Mon Power brings Rivesville solar energy farm online
Oct. 18—FAIRMONT — Every morning, the residents at house on a hill on Morgan Ridge Road in Rivesville can see the sun rise on Mon Power's new solar farm.
"We offered to put some hedges in so they wouldn't have to look at it," Doug Hartman, Mon Power's director of generation services, said. "They said no, they liked looking at it."
Mon Power held a one time tour of its new site in Rivesville Thursday as way of announcing the farm's completion earlier this month. Nearly 14,000 solar panels now produce up to 5.5 megawatts of electricity, depending on what the overhead skies look like. The site is built on top of a landfill. Previously, the land was used to dispose of fly ash from the Rivesville Power Station. Workers placed a cap over the landfill and placed the solar panels on top.
"The challenges that brought was, everything had to be above ground," Kayla Pauvlinch, solar program project manager, said. "At a normal solar site, your solar panels are held down from flying away from the wind. We can't drill down into the ground here. In order to hold them down, we had to use cement swimming pools, cement basins."
Pauvlinch said drilling into the cap would allow stormwater to percolate into the waste underneath, something they want to avoid.
To manage brush growth, Mon Power will use a herd of sheep in lieu of lawn mowers. Hartman doesn't have an approximate number of how many sheep the Rivesville site will use, but said the Fort Martin site plans to start with 200 sheep for its 83 acres. The Rivesville site is 27 acres.
"I think the industry standard is 8 sheep an acre," Project Manager Steve Rodriquez said.
The sheep will most likely arrive next spring. Pauvlinch said no shepherd will be on hand for the sheep, instead they'll be allowed to graze for three days in one area before a hand comes to the site and moves them to a different spot.
The solar farms built by Mon Power, and its parent company FirstEnergy, are the result of Senate Bill 583, which was passed in 2020. The law allowed power utilities in the state to plan, build, purchase and operate renewable energy generation and storage.
The bill comes with stipulations utility companies need to follow when creating a new renewable energy source. One of the requirements for solar farms was that they only be placed on brownfield sites. Brownfields are lands that have been polluted by industrial use, and require remediation for different uses. The solar farms don't take up any area used by farmland.
Rather than build to a certain capacity, FirstEnergy is letting demand tell them how much to invest in expanding solar.
"We'll use or build as much as our customers are interested in participating in," Hartman said. "I think that's probably the trigger that will move us toward more or additional solar construction, as need for energy continues to grow."
Both Fort Martin and now Rivesville have subscribers who opt to use renewable energy over traditional power generation such as coal. The next site, Marlowe, is already fully subscribed before even being completed.
Solar won't replace coal anytime soon. Both Fort Martin and Rivesville produce about 40,000 megawatt hours in a year. The Harrison and Fort Martin coal plants generate that same load in about 13 hours, Hartman said. Currently, solar contributes less than a percentage to the energy grid, Pauvlinch said. For that reason, solar could never rival coal as a power source in the state.
Hartman said the company is looking into whether that may extend the life of the coal plants. As far as safety concerns and regulations, he said those are challenges the company will have to manage.
"If I have a reliable asset on the ground, you're going to want to use it," Hartman said. "And, leverage that asset as long as you can to keep the grid reliable."
Hartman said plans to retire coal-fired plants haven't changed, contingent on state approval. He said the company is looking at other power sources, such as natural gas, to diversify power generation to fulfill energy needs.
However, Hartman said renewable energy is definitely something customers are interested in, especially data centers and AI. Current federal regulations require federal customers to stop using carbon power by 2030. In order to provide energy at night in the future, there's already a planned space for future energy storage next to the solar panels. However, the company needs to go before the Public Service Commission and get permission to add batteries to the site.
FirstEnergy has a phase two in mind once this round of solar sites is completed. Hartman said the company already has sites identified for future plants, and would add another 50 megawatts of solar energy to the electrical grid.
"Our solar projects create construction jobs and support economic growth by helping West Virginia recruit and retain employers," Dan Rossero, vice president of FirstEnergy's West Virginia Generation, said. "We are pleased to reach another important milestone in our solar program and are excited about the interest we continue to receive from subscribers."
