Title
Energy Commission Resolution of Support for Wheeler Center Solar Park
Memorandum
In November 2019, Ann Arbor's City Council unanimously adopted a Climate Emergency Declaration committing to chart a path for how the entire Ann Arbor community could achieve a just transition to carbon neutrality b?y the year 2030. In June 2020, City Council unanimously adopted the A2ZERO Carbon Neutrality Plan, a document created with input from thousands of Ann Arborites that lays out seven strategies for our community to achieve carbon neutrality in the timeframe established by Council.
The first of seven strategies in A2ZERO is Powering our community with 100% renewable energy. Included within that strategy are four actions: community choice aggregation, bulk purchase of renewables, community solar, and a landfill solar project. This project advances two of these four actions: Community solar and the landfill solar project.
In 2018-2019, the City began discussing the creation of a landfill solar park on the City's capped landfill. After preliminary internal discussions, the City reached out to DTE to evaluate their interest in the concept. After months of discussion, DTE and the City decided to commission a preliminary assessment to evaluate if the utility infrastructure onsite could handle an influx of power from a large solar system at the city's capped landfill. The results of this assessment, conducted by Black and Veatch, showed that, with modest improvements, the DTE sub-transmission network, which runs across the City's landfill, could handle an influx of additional power from the proposed solar park.
With these results, the City, through approvals by City Council, and DTE commissioned interconnection studies to get specific details about the improvements needed and associated costs. These studies provided specific details necessary to further design and refine the proposed landfill solar project. Findings once again confirmed that the project was possible wi...
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