By Philip Sean Curran
Monmouth County will select a company next month to develop a green energy project at a capped landfill the county owns in Howell, finding a second life for a property that otherwise could never be reused.
An energy company will be responsible for putting solar panels on the site, located at Lakewood Allenwood Road, to produce electricity that would go into the transmission lines of Jersey Central Power & Light. The landfill spans about 66 acres, but only part of that will be usable.
The county intends to award a bid in September and enter a lease agreement with the company that wins the bid. The amount of money paid to the county monthly will be based on how much energy is produced, the county has said.
Monmouth County Board of Freeholders Director Thomas A. Arnone, who has been trying to make the project happen for about three years, called it “a home run.”
“This is about the only use that you can use a capped landfill for,” he said. Howell Mayor Theresa Berger could not be reached for comment. Her community will get 25 percent of the money the county receives in rent from the lease.
This may not be the last time the county undertakes this kind of project; the county owns another capped landfill in the Belford section of Middletown, near the ferry terminal. It is now home to wetlands and dirt access paths.
“That will probably be our next project we’ll engage a study on to see if it’s feasible and if there’s a need or an interest,” Arnone said. Monmouth is following in other towns’ footsteps. In 2017, a municipally owned and capped landfill in Princeton became home to solar panels that produce power, at a lower cost, for the adjacent Stony Brook Regional Sewerage Authority. The 8,800 solar panels provide about 25 percent of the agency’s power.
The arrangement was a public-private partnership. Princeton Mayor Liz Lempert said the town does not own the panels, but it leases the land to the solar energy company.
“This is a way to make use of otherwise fairly unusable land,” she said. “It’s also a way to generate some money. And then it’s also a way to produce power in a cleaner way.”
In south Jersey, utility company PSE&G unveiled its latest project at a landfill to use solar panels to produce electricity. The project, spanning about 25 acres of a landfill in the Camden County town of Cinnaminson, has 32,490 solar panels producing 13 megawatts. That’s enough power for 2,000 average-sized homes for a year, said PSE&G spokesman Fran Sullivan.
Overall, Cinnaminson is the sixth place where PSE&G has built a solar project on a closed, capped and remediated landfill, he said.
“It’s different from having it on your home or on your business, where it’s only providing power to you,” he said. “This goes right out into the grid, so that it just becomes another source of electricity for PSE&G electric customers.”
