In the 1930’s, Boulder City’s claim to fame was Hoover Dam, the most colossal engineering enterprise ever undertaken. Originally known as Boulder Dam, for the canyon it was built in, the dam – when completed in 1935 after five long years and $60 million dollars – represented not only the world's largest hydroelectric facility, but the world’s largest concrete structure.

Boulder City subsequently set up a dam museum, and to this day the dam and the museum attract tourists, but not on a scale which can support a growing metropolis, particularly since gambling, drinking and prostitution – three of the rest of Nevada’s income-generating staples – have been forbidden since the days of construction. In fact, the sale of alcohol in Boulder City didn’t become legal until 1969.

So what do you do for revenue if you’re Boulder City and your tourist attractions are limited to the dam, the museum, a mountain-bike park, some hiking trails and Lake Meade?

You do what city planner Ned Shamo does; you lease land to solar companies wanting to install large-scale solar. It’s a win for the city, but also a win for solar companies, who find Boulder City’s access to the grid – thanks to the dam – and simplified permitting process – thanks to an in-place EIS (environmental impact study) from the 1990s – of particular value, cutting the usual permitting time of years down to a mere six months. Not to mention a permitting cost savings that approaches $2 million.

From the 2007 Acciona Solar project, Nevada Solar One – at 64 megawatts the largest solar plant in the world – to the 2009 Sempra Energy plant (the 10-megawatt El Dorado thin-film solar facility, the largest thin-film installation in North America), the land around Boulder City is burgeoning with solar panels, a feat that wouldn’t be possible if the city hadn’t bought 107,000 acres from the Bureau of Land Management for approximately $1.3 million in 1995.

The land was originally intended to serve as a bulwark between the fast-growing Las Vegas Valley and the somewhat reclusive bedroom community of Boulder City, and could never have been sold to solar developers, but nothing in the contract prevents the city from leasing the land.

So far, that unremarkable exclusionary principle has netted the city about $2 million, which is one-twelfth the city’s annual budget. And the sun, which shines an average of 350 days a year, is doing most of the heavy lifting.

Another potential lease, to a San Francisco firm called NextLight, will use over 1,000 acres to build a 100-megawatt plant. All of this may seem like baby steps when compared with the dam, which generates 2,074 megawatts of power, but ramping up to a “green” energy economy has to start somewhere, and Boulder City is glad to see at least some of it starting in the city’s own backyard.