Every day, thousands of people zoom up and down Route 1 in Dover, Del., many not knowing that a massive 10-megawatt field of solar panels is nearby, helping reduce the city’s dependency on fossil fuels.
The Dover SUN Park covers 103 acres of countryside just east of the highway.
Those 37,000 solar panels themselves are remarkable because of their sun-tracking ability. They soak up nearly 25 percent more sunlight because of SunPower Tracker systems. The tracker’s GPS follows the sun, so panels slowly rotate to fully face the shifting light. That also reduces land-use requirements.
Delaware Gov. Jack Markell and Dover Mayor Carleton E. Carey Sr. were among the dignitaries present at the recent dedication of Dover SUN Park.
The six-month construction project provided more than 250 jobs and supported the local economy though purchases of local materials and services.
“The Dover SUN Park helped put people to work and is producing clean energy during the times of day when power use is at its peak,” said Markell. “This is good for the City of Dover and it’s good for Delaware. This project really shows what can be accomplished when so many people in the community work together.”
Dover SUN Park was designed and built by SunPower, a Silicon Valley, Calif.-based company that builds large-scale power plants worldwide. L.S. Power is the power-generation and -transmission group that owns the park.
L.S. Power estimates that Dover SUN Park will generate the equivalent amount of electricity of what it takes to power more than 1,500 Delaware homes.
The quiet, zero-emissions photovoltaic cells could also prevent more than 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, according to estimates from by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
This could be the second-largest solar system east of the Mississippi River, estimated Colin O’Mara, Secretary of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
“For a state our size to pull this together took an incredible amount of coordination and partnership,” O’Mara said.
Completion of the large-scale park depended on support from the City of Dover, the State of Delaware and the private sector.
Delaware’s foothold as a green state began with legislation. Delaware’s General Assembly passed bipartisan green laws requiring energy providers to diversify their energy portfolios.
By 2025, the Renewable Portfolio Standard will require investor-owned utilities, the Delaware Electric Cooperative and municipal utilities to purchase 25 percent of the electricity sold in-state from renewable sources generated in-state, including 3.5 percent from solar photovoltaic systems.
The annual average will increase steadily until that goal is reached. In the 2011 to 2012 cycle, 7 percent of electricity must be renewable, and 0.2 percent must be solar.
“Delaware is becoming a leader in energy,” O’Mara said, noting that it is one of the top states in the country for solar power.
DNREC facilitated the Solar Renewable Energy Credit (SREC) contract, which means credits from solar power created at the facility can be sold and traded on market.
Dover SUN Park will deliver power to the local utility distribution grid, while the City of Dover, Delaware Municipal Electric Corporation, Delmarva Power and Delaware Sustainable Energy Utility purchase the renewable energy credits associated with the system.
Todd Goodman said Dover SUN Park is the first of many diversification projects for Delmarva Power. He cited wind farms and “cutting edge” fuel cells as next up on the green horizon.
Sean Garden noted the broader impact of the Delaware project. As regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Garden joked that the EPA often thanking someone or asking for something.
“Here’s the asking part: I ask all of you to partner with me to help me get out to the other regions and the other states … in sharing what you did here and how you did it and the benefits which you had gained from it,” said Garden.
State Sen. Brian Bushweller relayed state Sen. Harris McDowell’s comment that the SUN Park will to provide a “magnet for people, including employers and initiations and corporations” who will want to learn more about Dover.
“Given the debate going on these days, if you want jobs, this is jobs. If you want green jobs, this is green jobs. If you want to avoid a bridge to nowhere, this is a bridge to somewhere,” said Steve Vavrik, managing director for SunPower.
