Hooksett constructs solar array on landfill, joining other N.H. municipalities

Along five acres off West River Road in Hooksett, over 800 gabion baskets sit on top of the town’s capped landfill. Within three weeks, metal poles will be attached to either side of the fixtures. By the time one year has passed, those poles will hold nearly 2,300 solar panels.

Mark Zankel, the director of community solar for ReVision Energy, looked over the landfill on Tuesday morning, a week after the company started construction on the 1.34-megawatt solar array project.

“Having participated in a number of ribbon cuttings for towns that have energized community solar projects, it’s really great to see the pride that people in local communities have when they turn one of these systems on, and I expect that that will be the same for the town folks,” he said.

The project, expected to go online in late summer 2027, will produce 1.65 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually to offset a portion of both the town’s and the school district’s consumption. Hooksett joins a number of other state municipalities that have also utilized landfills for renewable energy projects.

ReVision Energy has completed solar installations on 11 landfill sites across New Hampshire and Maine, with three more expected to be completed by 2027. Zankel said ReVision has been doing these projects for the last nine years because of towns’ growing awareness around rising electric costs and the potential for clean energy.

“Is there something we can do in our town so that we can better control our energy costs going forward and do our part to figure out how can we help with the climate issue and advancing renewable energy?” Zankel said. “I think all those things have come together to make landfill solar more prominent and more on people’s radar.”

Hooksett Town Administrator André Garron said that before he assumed his role in 2019, the town had a goal to reduce its carbon footprint, with a solar project “sitting on the books.” Besides converting street lights from sodium vapor to LED, the solar panels are the next significant, energy-efficient project for the town.

He said it’s a “no-brainer” to use the idle land for another purpose, given that the Hooksett landfill has been capped since 2000.

“When we were doing our investigations of what to do with that and the possibility of a solar field going on there, we did our due diligence and getting requests for proposals,” Garron said. “We kind of said, ‘You know what, why not do this?'”

But putting solar arrays on landfills is not always straightforward.

Zankel said the cost of installing solar on these sites is more expensive than other pieces of land, such as a field. There’s a more extensive permitting process, and more materials are required to hold the panels as to not penetrate the landfill’s cap.

To move forward with a site, Zankel said one of the first considerations is the size and slope of the landfill — it needs to be at least five acres and relatively flat. The next factor is the project’s ability to connect to the grid at an acceptable cost.

“There are a number of landfills where a community might call us and say, ‘Hey, we’d love to do landfill solar,’ and we unfortunately say, ‘We wish we could do that, but either the site is too small or the possibilities of interconnecting to the grid there are really low,'” he said. “In the case of Hooksett, we were able to pass both of those gating conditions.”

Garron, who lives in Bedford, said his town also constructed a solar project on its landfill. He said it makes sense why other places in New Hampshire are choosing to do these types of projects.

“We can generate our own electricity, or at least the right revenue from the generation of the electricity on the site, and make use of this idle property in a positive way,” he said. “You know, I can see why a lot of communities opt to do that.”