Harvard has a great opportunity to lead the way toward a more sustainable future by allowing members of our community to create a shared solar garden. As one of the members of the Community Solar Garden project, I urge the Zoning Board of Appeals to approve the project.
At a meeting two weeks ago, I listened to board members and friends from the community discuss a number of zoning technicalities and fears of a town overrun with solar panels. I think both of these lines of reasoning are either unfounded or miss the point.
The site that has been found is an excellent site for a solar energy. It is a south-facing slope that is a small part of a parcel owned by Adam and Lyn Horowitz, and almost completely hidden from any roads. With a bit of landscaping no one will easily see it.
It will allow a number of community members who do not have appropriate houses or land for solar panels to locate photovoltaic collectors in a central place. In many ways this method is more efficient than putting panels on our own roofs, which may not be facing in exactly the right direction, or may have shade part of the day. By dedicating this land to solar, the panels at this site will have the most optimum placement and use fewer wires and inverters per panel by grouping them together.
Not unlike the rise in specialization in other aspects of our community—consolidating grazing, or apple farming, or snow plowing—it often saves resources when we consolidate our use of land and equipment. The solar garden is a perfect project for the community to try a new way of powering our houses, and the laws are written to give the Zoning Board enough leeway to allow it to happen. It is clearly not addressed well in the current zoning law, which is why we need the reasonable consideration of the Zoning Board to make a ruling in anticipation of more detailed zoning laws in the future.
There was great concern that if this project is allowed to go ahead, hundreds of acres of our land would be covered by other similar groups for similar projects before a zoning law is filed. These fears are totally unwarranted. First of all, as we were told by counsel, the Zoning Board would have to act on each request as new and separate from the last. Again, we are reasonable people, and can make reasonable decisions, and could easily prevent a project that does not fit the character of the town. More importantly, we have some idea of the total number of people interested in similar projects based on the last year of forming the present group, and it is a limited number of people. Even if there was a groundswell of interest, there are fewer than 1,800 households in all of Harvard, so there is no chance of unbounded growth of solar farms in the area.
We do not know, in the long run, if it would be better to all have panels on our roofs, or to cover square miles in Arizona with solar panels, but, at the moment, small installations such as the one proposed seem to fit the tests of still being hidden, offering distributed generation of power, making the grid more robust against outages, while not being so granular that we waste resources due to too much redundant equipment at each house. We may not get it exactly right the first time, but the risks are low for this project.
There is no pollution created while it is in operation, no oil to change or pesticides used to keep it operational. No birds are threatened. And if it works, we will have an incredible resource in town that contributes to the nation’s search for robust and sustainable energy for the future.
Finally a few technical points, and I should mention that I am a physicist who has been involved in research and teaching in the area of solid state physics (such as solar cells) and energy policy for more than 25 years. There were many questions at the Zoning Board meeting trying to probe if we were selling electricity to the grid and buying it back at our homes. The idea of sending electricity from point to point over the grid, which is a free-form network, such as from the solar farm to my house, is a standard operating procedure for the grid. Many of us have received offers from electricity generating companies in the past few years to sell us their electricity over National Grid’s wires. National Grid is just a conduit, and they allow us to send solar energy over their grid.
There was a comment at the meeting that solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they produce in their lifetime. This was an urban myth about wind turbines, and it was not true about them and it is not true about solar panels. On that note, it is now cheaper to produce electricity with unsubsidized wind turbines than nuclear power plants. The solar cells in the labs these days are twice as efficient as the ones you can buy now.
With the advances in home efficiency, in 10 years our solar garden could probably serve three times as many houses using the same footprint and infrastructure. It is a great investment for our future.
Every day of our lives, my colleagues and I work against unbreakable laws, the laws of physics, as we make new measurements or develop new technologies. But we don’t let the laws stop what we see as our goals and dreams, we just use the laws to frame the solutions. I would hope that the members of the Zoning Board of Appeals, seeing the incredible possibilities for Harvard leading the country in sustainable energy solutions, will use their appropriately given power to help move the solar garden forward.
Charles C. Agosta, Ph.D., is professor of physics at Clark University and CEO and co-founder of Machflow Energy, Inc., a clean-tech company developing heat transfer technologies for air conditioning and related applications. Agosta lives on Bolton Road in Harvard and, with his wife Lucy McQuilken, is a member of Harvard Community Solar Garden I, buying a 7 kilowatt share out of a total 249.9.
