That's just a fancy way of saying floating solar panels.
The Summit County Council allowed Mountain Regional Water Company to tap reserve funds for the new solar panels Wednesday.
The solar panels will be installed on the holding pond behind their Silver Creek Business Park treatment plant, and power the plant in its entirety. General Manager Andy Garland said he expects the panels will produce surplus energy in the winter.
He was excited to tell the council about the project Wednesday.
“It's something that was envisioned years ago in some preliminary work and started, then it got tabled, and now we finally are able to get it going,” Garland said Wednesday.
The project costs $1.8 million, which was initially too much for the company. But a $400,000 grant from Blue Sky, a Rocky Mountain Power initiative, and a 30% Solar Investment Tax Credit from the U.S. Department of Energy covered more than half the cost.
“It made this project pencil, and it's really exciting,” County Manager Shayne Scott said. “It's fun when things both make financial sense, sustainability sense—ticking a lot of boxes.”
Whenever the panels produce surplus energy for the grid, the water company will earn credits from Rocky Mountain Power, too.
“What we've seen a lot in the U.S. is that a lot of smaller cities and agencies are taking up floating solar, and they're actually deploying them on water treatment ponds,” Gadzanku said.
When floating solar panels are on artificial ponds, there’s no harm to local ecosystems. Plus, they save space.
“Because the floats are put on the water body there is a cooling effect that happens,” Gadzanku said. “So we see increased panel efficiency because it's placed on water.”
Floating panels may also reduce evaporation, but Gadzanku said her lab doesn’t have enough data to say so conclusively.
Mountain Regional Water has contracted the Colorado-based renewable energy company Ameresco to install the solar array. According to Ameresco’s proposal, the panels could be installed as early as August of this year.
