The State of Solar Power in New Jersey

by Jedediah Drolet, MCRP '11

In recent years solar development has become increasingly popular in New Jersey.  Probably the most visible manifestation of this is the placement of small solar panels on utility poles throughout the area served by PSE&G, the largest utility in the state, although rooftop solar panels on residential and commercial buildings are also becoming quite noticeable.  This is all due to aggressive policy incentives by the state, starting about ten years ago, to encourage solar.  Initially these consisted of rebates, but recently the state shifted away from providing money directly and now relies on a system of Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs), which are tradable credits that utilities can use to meet their requirements under the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), which mandates a certain percentage of electricity generation in the state has to come from renewable sources each year, with a specified level of that specifically from solar.  SRECs are generated by all solar installations registered with the state and traded freely, which provides a major incentive for the development of solar.  At current SREC prices, the income stream from SRECs vastly outweighs the income stream from the electricity generated by solar installations.

As a result of these incentives, solar development has been booming, and New Jersey now has more installed solar capacity than any state except California.  Due to its much smaller land area, however, the amount of installed capacity per square mile is the highest by far of any state.  As of April 29, New Jersey had 9,032 solar projects with a total capacity of 321 megawatts.  For comparison, a typical coal plant is 500 megawatts, and the Hope Creek Nuclear Plant has a capacity of 1,268 megawatts.  Solar is thus still a very small proportion of the overall electricity generation in the state, but it has been growing rapidly.  This is a concern for land-use planning, because solar can be relatively land-intensive compared to other electricity generation options, and New Jersey has relatively little remaining space compared to many other states.  During this past spring semester, I worked on a project as an intern for New Jersey Future to evaluate the state of solar development and its implications for land use (the results are summarized on their website here).  What I found was that despite a lot of recent concern over some high-profile projects in South Jersey which would use a lot of land for utility-scale solar generation, the vast majority of solar development so far has been in the form of small rooftop systems that use no additional land and are quite compatible with Smart Growth principles.  As of March 31, 91% of installed systems with available data were mounted on rooftops, and only 5% were ground-mounted.  Since ground-mounted installations tend to be larger, they account for a larger proportion of total capacity (15%), but rooftopo systems still account for 73% of installed capacity.  The main concern going forward will be to ensure that this pattern continues; there are plenty of rooftops left, and no pressing need at this point to turn to large, ground-mounted systems that use up precious land to meet the state’s goals for solar, ambitious though they are.

A City Frozen in... 25 Years Ago

by Marley Bice, MCRP '12

A sign reads Pripyat... you know you are in the Zone of Alienation (http://chernobyl1986.tombossi.com/)

It was twenty-five years ago today… the Chernobyl nuclear power disaster changed our planet forever. Almost two months ago, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the eastern coast of Japan experienced major malfunctions of its cooling equipment and controls as a result of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that devastated the area at the same time. As Japanese authorities have declared a 30 mile evacuation zone around the handicapped plant I can’t help but think of Chernobyl. Just as the Japanese evacuees are being told, the residents around the Chernobyl plant were told they would only need to leave for a few days, until the radiation died down.

We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe?

Although Chernobyl is a well-known and fascinating study in nuclear power disasters, the USSR’s devastation of most of eastern Europe and of nature’s overwhelming power over humans and our minute understanding of “science,” it is also an interesting social, and believe it or not, urban planning study as well. Everyone has heard of Chernobyl… but have you ever heard of Pripyat? Pripyat was a city of almost 50,000 people that was established in 1970 to house workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and is now a ghost town home to wild animals and about 400 illegal resettlers.

We lived in Pripyat, near the nuclear station, that’s where I was born and grew up. In a big pre-fab building, on the fifth floor. The windows looked out onto the station. On April 26 – there were two days – those were the last two days in our town. Now it’s not there anymore. What’s left there isn’t our town.

I found it fascinating to learn that the urban layout of Pripyat is actually a study in Soviet Russian urban design – frozen in time. The triangular-plan was made up of a series of five-story buildings alternated with high-rises. The buildings were spaced so as to maximize open space and ensure a view of the horizon was possible from almost every place. It is a study in communist, modernist city planning that was never allowed to fully develop.

At first there was disbelief, there was the sense that it was a game. But it was a real war, an atomic war. We had no idea…

Pictures (or video) of Chernobyl do a much better job of expressing the feeling of emptiness and loss. This disaster happened to a people already devastated by war and has forever changed the landscape and dynamics of this region.

An aerial view of Pripyat from the city's tallest building (http://chernobyl1986.tombossi.com/)

This amusement park was built just for the city's May Day celebrations. But May 1, 1986 never came to Pripyat. But looking at the lack of safety considerations on these rides... maybe that is a good thing. (http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-revisited/chapter18.html)