Nearly a year after the idea of a community solar facility was first proposed, construction of the first Harvard Solar Garden is about to begin. The limited-liability corporation formed to allow residents and small businesses to own shares of the 276-kilowatt facility will be closed within the next two weeks, with 42 members—38 residential and four local businesses.
Solar Garden I will be constructed on land behind the Harvard Plaza at 285 and 295 Ayer Road, owned by RDJ Realty Trust. RDJ trustee Robert Hirsch recently signed a 25-year ground lease to host the solar garden facility.
Construction of the solar garden could be completed in as little as three months, said Worth Robbins, Harvard Solar Garden project coordinator. But, allowing for typical winter weather, completion by March or April of 2013 is more realistic, Robbins said.
A solar garden is a large array of photovoltaic solar panels at a single site that offers shared ownership among stakeholders in the communities it serves. The model allows residents or small businesses that cannot or do not wish to install solar modules on their own property to invest in solar electricity generating capacity.
When fully built, Harvard Solar Garden I and the second phase of the project, Harvard Solar Garden II, will generate up to an estimated 630 megawatt hours of electricity annually, enough to power 53 average homes, according to Solar Garden organizers.
“This is the first entirely grass-roots level solar garden in Massachusetts,” said Karl Schwiegershausen, a Solar Garden share owner and one of its organizers. “People want to do it because it is the right thing to do. It is the only way to assure solar-generated electricity if you can’t put it on your own property.”
With subscription of Garden I complete, the attention of organizers will turn to finding subscribers to Garden II, a 255 kilowatt facility at the same location.
The ownership mix of Garden II may be the same as Garden I, or it may be different, said Stu Sklar, who is actively involved with finding Garden II participants. Because the economic model for solar gardens depends heavily on tax benefits—there is a 30 percent federal tax credit for all solar built before 2017—all owners must be taxpayers. Nonprofit organizations or municipalities cannot benefit from the tax credit.
For towns or nonprofits such as churches or museums to use any of the Garden II capacity would require tax-paying owners to make the electricity credits available as a charitable gift. Some of the solar garden organizers are exploring this possibility, while others are reaching out to potential residential and small-business participants in Harvard and nearby communities.
Although Harvard Solar Gardens I and II will be located in Harvard, participation is not restricted to Harvard. The state’s Green Communities Act of 2008 established virtual net metering, which allows electricity produced in a solar array to be credited to any electric meter account within the same utility “load zone.” Harvard is in a National Grid load zone that encompasses more than 50 communities in central and western Massachusetts, including the nearby towns of Bolton, Lancaster, Berlin, Clinton, Ayer, Shirley, Westborough, and Northborough, as well as more distant communities such as Sutton and Worcester. Residents or businesses in those communities could participate on the same basis as residents and businesses in Harvard.
Sklar told the Press that a website, www.hsgarden.org, has been established to answer questions potential participants may have, and he encouraged anyone wanting more information, or wishing to discuss participation, to send email to info2@hsgarden.org.
