Page 10 - Explore Lonoke County 2020

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The solar plant built in Clarksville by Scenic Hill Solar has a similar design to the proposed plant that will be built for Central Arkansas Water off U.S. 67/167 in Cabot.
GOING SOLAR Proposed plant expected to open early next year
BY SARAH DECLERK / CREATIVE SERVICES WRITER Travelers on U.S. 67/167 are slated to see
a new roadside sight in Cabot — a proposed solar plant just off the highway. e proposed plant, a partnership between Central Arkan- sas Water and Scenic Hill Solar, is set to begin operations early next year, pending approval by the Arkansas Public Service Commission.
Cabot Mayor Ken Kincade said he was ec- static when he heard that a site in Cabot had been selected for the plant.
“It was exciting to know that Cabot will be a city known for renewable energy,” he said. “We are hoping solar brings more businesses to our area. A focus on renewable energy is amust.”
e plant is expected to produce enough energy to satisfy 20 percent of the utility’s en- ergy expenses, saving Central Arkansas Water about $7 million in energy costs over the next 30 years, said Tad Bohannon, CEO of Central Arkansas Water.
Although Central Arkansas Water began looking into solar energy in 2016, Bohannon
said, a recent law change helped smooth the path forward. In March 2019, the Arkansas Legislature passed the Solar Access Act, which allows for net metering of solar energy.
“Net metering occurs when you have, in this instance, a solar power plant that pro- vides electricity for a client, and some of the time, it’s generating more electricity than the client is actually using at that time,” said Bill Halter, CEO of Scenic Hill Solar. “ at electric- ity is then exported to the electrical grid, and it flows naturally, physically to nearby cus- tomers on that circuit.”
He added that the kilowatt hours of elec- tricity exported to Entergy’s local customers will be measured against the kilowatt hour usage by Central Arkansas Water and credit- ed on the utility’s electric bill.
Before the law change, Central Arkansas Water would have had to locate solar panels at the site where the energy produced is used, Bohannon said. Pumping water from Lake Maumelle to the Jack Wilson Water Treatment Plant in Little Rock is the utility’s
most energy-consuming activity, he added, and the utility would have had to install solar panels at the lake to power the pumps with solar energy.
“We had actually even been looking at floating solar panels, which was going to be expensive,” he said. “So the ability to locate on dry land somewhere actually lowered our cost of the power produced by the solar.”
After reviewing several potential sites in Pulaski County, Bohannon said Central Ar- kansas Water chose the Cabot site because it was flat, located out of a floodplain and met Entergy Arkansas’ requirements for a suffi- cient local energy load.
As part of the 20-year lease agreement, Central Arkansas Water will lease the 72-acre site to Scenic Hill Solar for the construction and operation of the plant, and Scenic Hill Solar will sell the electricity produced back to Central Arkansas Water for 5.1 cents per kilo- watt hour, Bohannon said.
Halter said the plant will produce about 8 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year