When solar first began catching on, many residents and business-owners began realizing that their rooftops were an untapped asset. A similar transformation is occurring with solar development in “brownfields,” or property in the presence, or potential presence, of a hazardous substance (most commonly town landfills). Town managers and landfill directors are starting to catch on that their least desirable land might be the perfect candidate for a commercial scale solar energy system.
The EPA and the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced last year they were evaluating Superfund sites, brownfields, and former landfill or mining sites for renewable energy production. It comes at a time when the solar industry is in debate over which areas for solar offer the best rate of return for projects.
The Southwestern desert has strong sunlight and ample land, but grid interconnection has become a complicated issue and environmental development issues remain. Rooftop installations, on the other hand, often suffer from shading, foliage, pollution, limited space, building structure limitations and other complications.
Why Landfills?
Landfills are, generally speaking, locations close to good infrastructure, properly zoned, flat and wide-open, and in perhaps the greatest benefit, under little commercial development demand.
The potential for mid-sized, distributed generation projects built on landfills is substantial. In our experience, the average landfill has at least five acres and often up to 80 acres of land suitable for solar, meaning there’s a potential 1-16 megawatts (MW) on each landfill. There is roughly 100,000 sites (either decommissioned or operational) across the country, so by installing solar power arrays on just one quarter of those landfills, we could produce a potential 212 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy—almost 500 times the solar energy produced in the U.S. in 2009 (425 MW).
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/the-next-hot-space-for-solar-landfills/
No comments:
Post a Comment