Soon, a grassy hill in New Haven will be covered with more than 1,900 solar panels.
The hill – a former landfill at New Haven’s transfer station – will transform into a solar farm over the next six months.
The project not only gives unusable land new life. It will also increase electricity supply, which will be sold to United Illuminating at a fixed rate, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said.
“That's, to give you an idea, enough to power 200 homes' electricity used for one year,” Elicker said. “It's a lot of power, or it's the equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions avoided by recycling over 81,000 trash bags of waste rather than landfilling them.”
It will be the 12th solar farm in Connecticut completed by developer Greenskies Clean Energy, and the first landfill solar farm in New Haven.
The landfill solar project is the latest in a series of steps in New Haven to increase environmentally-friendly tactics, Elicker said.
The city has electrified municipal buildings and vehicles and it’s encouraged increased adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements among residents, homeowners and businesses.
“Despite the federal government just backing off altogether on any sort of green energy, we are leaning into it and leading the way and doing everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint, be environmental stewards of our Earth,” Elicker said.
Greenskies is leasing the land and will pay the city of New Haven $72,000 annually. The landfill was capped and covered with two feet of soil decades ago, said Ryan Linares, Greenskies’ director of business development.
The energy produced will be sold to United Illuminating at a 20-year fixed rate, according to Linares.
“They have the option or they delegate where that power is distributed, the power will be used locally, whether or not UI has the authority to discount that power,” Linares said.
