Loudoun Officials Trying to Shed Light on Unused Solar Panels

As the Franklin Park Arts Center prepares to celebrate Earth Day this week, Loudoun County officials say they are trying to figure out what to do with a 13,000-square-foot array of solar panels that has sat unused in the middle of the center's lawn for the better part of 10 years.

A smaller solar array of 625 square feet, housed on the roof of an equipment shed in the complex in Purcellville, has been a success: It feeds an average of 1.1 kilowatts per hour into the Dominion Virginia Power grid, helping to reduce the center's energy bill.

But the larger array, built more than nine years ago by volunteers, has never been hooked up to anything.

The center will host a discussion about the technology Wednesday as part of an Earth Day celebration.

One of the lead volunteers on the project, solar engineer Alden Hathaway, made a YouTube video in 2006 accusing Dominion Virginia Power of blocking efforts to make the larger array operational.

Hathaway said that the volunteers' goal was to generate enough renewable power to help meet the region's energy needs, far beyond the needs of the arts center, but that they could not persuade Dominion to let them connect the array to the grid.

"We've had, every step of the way, hurdles . . . placed in front of us by Virginia Dominion Power and the state to get this solar array connected . . . because they don't benefit," he says in the video.

County officials say the problem isn't opposition from Dominion but rather the age and condition of the panels that Hathaway's team installed.

They say the practice of connecting solar panels to the power grid, called "reverse metering," is relatively common now but was rare when the panels were built. Dominion did not have a system for reverse metering at the time, and the solar energy could be fed only directly to individual facilities, said Najib Salehi, the county's energy manager.

And by the time the center opened last year, after years of delay caused by funding problems, the large array was not connected to the building because the panels had become obsolete, Salehi said.

"Our preference was to go ahead and somehow use those panels to make it operational," he said. But he said a recent study showed that the panels had degraded and that their efficiency had deteriorated.

"The cost to bring it back to life would have been a lot more than making new panels," he said, adding that the large array had been "kind of ahead of its time."

Hathaway could not be reached for comment. Jeff Stern, the arts center's manager, said Hathaway has moved out of state.

As for the smaller rooftop array, which was built three years ago and hooked up in November, people can go to a Web site to monitor how much energy it is generating. So far, it has produced an amount equivalent to the energy required to power 29 houses for one day or six computers for a year, Stern said.

County officials said that they don't know what to do with the unused panels on the lawn or the land under them.

The county attorney's office is trying to determine who owns the panels so that a plan can be devised, said Lewis Rauch, Loudoun's director of capital construction.

Salehi said that county officials hope to confer with the volunteer organizations that worked on the original fundraising and construction. "Maybe some of them will come up with a solution that we never thought of," he said.