INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The nation’s largest solar farm built
atop a federal Superfund site is now generating power on a tract of
land in Indianapolis tainted by a long-shuttered plant’s wood-treating
operations.
The 43-acre Maywood Solar Farm went online last month,
with more than 36,000 solar panels feeding 8 megawatts of electricity
into Indianapolis Power & Light’s power grid.
The solar farm
is the largest built to date on a Superfund site, said Environmental
Protection Agency spokesman Francisco Arcaute. The next largest is a
40-acre, 6-megawatt solar farm near Rancho Cordova, Calif.
EPA
Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman said in a statement that the
Indianapolis solar farm "has transformed a site with a long history of
contamination into a source of renewable energy for the future."
The
agency is encouraging the development of solar, wind and other
renewable energy projects on tainted sites. As of last fall, 85 such
projects were generating a combined 507 megawatts of power at Superfund
sites, landfills and mine sites across the nation.
The
Indianapolis property’s owner, Vertellus Specialties Inc., worked with
the EPA, solar panel maker Hanwha Q CELLS, Indiana’s environmental
agency, the local utility and other partners to develop the solar farm.
The
complex covers about a third of the former 120-acre Reilly Tar &
Chemical Corp. site. For several decades, workers there refined coal tar
and treated railroad ties and telephone poles with the
wood-preservative creosote, a possible human carcinogen. That plant
closed in 1972.
Testing during the 1980s showed that groundwater
beneath the site was contaminated with the toxic fuel additive benzene,
the highly corrosive compound pyridine and ammonia.
After the site
was cleaned up in the 1980s by crews overseen by the EPA, it was capped
with soil and gravel and a ground water containment system was
installed.
Reilly Industries — the site’s former owner — merged
with Rutherford Chemicals merged in 2006, creating current site owner
Vertellus.
Vertellus President and CEO Rich Preziotti said the
project has put into productive use idle land on Indianapolis’ southwest
side that had served as storage space for shipping trailers since the
mid-1990s.
"We’re using this land in a really neat way — we’re
providing renewable energy to the community and getting some value from
that land," Preziotti said.
The company’s lease with the solar panel maker calls for the farm to operate for up to 30 years.
Arcaute
said Hanwha Q CELLS’ original design for installing the solar panels
called for trenching and a significant amount of soil disturbance of the
site, but the company worked with the EPA to retool its design to
reduce soil-disruption by more than 90 percent and use the site’s
existing topography.
The solar farm is part of Indianapolis Power
& Light’s goal of eventually adding 99 megawatts of solar-generated
electricity — enough to power for about 10,000 homes — to its energy
sources, IPL spokeswoman Brandi Davis-Handy said. The utility currently
receives about half that amount of electricity from 23 solar projects,
including a 75-acre solar farm at the Indianapolis International
Airport.
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