Today energy services provider Ameresco announced that it has completed an 18 MW-DC (15 MW-AC) ground-mounted solar PV project at a the U.S. Army Garrison Fort Detrick in the state of Maryland.
At nearly 60,000 PV modules, this is one of the largest PV plants on the U.S. East Coast to be completed to date. The area between Washington D.C. and Boston is the mostly densely populated part of the United States, and as such large contiguous areas of land are hard to come by.
The plant is located on Fort Detricks Area B, which was a proving ground for biological warfare and a disposal area for chemical, biological and radiological material until 1970. Area B is on a list of sites eligible for the U.S. government's superfund program, a designation for polluted locations which require a long-term clean-up.
Controversy over contamination of groundwater under Area B with trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene, which includes potential impacts on the area's water supply, is ongoing.
Ameresco will own and operate the plant and supply electricity generated to the U.S. Army under a 25-year power purchase agreement, which will meet around 12% of Fort Detricks annual electric demand. Additionally the plant is designed to be compatible with a micro-grid.
Fort Detrick aims to produce as much energy as it consumes by 2020. And while they have not received the level of press of other initiatives such as the widely maligned and misunderstood federal Loan Guarantee Program, the Obama Administration has set strong goals for federal renewable energy use, which includes the Department of Defense.
Not only is the U.S. Army part of a federal goal to procure 30% of electric needs from renewable energy by 2025, but it plans to reach net-zero energy consumption by 2030, and to deploy 1 GW of renewable energy on Army installations by 2025.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
Popular content
Share
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.