Centre County Commissioners approve third solar array, project long-term savings
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- Centre County Commissioners approve contract for a roughly one‑megawatt solar array.
- Energy will be virtually net metered to completely offset the Willowbank Building's usage.
- The contract includes five years of service payments and a sixth-year purchase option.
The Centre County Commissioners unanimously approved a contract Tuesday with Centre County Solar Partners for what will be the government’s third solar array.
The roughly 1 megawatt array will be located on the grounds of the Centre County Correctional Facility at 700 Rishel Hill Road, directly next to the county’s first solar array that was installed in 2020. The second solar array is located atop the Community Services Building.
According to County Administrator John Franek, Jr., Centre County Solar Partners is responsible for constructing, installing, operating, maintaining, replacing and repairing the new array, which will use a process known as virtual net metering to transfer the energy created there to the Willowbank Building.
That transfer of energy is estimated to “completely offset” the Willowbank Building’s energy usage, Franek said.
“Electricity costs are up 37% since 2020 with, by the looks of it, no break,” Commissioner Mark Higgins said. “[The costs] just keep going up and up and up, and this would allow us to fix out electric costs for as much as 40 years.”
Included in the county’s contact with Centre County Solar Partners is annual service payments made in equal monthly installments for the first five years of the contract. That will pan out to between $129,000 and $136,916 each year, along with an option to purchase the system in the contact’s sixth year for a termination fee $1,350,890 — a mechanism that the county has implemented before with its previous two solar array contacts, and utilized last year to purchase the correctional facility’s first array.
When the array is up and running, the long-term savings are estimated to sit at around $5 million. Higgins noted that the correctional facility’s first array has generated “positive cash flow every single year.”
“I think this is a tremendous investment in order to buffer the county from future cost increases with electricity — the fact that it saves us money from the very beginning is certainly an extremely valuable component in the way that the financials on this are structured,” Commissioner Amber Concepcion said, noting that projects like AI data centers will add additional stress onto Pennsylvania’s electric grid in the coming years.
She continued, “This, I think, really future proofs the county from future unpredictable electricity rates.”
The solar array is expected to come online in early 2028.