Three Solar Plants Planned in East Hampton

SunEdison, a solar energy company, will build solar power plants capable of producing more than four megawatts of electricity on three sites in East Hampton Town.

The company is leasing the land — on Accabonac Road, Bull Path, and at the capped landfill on Springs-Fireplace Road, all in East Hampton — from the town following a vote of the town board last September. The town planning board must approve the proposal. It will consider the Accabonac Road site at its meeting on Wednesday.

SunEdison’s plan for East Hampton is one of five agreements with municipal entities on Long Island. The company has also contracted with Southold Town, Suffolk and Nassau Counties, and the Suffolk County Water Authority. The electricity will be sold to the Long Island Power Authority over the next 20 years through a power purchase agreement, as part of the feed-in tariff program of LIPA’s Clean Solar Initiative. Cumulatively, the five Long Island projects will generate 15 megawatts of electricity.

A statement issued by SunEdison said that construction of the solar plants will create more than 100 jobs in the Long Island area. The plants are expected to produce enough electricity to power more than 1,100 homes.

While the electricity generated by the solar installations falls far short of LIPA’s previously stated goal of 280 megawatts of clean, renewable energy, it will assist East Hampton in achieving its own goals to meet 100 percent of electricity needs with renewable energy sources by 2020 and all of its energy consumption in other sectors, including heating and transportation, with renewable sources by 2030. In December, citing prohibitive cost, LIPA rejected a proposed 35-turbine offshore wind farm that would have been constructed 30 miles east of Montauk and produced some 210 megawatts of electricity.

“It’s helping us get there,” Kim Shaw, director of the town’s Natural Resources Department, said of the solar plants. “The wind farm was the big one, but these are great installations, and besides getting solar on a large scale, the town is leasing the lands, so it’s a win-win.”

Preliminary work is under way at the Accabonac Road and Bull Path sites, Ms. Shaw said, with an “aggressive timetable” for construction pending planning board approval. The installations will be unobtrusive and secure, she said.

Gordian Raacke, executive director of Renewable Energy Long Island and a member of the town’s energy sustainability advisory committee, called the installations “a huge step forward for East Hampton, because we’ve never had solar power plants being built here.”

The “scaled-down versions of what was originally proposed” by LIPA are nonetheless “a quantum leap,” Mr. Raacke said. “You can look at the glass as half full or half empty. These are not small rooftop solar systems — which we also need to grow, and we need to have parking-lot solar installations and on commercial rooftops — but three megawatts of solar power generation constructed here in the Town of East Hampton is a big deal. Obviously, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to achieve a 100-percent clean-energy future, but it always starts with the first few steps.”