The newly installed solar array in Far Meadow.
A “solar farm” is nearing completion at Far Meadow on property owned by Lincoln Woods, and if the good weather holds, it should be producing non-polluting electricity by the end of February.
Four hundred solar panels have been installed and the electrical connections are currently being made. You can see the installation by walking out the dirt road parallel to the railroad tracks from the commuter parking lot. Once it’s on line, the project is expected produce 112 kW of electricity. The average Massachusetts home used about 615 kWh of electricity per month in 2014, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Additional collectors are being installed on the flat-roofed Lincoln Woods units themselves. Their completion will depend on other work being done to bring Lincoln Woods in compliance with state refunding requirements.
The Far Meadow site is a relatively small installation and is expected to have minimal impact on the conservation land and meadow habitat which it abuts, according to Conservation Commission co-chair Peter von Mertens.
The town is looking into the idea of creating a larger solar site atop the old landfill tat could produce somewhere from 650 kW to 980 kW of electricity. Lincoln’s Green Energy Technology Committee presented information on this at the State of the Town meeting in November 2015.
For whose use are these panels intended?
It is easy to confuse kW (kilowatts) with kWh (kilowatt-hours).
If these numbers are accurate then on a sunny day the solar panels would produce 112 kWh each hour.
That would mean it would take about 6 hours to produce enough to power an average home for a month.
I wonder if that’s the real reason that they took down trees near the flat-roofed Lincoln Woods units. Solar panels don’t work under trees.
So is it 112 kW per month? Isn’t that not very much if the average home used 615kWh per month? Is this going to be a big or small impact for Lincoln Woods electricity usage?
I saw these being put in while walking around over there, glad to know what/who they’re for! Thanks!
Terri Edmonston