Emily Holbrook
DSM solar field in Belvidere, New Jersey. Image courtesy of DSM.
On January 10, 2019, DSM North America, a chemical manufacturing company, will host an event at its Belvidere, New Jersey facility to unveil New Jersey’s newest solar field. DSM says the event will highlight the benefits of the solar field to the Belvidere plant's energy consumption, the positive impact on the local New Jersey electricity grid and DSM’s commitment to addressing climate change by reducing the impact of its own business operations.
The original Belvidere solar field, opened in 2014, consisted of 20 acres and just under 20,000 panels. It produced approximately 30-40% of the plant’s electricity needs at peak production. The newly completed Phase 2 is double in size to the first phase and will effectively triple the solar output at the site by adding an additional 40 acres and 42,000+ panels to the existing Phase 1 solar field. Both phases combined (60 acres and 62,000+ panels) will become the largest net-metered solar project in the state of New Jersey and the second largest on the East Coast, after Apple.
At peak sunlight, the maximum output will exceed the plant’s consumption with the excess power being sold to the grid during those times. The solar field is expected to produce an annual excess of 3,460 MW-hours of electricity that will be sold to the grid, enough to power 406 homes for a year.
- Total Solar I&II output: 20.216 MW DC
- Total Solar I&II output:23,437 MW-hours
- Equivalent Metric tons of CO2: 17,441 MT
- Equivalent cars driven one year: 3,735 cars
- Equivalent miles driven: 42,750,524 miles
- Equivalent gallons of gas consumed: 1,962,666 gallons
- Homes electricity for one year: 2,614 homes
- Carbon sequestered by acres of forest: 20,544 acres
About the Solar Field:
- This newly completed expansion of DSM’s Belvidere solar field was developed in partnership with GeoPeak and NextEra Energy Inc., and offsets CO2 emissions of electricity from the grid by more than 17,400 metric tons annually.
- The panels utilize DSM’s own anti-reflective coating for the solar glass that increases efficiency by up to 3%. This technology is already in use at DSM’s operating solar fields in Kingstree, South Carolina and Pune, India.
The Garden State Becomes the Solar State
New Jersey has announced several solar initiatives in recent years, including:
- Renewable energy developers Citrine Power, LLC and AC Power, LLC announced last year they have partnered with Borough of Hopatcong, New Jersey to develop and build a solar power plant on the Borough’s capped solid waste landfill. Following a public request for proposal, the Borough entered into a long-term lease agreement with ACCP NJ Solar, LLC, a joint venture co-owned by AC Power and Citrine Power, to design, permit, interconnect and build a solar installation on its capped municipal landfill.
- In 2018, healthcare supply chain solutions provider McKesson Corporation signed a deal today with NRG to install solar arrays at a distribution center in Robbinsville, New Jersey. The solar power purchase agreement calls for rooftop and ground-mounted solar arrays that will have a capacity up to 3 MW.
- In 2017, Amazon unveiled the largest rooftop solar array in New Jersey, at its Carteret warehouse. The 22,000-panel system sits atop the warehouse’s 30-acre roof and will supply power to the building where 3,000 employees and 900 robots work. The solar panel system was created with 2.5 million pounds of materials and at its peak — during a long, sunny day — can create 7.5 million watts of power, said Tom Chandlee, Amazon’s program manager for renewable energy, on nj.com. Sol Systems and IGS Solar collaborated on the solar project, the installation of which began in February.
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