PAULDING — Solar energy is in conversations in some local communities and Paulding Village decided to join in at the council’s utility committee meeting Tuesday evening.
“This is just an informational meeting this evening,” said the village administrator Jason Vance as he began his presentation adding, “We are looking at a solar array with a couple of options to begin with: do we want just to reduce energy costs to municipality owned buildings, or do we want to have solar available to the whole village?”
Vance said, “Basically, a lease agreement is signed with a company and they maintain the panels. AEP would be responsible for hook-up and maintaining on their end.” Too he, said, “There is no out of pocket expense to the village. We would lease the panels at a locked-in price for the energy savings.”
Council member Dave Burtch asked, “What’s the percentage of energy received from solar?”
Vance responded, “We would get about 80% from solar and 20% from AEP.”
When Randy Daeger, council president and head of the utility committee asked, “What is that savings?” Vance said, “Right now, we don’t know because the company has to do an energy audit to determine that.”
There are pros and cons to each of the options.
If the village began with just the municipal buildings and decided later to add the rest of the village, there would be the time of adding new solar panels as well as renegotiating an agreement with the company.
On the other hand, if the village decided to go all in and give solar to everyone and then decide later to change, there could be the challenge of renegotiation with the company.
Mayor Greg White asked, “Could we start with village buildings and then upgrade after a few years to the whole village?”
Vance did say, “We don’t want to oversize our needs. If we do, we could end up selling some of our energy to the power grid — not such a bad thing. But if we need to purchase energy later, we would have to pay a premium price.”
Village Solicitor Harvey Hyman said, “We would have to renegotiate the price also, or go with another company.”
Daeger said, “I know that some of the farmers are concerned about taking up farmland. I am just throwing that out there, not to dampen the conversation.”
Vance said, “Well, we are looking at the brownfields at the Grizzly grounds and maybe the Stokley ponds as options. So that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Speaking about the Grizzly area, Vance said, “There is a lot of remediation to do there if we want to build on it. It may be that we don’t have to do that remediation work if we put in solar panels.”
Vance said about them, “We can …….
