Housatonic — With the sun at a sharp angle and the wind like a knife, Kirt Mayland stood on the tilled ground where his second solar project in town is under construction, watching Wilkinson’s Excavating prep the soil while it can still be worked.
Mayland, whose above-ground project on the brownfield behind the Rising Paper Company complex will start making energy by the end of the year, explained how he found these 19 acres behind Amerigas propane on Van Deusenville Road. He was eyeing a spot next door that turned out to be residentially zoned, and Mayland says the town is “smart” to prohibit ground-mounted solar in such an area. But soon someone logged this industrial-zoned land next to it, something Mayland said he wouldn’t have been comfortable doing himself. He saw his chance.
He bought the cleared land from Amerigas and talked to the three abutters, which included Project Native. All three gave him the green light.
“It doesn’t offend my environmental ethics,” said the former environmental lawyer. “It was already logged.”
This property also happened to have a half-mile rail trail, popular for walking, that Mayland says he will open for public use. He says he has offered to give the trail away, and will still do so if someone will take it. It begins behind the Housatonic Cemetery and continues on through this property out to Route 41.
Posts drilled into the ground will support the photovoltaic panels at this site. At the contaminated Rising Paper site, state environmental regulations required the arrays be built on cement foundations to avoid disturbing the pollutants and possibly spreading them around in a watershed and endangered turtle habitat.
This array will throw so much power into the electric grid that Mayland needed a large enough entity to take the credits. Net metering is a system that allows producers of electricity from photovoltaic arrays, wind turbines, or other methods, to sell the extra energy back to utility companies.
“There’s nobody big enough to take this power,” he said, and he had to search around until he found one. The credits from this array, likely up and running around February, are going to the Hamden Wilbraham School District near Springfield. The Rising Paper array is larger, with the Town of Great Barrington and the Berkshire Hills Regional School District the beneficiaries of the power discount.
Solar panels have been installed on the brownfield site adjacent to the Rising Paper mill in Housatonic. Photo: Heather Bellow
Selling these credits gives schools and municipalities significant discounts, and this is how Mayland makes his living. Great Barrington and Berkshire Hills, for instance, are each looking at a savings of between $70,000 and $90,000 annually in electricity costs. The town’s 20-year tax agreement with Mayland’s Housatonic 1 Solar LLC, will also generate around $70,000 per year in new property taxes from both the Rising Paper and this site off Van Deusenville.
Mayland is doing this in several areas, with benefits sometimes traveling far. For instance, the Southern Berkshire Regional School District in Sheffield is taking net metering credits from his array at a gravel pit in Clarksburg, a North County town.
Mayland, who has developed arrays in Tennessee, Vermont, Rhode Island and Canada, says he loves gravel pits for arrays, and has developed a handful in the state. Any property that is somewhat forsaken is on his radar.
“I’ve had to work hard to find the right sites so people wouldn’t get mad,” he said.
He developed an array on a sand pit in Sheffield, with those credits going to the Belchertown School District. This spring he will develop another array at an old Sheffield asphalt plant. Those credits will go to the University of Massachusetts Hospital System. His gravel pit array in Cheshire generates credits that benefit not only that town, but the Town of West Stockbridge as well.
He also helped install an array at the Great Barrington Fairground that will be owned by Lodestar Energy, a Connecticut solar developer.
A number of his projects, including Rising Paper and Van Deusenville, are owned by Altus Power, a private solar investor that also manages the construction. And National Grid adds extra wires to its poles to take the additional power.
State Sen. Benjamin Downing, whose efforts to remove limitations on solar energy have so far been stifled by the Legislature.
Power added to the grid, whether though solar, wind turbines or gas engines is a hot topic in the state right now as renewable energy advocates and state legislators are trying to lift state caps on net metering credits. The caps, they say, are stifling more projects like Mayland’s because the utility companies will only allow a certain amount of extra power to hit the grid from these other sources.
The Edge recently did a story about a Sheffield farmer caught up in a net metering dilemma.
Senator Benjamin Downing (D-Pittsfield) expressed his dismay last week when the session closed for holiday recess without passing legislation to raise the caps, keeping solar projects, already stalled by the caps, in limbo. Downing has introduced legislation to raise the caps.
Ben Hellerstein, State Director, Environment Massachusetts, said he was “heartened” by Downing’s last-ditch efforts to get it done before the holiday, but is still disappointed.
During a press conference on the Pittsfield Common Monday, July 20, environmental advocates called on the Massachusetts Legislature to lift the cap on net metering credits that make solar energy projects financially viable. From left, Ben Hellerstein, state director of Environment Masschusetts; Bruce Winn of the Berkshire Environmental Action Team, and Christopher Kilfoyle, president of Berkshire Photovoltaic Services.
“The Legislature’s failure to lift the solar caps yesterday is a clear sign of the tremendous power that special interests like the utility companies wield in the State House,” Hellerstein said in a prepared statement. “The vast majority of Massachusetts residents want to bring more solar power to the Commonwealth, and more than 1,000 civic and business leaders have voiced their support for a goal of 20 percent solar by 2025. But even with all that support, the utilities and their lobbyists were able to block progress.”
National Grid’s Massachusetts president, Marcy L. Reed, said in a recent statement that the company was “supportive of efforts to address climate change,” but that increasing the caps will plop “hundreds of millions of dollars” onto the bills of non-solar customers.
Reed noted that electric bills are going up over the next five years to the tune of $1.5 billion, even without a raised net metering cap. National Grid recently got high national rankings for the amount of solar it feeds into its system.
Mayland managed to get his projects going before the cap was reached last March, however, since part of his job, he added, is “watching the caps.” He told the Edge that his work involves complex timing as he navigates through regulatory mazes, with different rules at every turn.
“I sit up at night and worry about deadlines for all agencies and utilities. The bureaucracy of this current Massachusetts program is unbearable,” he said.
“It’s a system that’s grossly out of whack with pricing,” Mayland added. “It’s a really difficult system for people like me to maneuver through because of different rules from different agencies.”
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