Blueberry Fields Forever: Jersey Pinelands Gets Its First Solar Power Facility
The New Jersey Pinelands is our country’s first national reserve. The region is also the largest body of open space on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond and Boston. Its 1.1 million acres make up 22% of New Jersey’s land area. It’s mostly wild but there are certain properties in the Pinelands that may be used commercially.
So when Jersey Construction, which specializes in heavy highway paving and repair work, was looking for a new location for their offices and equipment they bought a former waste disposal area in Winslow Township near Atlantic City and set about upgrading it to their company needs and the larger needs of the Pinelands. In order to make their new location more environmentally friendly to the Pinelands and the world at large, Jersey Construction decided to power the building with solar power, which in turn led it to SunDurance — and the Pinelands’ first-ever solar array.
“I decided to install a solar ground array system at our new maintenance shop and office facility to demonstrate that solar works for businesses such as Jersey Construction,” explains Jersey Construction owner Ted Whitmyer. “I strongly believe in the environmental benefits it creates and that we as a company are doing our part. I am proud that we have taken a leadership role for small businesses such as ours in showing how solar can benefit their operations and do their part for the environment.”
“They are really committed to Pinelands sensitivity and saw solar as a great way to maintain full operations with a light carbon footprint in the area,” explains Jay Price, Executive Vice President of Business Development for SunDurance.
New Jersey’s aggressive program of solar energy incentives also helped, with state rebates covering almost half the costs.
The six-man SunDurance crew, led by general foreman Ambrose Cooper, did some homework before beginning the job, making a careful inspection of a similar solar array in Atlantic City that had been built as part of a previous Conti job, but by a subcontractor. After close study of the array and its mounting was complete, it was off to the Jersey Construction site, set among huge blueberry and strawberry fields, then at the height of the picking season.
“The temperatures soared to about 95 degrees,” Cooper recalls, “and one surprise was how hot the blue panels got when they faced the sun. The preliminary work on each panel was done with them facing down, but they were flipped over to be fitted into their frame segments they got very hot to the touch very quickly.”
Hot weather and hot panels notwithstanding, the installation of the 98 KW solar ground array met all production targets and schedules. The 14,000 square foot array consists of 561 panels mounted on a grid and piers, with the entire array canted at a 20 degree angle to the south to maximize exposure to sun. Each panel produces 175 watts for a total of 125,000 kilowatt hours a year, enough electricity to power 10 average homes annually. Overall, the system will enable Jersey Construction to cover 70 percent of its power needs through solar. Even better, the company will “save” 173,000 pounds of carbon a year, equivalent to reducing carbon emissions by removing 17 cars from the road on an annual basis.
Jersey Construction’s solar array is the first to use Live Data Systems’ patent-pending Sunflow Monitor™ and Facility Intelligence™ energy visualization software solutions for continuous monitoring and diagnosis of all of the facility systems through web-enabled devices from computers to kiosks to cell phones. “Sunflow Monitor is a critical source of reporting, billing and revenue information, and the graphics can even be displayed in a kiosk, so the community can see that solar power really works,” explains Conti Group’s Kushagra Nandan.
The solar array has an expected service life of 25 years, with minimal maintenance. Jersey Construction expects to cover the project costs in less than five years.
The SunDurance crew took about three weeks to build the array, from start to finish. “The way the job was set up made it an ideal circumstance for setting up the array,” recalls Cooper. “It was basically a matter of placement of the solar panel into the UniRac frame and piers. The precision of the settings is particularly impressive — when you look down from the end of a row, every piece is perfectly aligned. This was the first time this SunDurance team had worked together on a project. They did a great job.”
Not every state has its own version of the New Jersey Clean Energy Program, Price points out, but as more states and the federal government add incentives for introducing solar and other alternative forms of power generation, solar energy solutions like the one adopted by Jersey Construction will become ever more attractive to small and medium-sized businesses.
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