Photo: N. Scott Trimble | Syracuse.com
As director of the Indianapolis’ Office of Sustainability, Morgan Mickelson is considering an increasingly common solution for municipalities that want to increase their solar generation while creating jobs locally - building a solar farm on top of a closed landfill. Tax credits offered through the Inflation Reduction Act may make such brownfield installations more common. In Massachusetts, targeted state-level policies meant that by 2020, it had 52% of the utility-scale landfill solar projects in the US, although only 7% of the landfills. The EPA has tracked at least two dozen more completed solar landfill projects across the US, with others under construction or planned. As of the end of 2022, solar landfills have a capacity of about 2.4 GW, enough to power an estimated 500,000 homes, and RMI estimates existing landfills could grow that capacity at least 25-fold. The EPA and National Renewable Energy Laboratory have pre-screened nearly 200,000 brownfield sites and done site-specific analyses of some potential landfill solar farms.
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