How community solar turned a Superfund site into savings in Illinois

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.

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.

Installing solar on brownfields is one way to accomplish this.