New Jersey Scores Nation’s Biggest Solar Power Rooftop System

It will certainly be an impressive installation if they can pull it off.

A couple of observations and questions:

1. I’m surprised to see this kind of statement at the end of the article:

Unless they plan on installing a massive battery bank to go along with the PV panels, there’s no way that the system will meet the annual needs of the facility. A 5MW system in NJ will produce somewhere around 8,000MWh annually, but of course not all of that will be coincident with the load at the facility (food distribution? pretty steady 24-hr load, including thermal loads which the PV panels will do nothing to address). So please be clear, the system might generate the equivalent kWH consumed by the customer, but – especially in the case of PV panels – it won’t be meeting the customer’s electrcity needs without a substantial amount of utility power. In fact, I suspect that it would be pretty easy to demonstrate that a correctly sized natural gas CHP system meeting electric and thermal loads would result in far greater emissions reductions than the 5MW PV panel installation.

2. The financials for the project are probably fairly decent:

— 30% ITC (with Sec 1603 making that an upfront grant),

— MACRS depreciation on the tax basis for the equipment,

— SRECs in NJ/PJM: anywhere from 30c/kWh up to 50c/kWh

— NJ Net-metering without a cap on system size means that they’ll replace retail power for everything they draw from the utility and anything above that will get paid at the utility’s avoided-cost of power. Since there is no cap on the net metering size, they don’t even have to worry about getting in to the PJM Queue…everything just goes right back to the utility at avoided-cost.

3. As far as interconnection goes, its pretty fortunate that they’re so close to a medium/high voltage line coming off of that gas/oil peaker plant about 1.5 miles to the southwest ( http://goo.gl/maps/WHPx ) If it weren’t for such a convenient location, its not at all clear that the utility would have approved any project that wanted to hang 5MW off of a feeder in what looks like a pretty built-up area. Perhaps they’re even running a dedicated line all the way back to the substation?

3. Interconnection

Such an amazing project but I thought because of its size it can serve more than 400 families. But seems that I’m thinking wrong. I’m a bit disappointed.