As someone who spent several years as a workers’ rights organizer, Fredy Amador is intimately familiar with the financial struggles people face in the current economy. Northern Illinois’ skyrocketing energy bills make the situation even tougher.

Now, Amador has become an evangelist for something that can provide a modest measure of relief: a community solar project, built on a Superfund site too polluted for much else in the city of Waukegan where he lives, about 40 miles north of Chicago.

Residents who subscribe to get energy from the solar farm are guaranteed to see savings on their energy bills, under a state program incentivizing solar in low-income areas.

The 9.1-megawatt Yeoman Solar Project, which went online last month, can provide energy for about 1,000 households, as well as the Waukegan school district, which owns the land.

The school district bought the site in the 1950s hoping to build a new high school. But the land proved too swampy, and from 1958 to 1969 it was used as a dump for industrial and municipal waste. The highly contaminated Yeoman Creek Landfill was finally cleaned up 20 years ago, and now the district receives lease payments from CleanCapital, the national solar-investment company that owns and operates the solar farm.

Such brownfields are attractive locations for solar installations because of “existing electrical infrastructure, lower-cost land, and community acceptance,” noted Paul Curran, CleanCapital’s chief development officer. Incentives from the state initiative Illinois Solar for All helped make the project financially viable, even given extra costs incurred from building on a Superfund site.

It’s an example of how state policy can drive clean energy development and cost savings, even as federal tax credits for solar are being cut. The project also shows how solar can turn a community liability into an asset.

“The Yeoman Solar Project encapsulates so much of solar’s promise,” said Andrew Linhares, senior manager for the central U.S. at the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. “The project instills new life into the Yeoman Creek Landfill Superfund site like only solar can.”

Building on pollution

As an unlined pit amid wetlands, the Yeoman Creek Landfill leached toxic chemicals into the environment, including its namesake creek. In 1989, the landfill was added to the Superfund list, the federal program that requires companies responsible for pollution to clean it up.

The remediation was completed in 2005, though gas release, groundwater, and sediment are still being monitored.

“Since then, it’s been vacant,” and discussions started in 2012 regarding the fate of the land, said LeBaron Moten, deputy superintendent of Waukegan Community Unit School District No. 60.

“There were not too many options on the table for this specific site. We couldn’t build anything on it,” Moten said. “Our main objective was to keep people off it.”

Representatives of the school district, the city, and the group of companies involved in the cleanup decided to pursue putting a solar farm on the site, and in 2017 the school district issued a request for proposals. A national developer experienced in building solar on landfills, BQ Energy, was selected. In 2022, it was acquired by CleanCapital, which launched construction of the project.

Moten said the lease payments from CleanCapital and the energy savings from solar power will be helpful for the district, which serves over 13,000 students, the majority of whom are Latino and 68% of whom are considered low-income. The school district will be the project’s anchor tenant, using about 40% of the energy produced.

Seven of the school district’s buildings have rooftop solar arrays, which are referenced in sustainability lessons in the classroom. Moten said he hopes Yeoman Solar will similarly factor into educating students about clean energy, and potentially preparing them for jobs in the industry.

A new direction brings new challenges

A longtime industrial hub, Waukegan is home to five Superfund sites. The city still has a lot of manufacturing, and until 2022 a large coal plant operated on the shore of Lake Michigan, not far from residents’ homes. That location remains contaminated with toxic coal ash. The community organization Clean Power Lake County and local activists have long demanded a just transition for Waukegan, in which economic opportunities and renewable energy benefit residents who have suffered from pollution.

Installing solar on brownfields is one way to accomplish this.

Solar is a good fit for sites that are too polluted for housing or other types of development, noted Curran. Under the terms of the Superfund remediation, residential use is prohibited at the Yeoman Creek site.

But installing arrays on landfills or other remediated areas does entail some challenges.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reviews solar developers’ plans for Superfund sites, Curran said, to be sure the construction won’t damage caps over contaminated soil or otherwise release pollutants. The EPA examines “every single step of construction from how big ballasts can be, to stormwater protection, to how we’re going to revegetate,” he added.

Even mowing the grass below solar panels — a normally mundane process — can pose risks when a landfill lies underneath.

“The lawn is basically what’s holding the land in place, so you don’t get erosion,” Curran said.

An Illinois law passed in October and awaiting the governor’s signature creates a rebate for community solar paired with battery storage. Curran said that batteries would likely be too heavy to locate on a landfill, but CleanCapital may explore putting them on firmer ground nearby.

The company has developed solar on brownfields and landfills in other states, including a new 822-kilowatt site in Maryland. Curran said community solar should be built on more of the nation’s thousands of closed landfills.

Policies like those in Illinois help facilitate the process. A 2017 law created robust incentives for community solar. Since then, more than 700 community solar projects totaling over 1,800 megawatts have been built through the Illinois Shines incentive program. Another 33 projects representing 64 megawatts have been subsidized by Illinois Solar for All, a program for low-income and environmental justice areas (separate from the federal program of the same name that was ended by the Trump administration).

The Illinois Power Agency, which acquires power on behalf of utilities, procures solar built on brownfields. The Illinois EPA also provides low-interest loans and other resources for brownfield redevelopment.

A shared resource

Amador found out about Yeoman Solar from local clean energy leaders after he helped launch a Waukegan branch of the Chicago Workers Collaborative, which organizes and advocates for temporary workers. (He is no longer with the group, though he still lives in Waukegan.)

Community solar makes clean energy accessible to people who can’t or don’t want to install solar on their own homes — like Amador himself.

“I live in a condo building, and if I bought a house I probably would not have solar panels. I don’t like how they look on rooftops,” he said.

He often gets the same reaction when he tells people about community solar. “At first they think I’m talking about installing solar on their homes — they don’t want that.”

But after explaining and extolling the community solar model, Amador has recruited dozens of family, friends, and members of his church to subscribe to Yeoman Solar.

“It will help their wallet and help the ecosystem too,” Amador said.

The Yeoman Solar subscriptions will cover more than 90% of a household’s energy needs, said Ryan Libby, director of subscriber acquisition for PowerMarket, which CleanCapital contracted to recruit subscribers. Amador expects to save about $300 a year through his subscription, which equates to about 5 kilowatts of solar panels.

“That money can pay for utilities, for food, for other bills,” Amador said. “With how bad this economy is, it’s an important impact.”

Yeoman Solar is the largest community solar array in the territory of ComEd, the utility that serves northern Illinois. It reduces the amount of energy the utility needs to provide, and ComEd has praised the project. While any ComEd customer can subscribe, Curran said CleanCapital is prioritizing outreach to Waukegan residents.

Amador indeed feels it represents a new path for the city.

“All the pollution, the coal plant, the disinvestment — communities like Waukegan should be prioritized for projects like this,” he said. “I’d like to encourage people to ask questions — go to meetings, find out how these projects work, try to sign up. That will help them to save some money, and if we all participate, we’re stronger.”

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