The town of Brookhaven in Long Island’s Suffolk County is caught up in New York’s ongoing love affair with solar energy farms.
More than 50 solar energy farms, with acres upon acres of white and gray solar panels pointed skyward, have been approved on Long Island and dozens more are in the pipeline, according to PSEG Long Island, the region’s power utility. Supporters point to the low cost of energy per gigawatt using such farms and their relatively small footprint, compared with larger power-grid structures.
But the latest plan for a new 60-acre solar installation on a sod farm in Shoreham has drawn opposition from residents who say that such facilities would be better built to replace abandoned warehouses or unsightly industrial areas. The critics also cite worries about what they say are possible long-term health effects.
The proposed Shoreham solar farm would include about 50,000 panels ranging between 8 feet and 10 feet. The project to erect the panels on the grounds of the DeLalio Sod Farms was approved unanimously by the Brookhaven Town Planning Board in late October.
Some residents have filed formal objections to the Shoreham solar farm and two other solar farms planned nearby, saying they ruin the area’s rural character and that the negotiations for the Shoreham farm, off Route 25A, was done behind closed doors. MaryAnn Johnston, president of the Affiliated Brookhaven Civic Associations, said a lawsuit is in the works.
“We are all in favor of renewable energy but this is an industrial-sized solar power plant,” said Ms. Johnston, who works as a paralegal. “A project of this size should not have been done quietly.”
A review of the approval and contracting process for the solar farm is under way, said
Marc Alessi,
a governor-appointed trustee of the Long Island Power Authority, which oversaw the Shoreham solar farm proposal before it was taken over by PSEG Long Island and the developer, sPower.
“I think if some of this stuff had been talked about at length, and we had agreed to house it away from an active farm, we could have avoided the disagreement,” Mr. Alessi said.
Solar power supporters say the new farm could offset the annual energy use of roughly 1,775 homes and the panels be hidden by rows of evergreen trees.
“A lot of the concerns were focused on health but there’s no risk here,” said Chris Wiedemann, the director of development for sPower, a California and Utah-based renewable energy company that is building the solar farm. Mr. Wiedemann said the company is awaiting building permits and construction could take between four months and six months to complete.
Brookhaven has a rich history with advanced technology. Inventor Guglielmo Marconi used a small shack on the campus of a nearby elementary school to train wireless operators and beam messages to ships at sea. The town of Rocky Point on the North Shore was home to the largest wireless station in the world, with a campus of 400-foot-tall steel antenna towers built by Radio Corp. of America in the 1920s.
The area is anchored by Brookhaven National Laboratory, a 5,300-acre U.S. Energy Department facility with nearly 3,000 employees. The facility is home to the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a 2.4-mile atom-smashing supercollider that is the only one of its kind in the U.S.
Brookhaven lab also has the largest solar-energy project in New York state, providing 37 megawatts of power.
Paul Moskowitz, a retired environmental health scientist at Brookhaven lab who has lived next to the sod farm site since 1987, said he is disappointed the bucolic fields, a beloved spot in winter for playing in snow will be no more. But he says there were worse alternatives.
“I view it as a plus. I’d much prefer having a quiet, unoccupied field than a bunch of new houses with people using their leaf blowers and loud music,” he said.
Plans for Brookhaven Solar Farm Power Debate
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