New solar farm on capped Dartmouth landfill (via WPRI.com)
A new solar farm has gone up on the old town dump in Dartmouth in just five months:
The capped Russells Mills Road Landfill has a new lease on life after Borrego Solar Systems Inc. quietly topped the former dump with a solar farm, a venture that drew none of the complaints common to similar solar projects in town.
“It’s the town of Dartmouth that showed leadership today,” state Department of Energy Resources Commissioner Mark Sylvia said Wednesday during a ribbon cutting for the facility.
State and local officials including U.S. Rep. Bill Keating, state Rep. Chris Markey, Select Board Chairwoman Lara Stone and others attended Wednesday’s ceremony celebrating the 5,300-panel, 1.4 megawatt solar farm slated to meet 20 percent of the town’s energy needs.
If you have an old landfill and you don’t have a solar farm on top of it, you’re throwing money away. Even in March as the sun shines for hours less and at much lower intensity than it will in summer, the solar farm is already producing more than a megawatt.
But the article also has a reminder that to really reap the benefits of renewable energy, towns should consider properly-sited wind power:
The solar farm can produce 1.4 megawatts of power, slightly less than one of the two 1.5 megawatt wind turbines in Fairhaven, which stand 396 feet tall on land owned by the town.
Learn more at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.
Cross-posted from TheGreenMiles.com
Solar farms on the ground are more efficient that rooftop solar,as you can aim the panels in the most optimal direction. Hope we’ll see more of these.
We have a landfill that rises above the immediate skyline and treeline affectionately (or maybe not so affectionately) known as Mt. Trashmore that this might work on.
From the Lowell Sun (hey-o!) last October:
I guess someone already thought of that!
I see the Westford St. site is studded with what look like vent pipes. I assume they are to release and maybe monitor the gas produced as the buried trash decomposes. Since those gases probably include a lot of methane, they should collect it. Then they can pipe it to Waltham, so a certain someone can stop stinking up his neighborhood by burning coal.
who could be a major source of methane.
n/t and ROFL!
completing one of these on an old landfill.
The City of Cambridge has a capped landfill that is not a solar farm. It’s a park. A nice park, used and needed.
You can call it throwing money away, but I think it is a question of appropriate land use.
No my town, which has several school buildings with no PV on the roof, is throwing money away.
Grew up hanging out at that park, sledding, etc. Had no idea it was on a dump until my mom casually mentioned growing up across from it when it was, and then I saw it mentioned in an environmental policy course I took at U of C.
The Lexington town dump used to be on Lincoln St., behind where the Hayden Recreation Center is. When the town closed that dump, they made it into a ballfield, and opened a new dump on Hartwell Ave. That one no longer accepts residents’ household trash, and is now either a “landfill,” a “composting facility,” or an “anaerobic digestion facility,” depending on how jargon-addicted the writer is.
Towns should be thinking about mining old landfills for methane, sometimes a lucrative proposition, too. Whether it is lucrative or not, methane is a very effective greenhouse gas and we should be managing it much more responsibly than we have. A recent BU study showed over 30000 methane leaks around Boston from underground pipes and other sources.
I case you haven’t driven by the hugh Gas Tanks with the pseudo-rainbow flag swerl on it lately, NStar repurposed a large open space that was needed incase the tank ever get punctured and the gas spills out, it is contained within a pooling area. There is now a large Solar Panel Farm there as well. It can be seen best if driving North on I93, just as UMASS Boston and the JFK Library come into view.
Norfolk finished its solar array about two years ago.