Construction of the University’s new West Windsor solar panel field is set to begin next week after months of planning and permit-seeking from local, county and state authorities. The project’s completion has been scheduled for summer 2012.
The 5.3-megawatt solar field collector will occupy 27 acres of University-owned land in West Windsor Township, bordered by the Dinky train line, the Delaware & Raritan Canal, Washington Road and Route 1.
The field will generate 8 million kilowatt-hours of energy per year and could eventually reduce the University’s carbon dioxide emissions by 3,090 metric tons every year. This reduction will contribute to the University’s 2008 Sustainability Plan, which aims to bring its carbon dioxide emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020.
If successful, the project will generate enough energy to provide 5.5 percent of the total electricity used by the campus annually and reduce the University’s yearly electricity costs by about 8.0 percent. The solar array is expected to last for about 30 years.
To capture sunlight, 16,500 photovoltaic panels will be installed on the field. While a long underground cable that will carry power to the campus will be placed beneath the canal and Lake Carnegie.
Of the installed panels, 80 percent will be new “SunPower T0 Trackers,” which use a GPS device to follow the sun throughout the day and thus maximize energy absorption. The remaining 20 percent will be fixed in place. This combination is designed to take advantage of the field’s unique geography.
The solar panel system will not always be running at full power: The solar panels may only gather 5 to 10 percent of their normal energy load in the early hours of the morning and will produce no power at night, when it is dark.
Faculty and students will be able to use the continuous stream of data collected from the solar array for research purposes.
The system was designed by SunPower Corporation and will be funded and owned by Colorado-based firm Key Equipment Finance. The University will host the field and lease the equipment from Key Equipment Finance for about eight years.
Though the prospect of using solar panels to generate energy for the University has long been on the minds of members of the facilities department, the project became financially viable in 2010 through a federal grant and various incentives offered under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as well as the revenue-generating potential of New Jersey’s Solar Renewable Energy Certificate Program.
“It’s a technology that we’ve been watching in some of these engineering projects for 20 years,” Princeton Energy Plant Manager Ted Borer said. He acknowledged, however, that the University had been waiting “until [the installation] became a financially attractive thing.” Without the combination of state and federal opportunities that presented themselves in the last two years, the solar array’s construction would have been prohibitively expensive, he explained.
To qualify for the federal grant, which will cover about 30 percent of the field’s approximately $28 million price tag, the University must collaborate with a for-profit partner. This partner will own the system and receive the ARRA benefits that come with its construction.
The University will generate power from the field and pay for its lease with a combination of the grant, avoided energy costs from its own power generation and the sale of Solar Renewable Energy Certificates to utility groups within New Jersey.
SRECs are tax incentives that represent a facility’s production of solar-generated energy. The New Jersey government issues one SREC for every megawatt-hour of energy produced by a facility’s solar-powered system, and the facility that receives the SREC can then sell this certificate at market price to utilities in the state that don’t have the capacity to generate solar power themselves.
Under New Jersey law, 22.5 percent of the electricity these utilities buy must come from renewable sources, but buying SRECs from a facility that does generate solar energy helps to satisfy this requirement and allows the utilities to claim environmental benefits.
This scheme increases the economic value of solar energy in the long run and rewards the solar-generating facilities for their investment while enabling groups without solar plants to comply with state law. The University will not claim that it is reducing its own carbon emissions while selling the SRECs, but once it has paid off its lease it will begin to “retire,” or stop selling, the certificates.
After the lease is paid off, the University will have the opportunity to buy the solar array from Key Equipment Finance, though such a sale is not legally required of either party to the contract.
In anticipation of this purpose, however, the University will put aside some money every year from its sale of SRECs with the hope of buying the system at fair market value once the lease expires.
This process of retirement will start in 2020 and enable the University to claim that it is reducing its carbon emissions by as much as 3,090 metric tons annually.
The solar panel field will become the third solar-energy producing site on campus, following the installations of solar panels on the Frick Chemistry Laboratory and the roof of The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium building.
Though the University signed the contracts for the project in December 2010, getting internal approval took about nine months. This effort “really took support from a big chunk of the University administration,” Borer said, citing the cooperation of such offices as the Office of the General Counsel, the Treasurer’s Office and the Office of Communications.
Much of the spring and summer of 2011 were spent obtaining permits for the project, which required dealings with more than a dozen local, county, state and utility agencies. The University submitted its final local permit applications for the project this past week.
West Windsor field was once used as a site for the environmentally hazardous dumping of sediment and waste found at the bottom of Lake Carnegie after the University dredged the lake back in the 1970s.
Now, Borer explained, the solar panel field is counteracting that toxic activity with the installation of renewable energy sources and native grasses.
“I’m pleased that we’re making a more thoughtful use of the land,” he said.
The West Windsor solar panel field fits well into the University’s plan for reducing emissions. Envisioning the steps the University should take to reach its sustainability goal as a pie chart, Borer explained that “we’ve got three-fourths to seven-eighths of that pie chart filled in.”
Steps as simple as improved insulation and window design, on both a residential and commercial scale, can greatly propel this sustainability effort forward in a way that both reduces operational costs and carbon emissions, he explained.
“If you’re very thoughtful about it, you can do both at the same time,” Borer added. But, “there’s no one thing that is an easy quick fix; it takes lots of lots of thought and years of work,” he said.
Standing between four and five feet tall, the solar panel field installation is not expected to affect local wildlife. An assortment of low-maintenance, native grasses will be grown around their bases.
“The birds and small animals ... won’t be precluded from living there,” Borer said. A fence will be erected around the field’s perimeter, however.
The field is sometimes used for practice by Princeton’s ROTC program, but the coming installation will prevent further practice in the area.
“It wasn’t something that we were aware of when developing the project by any means,” Borer said, “[but] we’ll work with them and figure out where they can do their practice.”
ROTC and the University are currently discussing alternative sites for practice maneuvers, though no formal agreement has yet been made.
Reactions to the installation of the solar array have been largely positive, Borer said, noting that the general reaction to the project has been,
“ ‘Wow, that’s really cool!’ ”
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