New Haven Independent
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One city’s trash is a solar company’s treasure — now that more than 1,900 solar panels are generating electricity atop the capped New Haven landfill.
City officials and partners gathered atop the landfill to celebrate the completion of the solar panels on Monday.
“On July 9th, we flipped the switch,” said city Climate and Sustainability Director Steve Winter. “This solar array is now operational and sending power to the electric grid.”
“Quite literally, we are on top of the waste of our past and talking about the future of New Haven,” said Mayor Justin Elicker.
The landfill solar project is the latest product of a collaboration between the City of New Haven and the North Haven-based commercial solar developer Greenskies Clean Energy.
According to Elicker, the project can generate 1,900 kilowatt hours of power per year — enough to “power 200 homes of electricity used in one year.”
Under a 20-year lease agreement, Greenskies is paying the city $72,000 annually in exchange for installing and operating the solar panels atop the landfill.
Greenskies will then sell the electricity generated by those panels directly to United Illuminating (UI), which operates the local power grid. The solar-powered electricity will meld into the broader pool of electricity generated from a variety of sources.
Greenskies built the solar array in less than a year, over the course of a “tough winter,” according to Greenskies’ Head of Real Estate Ryan Linares. The company worked with the New Haven Solid Waste and Recycling Authority, which operates the adjacent transfer station, to secure access to the landfill and coordinate logistics.
Elicker and Winter pointed to both climate and cost-saving benefits associated with the solar project.
According to Elicker, the city estimates that the solar array will reduce carbon emissions equivalent to the amount of carbon absorbed by 16,000 trees over the course of ten years.
The solar array could also indirectly impact residents’ energy bills. In general, as Elicker noted, solar power is a relatively stable supplier of electricity that “gives us more predictability for energy prices in the future.”
In the long term, by adding to the supply of power available to UI through one of the least expensive means of generating electricity, the solar array will likely contribute to reducing the cost of electricity on UI’s end. UI might then transfer cost savings to residents.
“This will go into, essentially, hedging the cost of energy for the next 20 years,” as Winter put it.
The array is part of a broader initiative to construct solar panels across the city. Solar parking canopies have already been installed by both the city and Greenskies at L.W. Beecher Museum Magnet School and Hill Central School. More parking canopies are slated to come by next summer to the East Shore Park parking lot, Roberto Clemente Academy, Career High School, and Wilbur Cross High School. And the city is exploring adding another cluster of solar panels to the landfill.
Winter pointed to recent instances of extreme weather, from record-breaking heat to the Canadian wildfire smoke that filled the sky over New Haven last week.
“Climate change is literally hitting us in the face and harming our lungs,” said Winter. “So it really underscores the urgency of advancing these projects.”
Laura Glesby is a staff reporter at the New Haven Independent. You can get in touch with her directly here. More by Laura Glesby
2 Comments
This is great, from an economic as well as environmental perspective.
Climate change is like a leak in your roof. It will cost money to fix it now. It will cost even more money to wait until the problem gets worse.
@ Kevin, I agree, and we should embrace solar where it makes sense. However, the Mayor is not being transparent when he stated, “solar power is a relatively stable supplier of electricity that gives us more predictability for energy prices in the future” and no one should be surprised that the costs of energy have gone up over the last 30 years – if you lower supply and increase demand, that is what happens – basic economics; unfortunately, politicians were not listening, especially here in CT.
Solar is a stable market only when you can 1) transmit and store the solar energy at a very low cost – batteries are extremely expensive at massive scale and 2) have a lot of sunny days! New England’s overcast winters drastically reduce solar energy production, but as they say, something is better than nothing. I also agree that massive solar arrays in our deserts make a lot of sense if we can transport and store the energy with lower losses than we have now – get on that, young scientists!!!!.
All that said, the reality is the U.S. needs nuclear (both fission and hopefully fusion) to generate the massive amount of power we will need for the future.
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