New Jersey’s Groundbreaking Solar Plant to Power 5,100 Homes
Winter is usually a quiet time for solar energy news, but Con Edison Development and Panda Power Funds just turned that paradigm on its head by breaking ground on a 20-megawatt (MW) solar power array in Pilesgrove, New Jersey.
Solar power is big in New Jersey (See? See? SEE!? See for yourself!), and the Pilesgrove solar farm – big enough to power 5,100 homes and create 100 jobs – is equally big news during a season that usually sees solar energy companies slumping both on the Street and in the field.
Comprised of 71,400 Suntech Power solar panels and costing about $90 million, the farm will be completed sometime in 2011 and connect directly to the utility grid. Suntech, a global solar energy solutions company, provides residential to utility-grade solar panels, the latter combining best-of-breed trackers and inverters as part of traditional crystalline silicon panel architecture.
Project developers agree that New Jersey’s renewable energy incentives played a major role in making the solar farm a win-win. These incentives include a Solar Renewable Energy Certificate (SREC) financing model that pays out at about $625 per MW (an all-time high of $680), and excellent interconnection and net metering standards that have made it easier for contractors to tie in to the grid.
At about $4.25 to $4.50 million per MW, the Pilesgrove farm will run at least $1.6 million per MW below other solar power farms in development costs. And, for those who like a bit of trivia with their newsbytes, solar panels were actually invented in New Jersey, 55 years ago, by Bell Laboratories’ scientists Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson. In the late 1950s, Bell Labs went on to supply solar power for NASA’s first permanent satellite.
As of Oct. 1, New Jersey – one of 29 states with Renewable Portfolio Standards (or RPS, which mandate a certain portion of energy from renewables by a specified date), had 200 MW of solar capacity installed, via more than 6,800 projects statewide. The state’s RPS is 22.5 percent by 2021. New Jersey is second only to California in MW of installed solar power; California had 1,102 MW at the end of 2009.
Con Edison Development, founded in 1997, is a renewable energy development firm and subsidiary of New York-based Consolidated Edison, Inc. (NYSE:ED), one of the nation’s largest investor-owned utilities. Dallas, Texas-based Panda Power Funds is an energy infrastructure financier specializing in utility-scale energy projects. Transmission for the project will be provided by Atlantic City Electric, and engineering firm RMT, Inc. out of Madison, Wisconsin will design and build the array.
Photo via Great Valley Center on Flickr CC
Posted on October 20th in Solar News by Jeanne.