Solar farm construction underway, but some still wary - WKBN.com

Meeting discusses Coolspring Township, Pennsylvania Sunrise Energy solar farm construction underway

COOLSPRING TWP., Pa. (WKBN) — A solar farm is under construction in Mercer County, and the people living around seem to have accepted the idea.

The site is on Miller School Road, between Coolspring Church Road and Airport Road, and construction has started in the three weeks since the last meeting.

A meeting Monday evening gave residents another chance to ask questions of those running the company that’s putting the solar panels in.

Of Richard Thomas’s Coolspring Township property, 650 feet border the land where Sunrise Energy is building a solar farm. Thomas thinks there may be a need for a retention pond on the property to control the runoff.

“What you have done is, you’ve taken that solar field and made that into a parking lot, because there’s going to be a lot more runoff,” Thomas said.

Dave Hommrich is president of the Pittsburgh-based Sunrise Energy company, which is building the solar farm.

“As far as the comment that it’s a parking lot, I mean, universities have done studies and they’ve concluded it’s not,” Hommrich said.

Hommrich and two others met with 50 people at the Monday meeting to answer their questions. Hommrich knows a major concern is aesthetics — people don’t want to look at solar panels.

“If people come to us and say, ‘I don’t want to look at it, could you plant some trees?’ — let’s talk,” Hommrich said. “The beautiful part about that is they don’t operate at night because the sun goes down.”

Sunrise Energy has a 30-year lease on the property — with an option for 20 more.

“There’s a bond we’re required to put up that says no matter what, at the end of the lease, it’ll be returned to the state it was in before we got there,” Hommrich said.

A representative from the Lake Latonka homeowners association brought up the possibility of warmer water in the retention ponds causing algae to bloom: “We don’t want to see that.”

“My assessment, as an engineer, is you couldn’t have hot enough panels to make a difference in the temperature of your water in Lake Latonka,” Hommrich said.

Hommrich also said there will be grass around the solar panels, which will be mowed. He also said the panels do move with the sun, but their is no noise generated from the movement because the movement is so slow.