Granite Geek: A big solar array in Concord is great, but it should have been here years ago

The newest large-scale solar array in Concord, which got an official groundbreaking Monday, is good news from the cheap-electricity standpoint, but it’s also a lesson in the obstacles slowing our transition to 21st-century energy.

The 5-megawatt array — the biggest allowed under our net metering laws — will be located on about 30 acres owned by Brochu Nurseries in a bend of the Merrimack River. The 11,000 panels will sit on about half of the parcel that was bought by Len Brochu Senior back in the 1970s, with the rest of the land being used for the nursery.

By the way, this is a separate parcel from the Brochu Nursery visible next to I-93, which has had a much smaller solar array for more than a decade.

“Half was a pine grove we’d been nurturing since the ’70s for log homes,” Len Brochu II, the company owner, said of the land off West Portsmouth Street. “Several years ago disease wiped it out. We had to cut them down. I can’t do anything with that land; it would be too expensive. It’s very silty and sandy, wasn’t viable for nursery stock.”

A solar farm made more sense.

“I wouldn’t take good agricultural land and do this,” he added.

Brochu had that idea almost two decades ago, and I first wrote about it in 2017. Yet it won’t come online until 2026 at the earliest.

That’s weird because one of solar’s strengths is that it can be built much more quickly than any other power source. What happened? In part, the usual NIMBY fussbudgets, who are weirdly focused on solar panels more than parking lots.

But a big reason for the delay was city zoning and planning laws.

Rule-writers in the past hadn’t anticipated filling a field with thousands of solar panels on stilts, so the array was treated as if it was one big building rather than lines of hard surfaces spaced out, with lots of open land between them. That meant it was rejected for violating rules about impervious surfaces and runoff.

Changing the regulation to reflect the reality of solar installations took time. Combine that with pandemic-related slowdowns and the region lost out on almost a decade of cheap electricity. Bummer.

That is a perfect example of how “soft costs” such as permitting and community acceptance have become more of an obstacle in the energy transition, even as the “hard costs” of equipment and production have fallen sharply.

That is why so-called red states have seen a boom in large solar farms in the past couple of years. They tend to have fewer regulations than so-called blue states, which is a drawback when you want to keep pollution out of the river but a benefit when you want to build a solar farm quickly.

Depending on how you measure it, this array will generate as much electricity annually as used by at least 5,000 homes. A similarly sized array is in the process of being built atop Concord’s closed landfill.

The state’s net-metering law says that the financial benefit of large arrays can only be shared with municipal and nonprofit organizations, called the offtakers. These folks sign long-term agreements to buy the power from the array (when your fuel is free, your electricity can be cheap). An array needs enough of them to cover the expected output if they are going to connect to the grid.

For these two arrays, offtakers include Concord government, city schools, state government, the NH Housing Finance Authority, the McAuliffe Discovery Center and, surprisingly, Exeter School District. Why Exeter? They wanted it; and they also get electricity from Unitil. Net metering has to stay within a given utility.

For reasons that escape me, the state legislature prevents companies from being offtakers of solar arrays. This is a big problem, says Rob Werner, a former city councilor who is the state director of the League of Conservation Voters. “We need net metering expansion because the supply of offtakers is limited until it expands to commercial properties,” he said.

It is, of course, good news that Concord will be getting 10 megawatts of solar power — that’s 10 MW AC, if you’re counting — but in the grand scheme of things, that’s just a drop in the bucket. We need lots more built quickly to cope with any “energy emergency” the country may have.

Setting up solar panels is the fastest way to get more electrons flowing, so to speak, and we’d be idiots not to encourage them in every way possible.

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