New Haven turned a capped landfill into a 1,920-panel solar farm; the site now powers about 200 homes and pays the city $72,000 a year

A landfill off Middletown Avenue in New Haven stopped accepting trash about twenty-two years ago and has since been out of use. But now, the city has announced it will put it back to work as the host for a 1,920-panel solar farm that will produce more than 1.4 million kilowatt hours of power a year.The project will be led by solar developer Greenskies Clean Energy, under a 20-year lease with the city. It will in turn generate more than $1.4 million in revenue for the city, or $72,000 per year, said Mayor Justin Elicker, as per a report by The New Haven Register. Greenskies will then sell the electricity generated by those panels directly to United Illuminating (UI), which operates the local power grid. The solar-powered electricity will blend into the broader pool of electricity generated from various sources.The company built the solar array in less than a year, over the course of a “tough winter,” according to Greenskies’ Head of Real Estate Ryan Linares. The company worked with the New Haven Solid Waste and Recycling Authority, which operates the adjacent transfer station, to secure access to the landfill and coordinate logistics.“It’s a great site,” Elicker said at a press conference to announce the start of the installation. He pointed to one of the solar panels that will go on the array on the landfill behind him. “You think about the size of the solar panel array, it’s just incredible,” he added. Elicker said the city is “doing everything” it can to expand its solar footprint, which already includes more than 50 electric vehicles and solar panels on 19 city schools. More parking canopies are slated to come by next summer to the East Shore Park parking lot, Roberto Clemente Academy, Career High School, and Wilbur Cross High School.“Despite the federal government backing off altogether on (funding for) any sort of green energy, we are leaning into it,” Elicker said. “Today is about a win for the environment. It’s a win for public health. It’s a win for our pocketbooks.”The solar array will provide the equivalent benefit of recycling more than 81,000 trash bags full of waste or the carbon sequestered by nearly 16,000 tree seedlings grown for ten years. The energy produced will be enough to power the electricity use of more than 200 homes for one year, the city said in a release.Steven Winter, executive director of the city Office of Climate & Sustainability, said New Haven will get a check for $6,000 a month for the next 20 years. “We are looking at additional solar panel opportunities,” Winter said. This will be the first such project that the city is involved with in which it actually will be making money, and will be by far the largest to date, he added.The array will be visible from Interstate 91, he said. He said he remembers driving by the site years ago and “thinking it would be great” to have solar arrays on top of it. Getting there “took a lot of work behind the scenes,” in part because you have to go through an active transfer station in order to get to the site, said Winter, who was joined by Lori Vitagliano, executive director of the New Haven Solid Waste and Recycling Authority, among others.While Greenskies has installed solar arrays atop two closed landfills in West Haven and one each in East Haven and North Haven, the New Haven one has the benefit of a landfill cap that is more than two feet thick, said Ryan Linares, vice president and director of business development of Greenskies Clean Energy. He added that he hoped the project would continue even after the 20-year ground lease is up.When asked to comment on installing a solar array at a time when the federal government is cutting subsidies, Elicker said the federal government is not doing enough to address climate change. “Sadly, the rest of the world is leaving us behind now,” he said, calling it “a sad moment for America when we see a president turn his back on solar power and wind energy.”Winter pointed to recent instances of extreme weather, from record-breaking heat to the Canadian wildfire smoke that filled the sky over New Haven last week. “Climate change is literally hitting us in the face and harming our lungs,” said Winter. “So it really underscores the urgency of advancing these projects.”