By Esteban Fernandez, Times West Virginian
FAIRMONT, W.Va. — 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.
