In April 2021, The Town of Windham, Maine, officially turned on their new 504-kilowatt array, which will bring clean solar energy to Windham residents. The array, comprised of 1,344 photovoltaic panels, will produce over 684,000 kilowatt-hours of clean, solar electricity annually.
The Windham solar array is another example of a solar project sited and developed on land with limited productive use, granting new value to unserviceable land. Building on a capped landfill was a particularly appealing part of this clean energy project, according to the Town Sustainability Coordinator, Gretchen Anderson.
While a number of local towns and cities have installed solar on their capped landfills, Windham is one of the first to use local rocks as ballast. Because the ground can't be penetrated on capped landfills, ground-mounted solar arrays need to be held down with heavy ballast, usually made of concrete. For the Town of Windham, the ReVision engineering and design teams opted to use crushed bedrock from two local quarries: one right down the street and one in the neighboring town of Gorham.
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