MANSFIELD — A solar farm is greenlit for closed landfills on Mansfield’s north side.
Now all officials need is a local consumer(s) for the electrical power the site will produce.
Mansfield City Council on Tuesday approved a development agreement with CEP Renewables that would see the company build a solar field. The facility could generate between 25 and 35 megawatts.
CEP will lease land used for the solar farm for $2,000 per acre per year and will also take over responsibility for mowing and maintenance, lightening the load on the Richland County Solid Waste District.
Lawmakers approved the agreement after meeting with Barrett Thomas from the Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development and Kurt Prinzick, a senior development manager for the company and former district chief of the Ohio EPA Northeast District Office.
(Below is a PDF of the agreement approved by Mansfield City Council on Tuesday evening with CEP Renewables to construct a solar farm atop closed landfills in the city.)
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Prinzick said the company could have the solar farm producing within a year of finding larger local commercial user(s) to purchase the power. Under the agreement, CEP would lease up to 196 acres for the project, using the former city landfill and the former county landfill near Cairns Road.
“Before we can start working on this project, we need a guarantee that someone’s going to be able to take this electricity. From the moment we have a (power purchase agreement), we will need about 12 months,” Prinzick said.
Thomas said last week the project will not need approval from the Ohio Power Siting Board since it will not connect into the PJM Interconnection grid, which coordinates and moves electrical power in all or parts of 13 states, including Ohio.
“It’s kind of the micro-grid system that everybody’s talking about. Generate power locally and use it locally. That’s the best way to do this,” Thomas told Richland Source last week.
“The most efficient way with the least regulation is to get companies that buy power and need power, stick them together, they make an agreement, they buy the power. That’s by far the most efficient way to do this,” Thomas said.
The solar panels would rest on concrete ballast since digging into the old landfill is prohibited by the Ohio EPA. Thomas said they would stand around 10 feet tall at the highest point.
Prinzick said former landfills, such as the location where CEP built one in Cuyahoga County eight years ago, are prime locations for solar farms.
“In brownfields, we’re always looking for our highest and best use. But when it comes to landfills, quite frankly there isn’t a lot you can do with them,” said Prinzick, who worked for the EPA for 31 years.
“We were excited when the (request for proposals) came out (in 2024) and we were just delighted that we were the selected vendor. I’m really looking forward to moving this project forward,” he said.
He said it would be a large solar farm, depending on what the eventual customers need in terms of power.
“When we design that … when we maximize that site … (on the) Richland County landfill we can get about 25 megawatts and on the Mansfield landfill we can get around 10. So a total of 35 between the two, but again, it will depend on what we can do with the (customers),” Prinzick said.
In addition to the funds from the lease, and reduced costs for maintaining the closed landfill sites, he said the community would benefit from increased tax revenue.
He said CEP would pay $9,000 per megawatt produced annually.
“If we can get to 20 megawatts AC, that’s $180,000 annually that comes into the local taxable jurisdiction. I know that’s not generational money, but it’s money you can rely on for the life of the project, which is 20 years, plus three, five-year extensions,” Prinzick said.
“It’s money you can rely on and budget for the foreseeable future,” he said.
CEP must also prepare a decommissioning plan to be submitted and approved prior to construction.
The decommissioning plan shall describe how CEP intends to remove the solar project and any support structures at the end of commercial operations and also describe how CEP intends to protect the landfill caps during such decommissioning.
The project will include land occupied by the former county landfill, which closed in 1990, and the former city landfill, which shut down in 1970. It would include land south and north of Cairns Road near Mansfield Lahm Regional Airport.
