Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

of the school's entire electrical load.

So working with them, we decided that we pitched doing a combined system. So if you look at the array, there's two different color solar panels. So half the array, it's a 525, the other one's a 925. So the school owns one project, and then we opened up a company to do a power purchase agreement to own the other half. So both projects, you know, cohabitate for all intents and purposes within the same fence line. But they're two separate but similar projects that feed into the school. And it offsets about 110% of the school's electric demand. So it's a good program for the school. And so we're right now working through development. We have our plans in front of you. We've done our geotechnical investigations. So we know how deep we have to set the piles to hold the array. which is we just got the final results on that, which the details weren't on the plan. So we have depth. We can talk about that. So the array is going to be connected to the school like this. So the array is going to, our equipment is going to be here and it's just going to plug right into the electrical room in the back of the school. So the plan is to maintain the meadow that's currently under the array. So we're not going to pave or put stone down we're just going to come in disturb as little surface as possible we use you know a rubber track skid steer pretty much with a hammer on it to drive the piles in place so the grass disturbance is really just being laid over while we're tracking in and about so the impervious cover is the diameter of the piles for these projects which is important to us because we We really don't like to go out and put in additional stormwater and do additional disturbances. And this is a key site because DEP has guidance that if you have a nice flat site, which we have, it allows you to have, they call it discontinuous impervious. What that means is when water flows off of this panel, flows down the panel and infiltrates under the row in front of it. And so it just really offsets about 10 feet. So up here in the Great North, where you guys get five feet of snow time to time, we elevated the top of the panels or the front edge of the panels to around 32 inches. So that should allow snow to slough off the panels and accumulate. With the 32 inches in the front, it ends up to be about 10 feet in the back of the array. And of course, that's gonna follow the terrain since we're not doing any grading on site. So it'll have, just follow the contour so it should always be 10 feet above ish the spot below it do you guys have any just general questions before we get into the comments because we can walk through the comments tonight too so just a general question right now the uh pd equipment up there is there just like an inverter system and you're going to they do all of that on the site yeah so the Right here is going to be a bank of inverters. And so the idea is we're just going to run all the power this way and a single trench here and a single trench into the school. The inverter is going to be mounted on piles as well. So there'll be about, you know, eye level. So five feet off the ground to the window. So that way they're out of the snow line as well.

What happens with the vegetation underneath those? like two years from now, what will that look like underneath the panels?

So we're going to keep the existing vegetation there, which is a mix of, you know, it's field wheat. But we will over, we'll broadcast, it's a pollinator mix by Ernst Seed. It's specially approved by DEP for solar arrays. And so we'll overcast the area and hope that it takes place. And that comes with a very specific mowing cycle. And so the first year you have to mow it. Once it gets to eight inches, you know, there's a schedule. The school is going to take care of mowing the array. It's part of the part of the project. So eventually, hopefully it turns into a, you know, a nice flower bed. Well, but it'll be maintained low because we don't want the weeds growing up because there's vine weeds when they get on those piles and they're strong enough to start moving stuff.

In other words, there's experience, a lot of experience with that kind of planning, that pollinator and everything, so you know what you're going to get.

We do.

We'll work directly with a dynast, and they'll help get the mix for us.

And then we'll mow and cast. Bring it back to the grid. It does, which is really nice. So all of this power goes straight to the school. So there's no export of it. Well, be overproduced by 10%. But that's really on an annual average. So during the summer, we'll be overproducing, and it just spins the school's meter backwards. And so power washes through the school's electrical gear and then out to the grid using their existing connections. All the overproduction, First Energy will write the school district a check. So they benefit from it. They're the only beneficiary of the overproduction. So it's not a net export. So it's really successful use. Just plugs into the school. It's a big shiny shed.

And then during low, again, this doesn't have anything to do with land development, but then again, during low usage times, like on weekends, it's nice and sunny outside, but there's no classes going on or anything. Nobody's sitting there welding or anything like that. You're going to have quite a bit of overproduction, right? And at the end, the infrastructure, in other words, the line speed the school are capable of handling that.

What's nice is since we're 110% of the school's usage, the school is designed for like 140% of their use. So we always just slip in underneath their threshold. But all the approvals are coordinated through Panalink. So we have to do an interconnection. So no matter what we think, they'll think different. And we'll have to coordinate our interconnection. We can't plug it in until we have their approvals. Access to it as far as maintenance? Maintenance, so they'll be, they're not shown on here. So we do an equipment, a swing gate for equipment, and then two man gates, or personnel gates. So there's always an emergency exit if someone's in there, right, if something's happening. But to get to that point, how do you get there? If you can see this, there's an existing drive that used to go back to a wastewater treatment. Let me go to the air photo. So the array's gonna sit right on this side of this kidney beam working part of the field. And so this is how it'll get out there. There's a wastewater treatment plant or water treatment plant back here of sort that's been decommissioned. But some of the pipes are still on the ground. So this would be the lane to get out there. So we've been working with the school. They're going to let us stage our equipment here. So our workers will park in that part of the parking lot. We'll probably have two C-cams out there for all of our equipment here during the construction season. And we'll just run right back out on that main little road here. Which is why there's not a driveway on our plant zone. It's a truly pervious cover. I mean, things sit there and they don't do anything. They don't lose much attention. Just a lawnmower or tractor.

It's going to push a lawnmower out there.

There's a tree along that. Right. It's just a tree's here. Yeah. And we did a shape study and we're okay. We don't have to take down any trees for this project. As far as screening, our thought was we're pretty much insulated using existing vegetation on the school, except for this little gap right here, which is by the school's rain basin. So our hope was that we didn't have to plant a tree to try and shield it, because we would just be shielding it right from the trees.

How long will it take for installation?

So the installation is the easy part. It's probably about two months total. Then we need to get Penelex approval to connect it. So we're going to be waiting for them to actually work through the queue. So that could be 18 months, worst case scenario. But we want to have it built and ready to go. We don't want to build during winter. Yeah, because it was funny, we were just talking before this. We had scheduled a site kickoff on January 1st to come out and do some testing. Beautiful day.

We had to walk.

It was a little windy. Everyone made fun of me because I was bundled up. But two weeks later, we were going to schedule our, we did a ground penetrating radar to make sure there was nothing buried. It was like a foot of snow. And it stayed there for two months.

Yeah, I'm like, we're not doing this.

So, and then just, so there's no lighting just to give you some more of the background on the array. Uh, and there's no exterior lights. So at night, uh, there, well, sorry, there, there are a few lights. There are led lights just to show that the inverters are powered on and those will be facing this way. So they won't really be visible from anywhere. Uh, we do not put any search lights or floodlights on the array. It will have. just a metal fence, chain link fence around it, eight foot high chain link fence. And then it'll be set back about 17 feet from the edge of the panels. And that's to meet electrical code requirements. The array will be designed by, we have an electrical engineering house that'll do all the electrical engineering. We're working with Church and Murdock. It's a local electrician that's gonna be doing all the installation. So all the plans that come in to the township are all stamped and sealed by electrical PE, and then the land development is going to be by the regular PE or civil engineer. So all the plans are reviewed. The piles, or we did testing earlier on that you push a pile in and try and rip it out of the ground. I mean, your soils with all those silty sands, it's like pushing them into a bag of sand. So we have a really good, the geotech study was really a sight. And so we have a predetermined depth on how far we have to drive the piles. And if we hit a boulder or some other obstruction, there's a plan in place that we have to go in and dig, try and dig it out, or bore through the rock, or we over-excavate and put a cement plug.

Sounds interesting. Integrating in the map of Dave.