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The Maywood Solar Farm in Indianapolis is on land identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a Superfund site. The 10.86 MW project, which achieved commercial operation in February, joins the ranks of Superfund solar projects, including a 6 MW photovoltaic array Solar Power Inc. completed on the location of an Aerojet rocket fuel plant in California, and a 1 MW concentrated PV facility Chevron built on its former Questa mining operations in New Mexico.

The EPA envisions many other renewable energy projects on Superfind sites in the future. However, as project participants will attest, building them is no easy task.

The Maywood solar project is located on property owned by Indianapolis-based chemical manufacturer Vertellus Specialties, a company formed through the 2006 merger of Rutherford Chemical and Reilly Tar & Chemical Co., which operated the wood treatment facility near Indianapolis.

Established in 1896, Reilly’s facility refined coal-tar that was used to make the wood preservative creosote, which was used to preserve railroad ties and telephone poles in the early to mid-1900s.

However, groundwater beneath the site became contaminated over time through the seepage of chemical byproducts. Back then, business owners were far less concerned with environmental stewardship and did not have the foresight to think about the long-term negative impacts.

“By the 1970s, that business had all but died,” says Rich Preziotti, Vertellus president and CEO.

The land sat idle for more than 20 years until Vertellus acquired the property and worked to remediate the land with the EPA, which designated it as a Superfund site.

When the Maywood site was cleaned up in the 1980s, it was capped with soil and gravel, and a ground water containment system was installed. As the parcel sat idle, Vertellus had been looking for an opportunity to put the site back into use. And when utility Indianapolis Power & Light enacted an incentive program to entice solar development in 2010, Vertellus quickly moved forward.

Solar developers often attempt to develop solar projects on brownfield sites but can get tripped up by ballooning project costs or regulatory compliance, explains Geoff Underwood, utility-scale solar developer at Hanwha Q Cells, which developed the Maywood site.

However, Underwood says the Superfund site was unique for several reasons. For starters, all of the project’s stakeholders - Vertellus, EPA and Indiana state agencies - had been involved in the site for more than 20 years. Therefore, they all possessed institutional knowledge about all the decisions and site improvements. All the parties involved - including the EPA - expressed commitments to complete the proposed solar development project.

“Early on, we had a conference call with the EPA to understand their process,” Underwood says, noting that Superfund sites often carry restrictive covenants that dictate what can and cannot be done at a site. “The fact that [the] EPA was enthusiastic and confident the project could be built was a huge X factor.”

The fact that everything was documented would be a big leg up when it came to assessing risk. Identifying the risks helped keep costs down, Underwood says, adding that environmental counsel at Vertellus assisted in providing legal due diligence. Additionally, the utility’s incentive program gave Hanwha enough comfort that the project could be financed.

 

Comfort level

Poughkeepsie, N.Y-based BQ Energy LLC has built up particular expertise in the siting of solar energy facilities on landfills and brownfields. Paul Curran, managing director of BQ Energy, says developing solar on Superfund sites is just another aspect of this business, but one with some additional twists.

“To be honest, it is partly a question of comfort with the whole concept,” Curran says. “If we’re doing the fifth or sixth or tenth straight design that is exactly the same, then there will certainly be a better level of comfort. We’ve seen this before, and we get it. No worries.”

The biggest hurdle, at least initially, is conquering the paperwork involved in meeting EPA approval to go forward on a Superfund development project.

“As a first cut, if you are doing a first project in an EPA region and you say you want to use a GameChange racking system and you say you want to use whatever panels you want to use, they will do a very detailed 700- to 800-page submittal that will show exactly what you are going to do and how you are going to do it,” he says.

Where it comes to renewable energy development, the EPA has delegated some of its Superfund oversight to certain states, including Massachusetts and New York. This tends to simplify the process, particularly if the solar developer has worked with the state on other brownfield sites.

 

 

BQ Energy has a contract to develop a solar array on the site of the former Bethlehem steel plant in Lackawanna, N.Y. The company performed the engineering and construction work on the 20 MW Steel Winds wind farm built on the same site for First Wind.

For the solar project, Curran says BQ Energy is going to use the GameChange Pour-In-Place ballasted ground-mounting system to avoid having to drive posts into the ground. Because it is a highly regulated site, there are very clear rules about what sort of remedies are needed. In the case of the Lackawanna project, BQ Energy will be moving steel slag - a clean byproduct - from one part of the site to cover the contaminated portion of the site where the solar array will go up.

Another aspect of such programs where experience pays is understanding how to work with the bureaucracy in order to make the project as cost-effective as possible. Curran says that when BQ Energy was working on the Lackawanna site for Steel Winds, he found it advantageous to have some aspects of the federal Superfund renewable energy development program reclassified as a New York State brownfield cleanup program in order to qualify for relevant tax credits denied under the former.

“That took a little bit of time working with the EPA to allow that to happen,” Curran says.

Once the rules and document submittal process has been mastered, Curran says Superfund sites - and brownfields in general - offer many attractions. “It’s really a classic place for our business model,” he says. “We don’t worry about what neighbors are going to think about it. We don’t worry about new power lines. A good industrial place that is, frankly, underutilized has got all that stuff, and it really helps an awful lot.” R