Let us know if you have industrial areas enjoying the same push for sustainability.
NORTH KINGSTOWN — The Quonset Business Park is continuing its push into renewable energy with the approval on Tuesday of a lease for a 500-kilowatt solar farm proposed by a Colorado-based developer.
The Quonset Development Corporation’s unanimous vote in favor of an agreement with Bella Energy follows the approval last December of a similar-sized solar project in the park planned by a subsidiary of rTerra, a Middletown clean-energy firm.
The state-owned business park on Narragansett Bay is quietly becoming a hub for renewable power in Rhode Island as the QDC looks to maximize the use of marginal properties that are not suitable for traditional development.
“We’re trying to fit it in where we can,” said Steven King, managing director of the Quonset Development Corporation. “We wouldn’t otherwise put development on these properties.”
Much has been written about Deepwater Wind’s selection of the Port of Davisville in the business park as the staging area for its two proposed offshore wind farms in waters off Rhode Island. The projects are massive and would create hundreds of jobs during assembly and installation.
State officials have talked of positioning the port as a construction center for the offshore wind industry on the East Coast. But Deepwater’s first wind farm, a five-turbine demonstration project off Block Island, won’t start installation until fall 2015 at the earliest. Other projects are still years away.
But in the meantime, a series of smaller clean-energy projects in the 3,207-acre business park have been moving forward one after another. In 2011, Toray Plastics America built a 445-kilowatt solar field at its manufacturing plant where thin plastic films are made. The factory, which is the largest individual consumer of electricity in Rhode Island, has also invested in two cogeneration plants that make it largely independent of the power grid.
At the time it was installed, Toray’s solar array was the largest in Rhode Island. That system seems almost quaint in comparison to newer projects.
What is now the state’s biggest solar project — a 3.7-megawatt facility — was installed last fall on top of a closed landfill in East Providence. But the Quonset Business Park has the second-largest array in the state, a 2.4-megawatt system that Boston developer Nexamp built last summer on top of two industrial buildings in West Davisville.
The system is five times the size of Toray’s and is tied for the largest rooftop solar project in New England.
Last September, NEO Energy, of New Hampshire, announced plans for a 500-kilowatt plant in the park that would generate energy by burning the gas given off by rotting food. The anaerobic digester would take food scraps from restaurants and supermarkets to create biogas and the organic matter left over from the process would be sold as compost.
The project comes at a time when legislation has been filed in the General Assembly to redirect food waste from the state’s Central Landfill to biogas plants and compost operations.
NEO’s proposal and recent solar projects in the park, including a 330-kilowatt rooftop system being built on a building owned by food distributor All American Foods, have all been made possible because of the state’s distributed generation program, a three-year-old initiative that allows renewable-energy developers to bid on long-term contracts with National Grid, Rhode Island’s dominant utility.
“The state has taken a leadership position in creating a viable program for businesses,” said Frank Epps, president and CEO of rTerra.
His company and Bella Energy both won 15-year contracts in the program’s final application round in 2013. Bella Energy will be paid 14.8 cents a kilowatt hour for the electricity its project generates while rTerra will be paid 19 cents per kilowatt hour. Both prices are higher than National Grid’s standard offer rate of 8.6 cents a kilowatt hour, which includes power from fossil fuels and other renewable sources, but they are lower than the prices given out in previous years of the distributed generation program.
Epps said that rTerra has become the largest solar installer in the state after receiving three other contracts through the program, including pacts for a 2-megawatt project in West Greenwich and a 1.8-megawatt project in Johnston. The plans in the Quonset Business Park call for installing up to 300 solar panels along Newcomb Road on a 5.4-acre parcel that is difficult to develop because of its location and shape.
Bella Energy, of Louisville, Colo., entered the Rhode Island market two years ago in response to a request for proposals for solar development from the Quonset Development Corporation.
The firm looked at a host of parcels in the park before settling on a 5.2-acre property off Camp Avenue that has limited access, is sloped and sits adjacent to a capped landfill that dates to the days when a naval station occupied Quonset Point. QDC documents describe the land as “marginal at best.”
The solar array will consist of 1,620 panels that will occupy an actual area of about 1.5 acres. It will produce enough power for about 90 typical homes. Under the 15-year deal with the QDC, Bella will pay $9,516.12 annually for the land.
The company, which is also planning a 1.3-megawatt solar farm at the MetLife campus in West Warwick, plans to start work on the Quonset project in the fall.
“It’s a property that doesn’t have much use,” said Hunter Strader, Bella Energy’s representative in Providence. “We figure that would be a great area for solar.”
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