NJ solar project faced severe weather—and an earthquake

While building the 10 MW New Jersey Oak Solar project, Lincoln Renewable Energy ran into some big time weather including Hurricane Irene, followed by a snowstorm in October—and an earthquake.

By Diane Mettler

What is special about the New Jersey Oak Solar project in Cumberland, New Jersey's Fairfield Township? For starters, the 101-acre site contains 53,200 fixed solar panels, produces 10 megawatts of AC power (enough energy to support 775 homes), and is the largest non-utility-owned solar project east of the Mississippi, according to Lincoln Renewable Energy (LRE).

Back in 2009, LRE was looking at two primary markets for solar—California and New Jersey.

"We felt at the time that the California market had significantly more competition for utility scale solar than New Jersey, so we started our greenfield development in New Jersey. It was our first area to develop," says John Stone, vice-president, project management at LRE.

Macquarie Energy LLC entered into a long-term purchase agreement for the power and renewable energy credits from the NJ Oak project and also provided construction finance and term debt to the project.

Stone, speaking about Mac-quarie says, "I think that there are different types of customers in the energy marketplace. Some are your traditional utility offtakers, and some are traditional power marketers, which I feel Macquarie Energy is. They are into power marketing and power sales."

The solar project is located off the main highways in Southwest New Jersey. Although there are a few neighbors close to the project, the power generation is quiet, and should neighbors come in closer over the 25-year life span of the solar farm, sound won't be an issue.

The site LRE chose was a piece of land that had once been actively used for agriculture but had since been reclaimed over the years by brush and trees. "This made it an ideal setting for a solar farm because, in New Jersey, it's important to make the perimeter of solar sites visually pleasing and the scrub brush and the mature trees that we left around the outside provided a natural viewshed."

Although one of the benefits of the location was its vegetation, clearing excess brush and trees was also one of the challenges. Of the parcel's 101 acres, 84 acres had to be cleared for the 62-acre plant. The vegetation that was cleared was recycled and ground up into 47,000 cubic yards of mulch.

"We had to take out about 14 more-mature trees because they caused either a shade issue to the plant or were danger trees, meaning if they were to fall, they would fall into the fence or into the plant itself," said Stone. "They will be replaced in the perimeter with smaller trees of like species."

LRE worked closely with Quanta Renewable Energy Services (QRES) and The Ryan Company (Ryan), both wholly owned affiliates of Quanta Services. "We hired Ryan on a turnkey basis," says Stone. "They proposed Yingli modules, and after we did our due diligence and talked to them about the layout optimization, we agreed. QRES provided the engineering and procurement and Ryan the construction."  

QRES chose the YGE-235 series high efficiency, multi-crystalline modules, which deliver a module efficiency of more than 14 percent.

"Ryan and QRES had worked with these modules before and understood the racking systems required and the installation processes, so we felt that Ryan would bring a more efficient construction effort," adds Stone. "And because they had done the engineering, they knew how many modules to put in strings and how to optimize the layouts."  

LRE also chose Satcon Technology Corporation inverters, based on QRES's recommendation. Satcon delivered ten 1.0 MW Prism Platforms configured with the company's Equinox inverters.

Satcon says that the Prism Platform is its turnkey utility-grade multi-megawatt building block, complete with factory-integrated step-up transformers, MV disconnect switches, and power-conversion electronics.

LRE broke ground in July 2011 and had no idea what kind of challenging weather they were in for. In August, Hurricane Irene blew through and it was followed by a snowstorm in October. If that wasn't enough, the New Jersey site experienced an earthquake as well.

	The 101-acre Oak Solar site contains 53,200 fixed Yingli solar panels and is the largest nonutility-owned solar project east of the Mississippi, according to Lincoln Renewable Energy.

Luckily, when Hurricane Irene came through, there were no modules on site, and the Ryan crews worked to make sure everything that could potentially fly around was tied down.

Because you can't dictate what Mother Nature is going to throw your way, Stone says it's important to build extra days—"float days"—into the schedule. "We certainly did that and still worked six and seven days a week for the last couple of months to make up some of the time."

When construction was at its peak in November, there were 145 workers on site, with Ryan's subcontractor using IBEW Local Union 351 electrical workers for electrical portions of the project. The schedule called for workers doing final onsite clean-up for six months following.

March/April 2012