Unsightly landfill? Put some solar on it.
As the little girl says: Por qué no los dos?
A trash opportunity
When Annapolis’ mayor and various local dignitaries cut the ribbon on a solar farm in 2018, they did so on city land. But it wasn’t the roof of city hall or the field behind the rec center — it was over a landfill.
This newsletter has featured thinking about waste as a verb, as well as preventing your kitchen food scraps from turning into powerful greenhouse gas emissions but there are still thousands of closed and active landfills across the U.S. that will need to be managed for a long time. Increasingly cities are putting solar panels on top.
Annapolis now hosts the largest single installation of solar panels on a landfill in the U.S — enough to power 2,300 homes at full capacity. Mixing solar and landfill has a number of benefits in its favor. Landfills are already owned by city or county governments, they have no tree cover to block the sun and tend to be slightly elevated. Plus, the land can’t be used for anything else — especially important as farming communities, desert landscapes and exurban developments have pushed back against developing large utility-scale solar nearby.
It feels like a no-brainer, but landfill solar hasn’t grown anywhere near as fast as the rest of the solar industry in the past 10 years. Why? A report from RMI, a research non-profit that supports building out zero-emissions energy, suggests one major reason: it’s relatively complicated (and therefore more expensive up front) to add solar to landfill site in comparison to a generic field or a large roof.
In Annapolis, panels were installed on top of concrete blocks, instead of anchors driving down into the soil itself, to avoid disturbing the liner that separates the waste underneath from the larger environment.
Putting solar safely on landfills includes technical skill and a different design than normal. It includes thinking how the land will settle over time as the waste decomposes and working around pipelines on sites that have landfill gas infrastructure. This is not something you want to cut corners on.
As Matthew Popkin, an urban transformation manager at RMI, told Time Magazine: “If you put a stake in the grass in a random field poorly, the dirt might suffer. If you put a stake in a landfill poorly, the community might suffer.”
Right now there’s just over 100 utility-scale landfill solar sites active in the U.S, with a total generation potential of nearly 450 MW of capacity. RMI thinks, as a conservative estimate, landfill solar capacity could be 250 times that, or about the total yearly power consumption of South Carolina. Local governments have leased or built the vast majority of these landfill sites, but states can make a difference. Massachusetts alone hosts more than half of all landfill solar sites in the country.
In fact, four northeastern states — Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York — have 73% of all solar landfill installations despite having only 7% of all landfills in the U.S. Why such a geographic concentration? The RMI report points at deliberate state policies encouraging not only solar installations in generally, but community solar (a way of individuals or small orgs buying-in to the power generated by specific installations), and landfill solar specifically, including technical assistance for designing the installation. Massachusetts even updated their solar benefits to be weighed slightly away from “greenfield” sites, to encourage developers to consider more challenging installations on landfills.
Annapolis won’t retain the record for largest landfill solar farm for long — a Houston solar installation more than double its size has just passed a key approval, and a project of a similar size is in the works in Ohio.
Want to learn more about landfill solar? You can read the full RMI report here and check out the EPA’s RePower database for potential sites. If you know of one of these landfill solar installations near you, I’d love to hear about it.
Welcome back!
Now that I’m back from a summer break, The Planet You Save will continue with minor adjustments. All subscribers will get weekly emails three weeks out of the month where I’ll focus on reported stories and Q&As. The fourth week with be for paid subscribers only and be more resource-focused. After about eight months, I’ve realized this is the best balance for keeping most of the editions free for everyone — and sharing lots of great additional stories — while thanking paid subscribers for making this newsletter work.
You can join them by signing up to be a paid subscriber here. Not interested in the bonus emails? Buy me a one-time “coffee” here to say thanks (this particular edition took two literal cups of coffee).
This month I’ll also be resharing an older (but still very relevant) paid subscriber newsletter with everyone. I’m excited to see what you think of it.
More local climate stories
- Text message saves California from rolling blackouts
- West Virginia gas pipeline opponents rally against Congressional deal to push through contested project
- Another “put a solar panel on it” option: over canals
- Stacey Abrams, running for governor of Georgia, discusses her climate platform for the state
- “A huge day”: Climate plan to make Kansas City carbon-neutral by 2040 moves forward