Former army depot boasts 1st-of-its-kind community solar project
Nautilus Solar Energy is no stranger to building solar arrays atop capped landfills. The New Jersey-based solar contractor has completed many solar landfill projects throughout the Northeast, but building a ballasted array at the former Schenectady Army Depot in Albany County, New York, was a brand-new experience.
The community solar project located at the former Schenectady Army Depot was built within narrow stretches of capped landfills surrounded by a range of obstacles. Nautilus Solar
The 2.8-MW Altamont solar project is the first community solar project on a formerly used defense site (FUDS) in the United States, and Nautilus had to work alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to ensure the array met significantly higher standards than “normal” landfill projects.
The Army Corps retains monitoring duties on FUDS to ensure any past activities, like storage of hazardous waste, munitions or explosives, are remediated and not actively harming the surrounding environment. Due to this additional government oversight, the permitting and construction timeline for the Altamont array was lengthened to two years. The management plan for the project alone was hundreds of pages long. Rupal Bain, senior manager of structuring at Nautilus, said there were as many as 45 people on planning calls for this community solar project.
“We had to really run down every potential issue in advance to make sure that we’d planned for it, priced for it, protected against it, mitigated it, so that it would be a smooth construction and then operation going forward,” she said.
But it was necessary, because design and construction of the Altamont project was no walk in the industrial park.
A less-than-optimal project site
The Schenectady Army Depot was active from 1941 to 1969, processing military goods during World War II and the Korean War. The land was also used for burn pits and landfills.
Given the shape of the allotted project space, many of the solar panel rows are staggered and hold varying numbers of modules. Nautilus Solar
“To be clear, it is not fully understood what is underneath there,” said Steve Dzubak, project manager at Nautilus. “It was [the army’s] intention to not disturb the site.”
The area designated for solar construction was limited to these capped landfills, which weren’t exactly wide-open acres ripe for development. Since it was capped, the land was revegetated, and a private access road built above the grade splits the plot into narrow segments. It’s also bordered by an on-site pond, forest, wetlands, railroad tracks and an industrial park belonging to current landowner the Galesi Group.
“The reality is that we had to design the array to fit within very constrained spaces, because there is no other place to put the array,” Dzubak said. “You can’t go into the wetlands, the railroad tracks or the highways of the industrial park. It’s longer and narrower than you might see on a usual array that’s built into a rectangle.”
The array was designed to fit within the borders of this limited space and on the contours of the land, because grading wasn’t an option. The project was assembled in four separate segments of that narrow land following the access road. Panel rows are staggered, and many are different lengths than preceding panel rows.
Due to the land’s capped nature, the Altamont solar array is mounted in place with concrete ballast blocks. It’s composed of Adani Solar modules, DCE Solar fixed-tilt ballasted racking and CPS inverters.
Project cabling was run and managed above-ground as well. The installers used heavy machinery with treads instead of tires to haul components and navigate the site to better distribute weight and reduce the risk of straining the landfill cap.
“It’s a good use of land that is otherwise unusable for the future because of the contamination and the condition of the land and the permanent need to monitor the land,” Dzubak said. “This is a model that could be replicated on other FUD sites.”
The Altamont solar array was mounted using concrete ballast blocks and follows the contours of the site, because grading or penetrating the land was not an option. Nautilus Solar
FUDS typically have construction restrictions, such as barring any housing or public developments there. The Army Corp reported that there are more than 9,300 FUDS in the United States, and while their conditions and volatility may vary, the Altamont community solar project is proof that there’s an opportunity to make that land productive again for the long term.
Nautilus owns the Altamont solar project and will operate the array for the next 40 years. Any maintenance or upkeep on the project will be handled in-house or through hired O&M partners.
Given the scope of the project and its comparably delicate construction requirements, Altamont was not the cheapest array to build, Bain said. However, to her, the result was worth it. She used to reside in the nearby town of Schenectady and felt personally motivated to complete this project.
The Altamont community solar project took an otherwise inaccessible and undevelopable piece of land and turned it into something that is serving residents nearby.
“Things can be done if you put in the commitment and time,” Bain said. “Problems aren’t unsolvable — they just haven’t been solved yet.”