“Mayor Vince DeSantis is encouraging residents of the city to take advantage of reduced electricity costs made available by the 4.98 megawatt solar farm set to come online next month at the site of the former city landfill on East Fulton Street Extension.
DeSantis posted a video of himself to Gloversville’s Facebook page on Thursday, explaining the project.
“I can remember coming to the Gloversville city dump with my dad when I was a little kid on Saturday mornings, and it’s now completely transformed,” DeSantis said, standing in front of 17,820 photovoltaic panels.
DeSantis said back in the early 1990s, the former city dump was encapsulated as part of a huge public project to seal-in all of the landfill’s toxins, so that they couldn’t get into the groundwater.
“You can’t do anything with this site,” he said. “You can’t even plant a tree here because the roots would break the barrier [of the encapsulated landfill].”
Back in 2015, the city decided to try to plant a solar farm on the 50-acre site, originally awarding a contract to SolarCity, a subsidiary of Tesla, but that project fell through. In 2018, the Common Council awarded another solar farm project to Framingham, Mass.-based Ameresco.
Over the past three years Ameresco built the solar farm on 25 acres of the landfill, operating under its subsidiary, Gloversville Community Solar.”
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Subik, Jason. The Recorder 8 March 2021.