Agenda - Council Work Session - 04/11/2023

Home

1 Introduction Closed landfills are promising sites for solar PV systems. Solar on closed landfills could make use of already disturbed land, avoid greenfield development of prime farmland or other undisturbed or undeveloped land, provide a revenue stream from land that would otherwise have no use, and assist the state in meeting carbon reduction goals. The EQB received Minnesota Legislature funding in 2019 to conduct a study on the potential to deploy solar PV systems on the MPCA CLP sites. The MPCA- administered CLP is a program established by the Legislature in 1994 to properly construct, monitor, and maintain closed municipal sanitary landfills. There are currently 110 sites in the CLP (Figure 1). However, there has been insufficient information regarding whether CLP sites are viable for solar development. The EQB issued a competitive request for proposal and selected Barr to facilitate a study to evaluate the viability of CLP sites for solar development, examine barriers to solar development, and recommend actions to address those barriers. As an overview, the CLP program includes the following key features: • The CLP currently manages over 8,500 acres of closed landfill property about 75 percent of this acreage does not contain solid waste. Each site is defined by a land management area (LMA) which is land under control of the MPCA and includes permitted areas and adjacent waste management areas plus any lands acquired by the MPCA. At each CLP site, the capped waste footprint ("cap") is surrounded by buffer areas, which vary in size from minimal to dozens of acres. • The underlying ownership of the CLP sites is as follows: 45 state-owned sites, 54 local government -owned sites, and 11 privately -owned sites. Appendix A provides a list of sites and current ownership. • Some of the landfills use electricity to manage environmental impacts of the closed landfill, for example 20 landfills have active gas extraction and 6 landfills have groundwater treatment systems. • The CLP develops land -use plans for each landfill with which local government plans must be consistent. According to the MPCA, The CLP includes solar energy generation as a use in nearly all its land -use plans. • In Minnesota, GOB funds were used to improve some of the sites. The use of these bond funds creates restrictions for certain uses including site leases to private solar developers, energy output contracts governing the sale of solar energy generated onsite, or other revenue generating activities. Fifty-five of the sites include these restrictions on some portion of the site. Solar PV systems on closed landfills must be designed to consider the following unique characteristics of a closed landfill site: • Solar PV systems on landfills outside of Minnesota are typically installed on the landfill caps; however, Minnesota landfills often include ample buffer land available for solar development around the cap. 4