Solar landfill in New Paltz still a beacon, just not as bright

The volunteers working to install a solar system atop the old town landfill in New Paltz have faced numerous obstacles, yet they have persisted. Construction on a scaled-back project that won’t yield nearly as much electricity could begin as soon as this year, however, and is being hailed as an important step on the difficult journey of saving humanity from the consequences of its growing population and short-term decisions. 

The fact that there is no longer a town landfill is itself due to an attempt to make better environmental decisions. The municipal dumps that dotted the Ulster County landscape were bad news, and the deal to shut them down also resulted in the creation of the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency. While it’s true that under agency supervision solid waste is hauled hundreds of miles away — at tremendous financial and environmental cost — closing the local landfills forced that conversation into the open before more damage was done to life in Ulster County. 

A capped landfill isn’t much use for humans, but a considerable swath of land in the northern part of town became quite popular for non-human town residents, both plant and animal. When a committee tasked with studying putting in solar there first reported on their work in 2019, it included a proposal that pitted the need to reduce the carbon impact of human energy needs against the needs of the beings who had been using that land themselves. The first plans called for felling acres of trees to maximize the amount of solar generation available. While only a minority of council members at the time wanted to slow the process down to consider that impact, economic factors ended up scuttling that particular plan. 

The project has “proved more challenging than we thought,” volunteer Cara Lee told council members at their June 15 meeting. In addition to being “ghosted twice” by contractors who had agreed to do the work, the topography of the land and the state of the surrounding electrical infrastructure has resulted in a much smaller project overall. Those first plans could have provided as much as a third of all the electricity used by town residents, but it turns out that there’s nowhere close to plug into Central Hudson lines with that much juice. Even though the scale has already been reduced to keep costs down for the selected vendor — none of this work would be paid for with tax dollars — the nearest place to hook this solar farm up to the grid would have been on Ohioville Road. To avoid having to run that much line and instead connect nearby, by project has to be much smaller. 

In the current configuration, solar on the landfill will result in hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars being paid to the town; the first configuration could have yielded tens of thousands of dollars. Nevertheless, council members and committee volunteers feel good about moving forward, if only to lead the way. As long as the human population continues to climb and technology continues to advance, the electricity needs will also grow, and this project will add power that doesn’t have the same carbon impacts of burning petroleum and coal products. It’s also possible that future infrastructure development of the power grid could make it possible to add more solar capacity at a later date. 

Once a contract is signed — assuming that there will be no more ghosting — the final costs for the vendor can be worked out. Construction will take three to four months.