Mon Power and Potomac Edison, subsidiaries of FirstEnergy Corp., have officially confirmed the completion of their third utility-scale solar site in West Virginia, a site designed to help meet the state’s electricity needs.
According to certain reports, more than 17,000 solar panels are now producing up to 5.75 megawatts of renewable power at the Marlowe site in Berkeley County. To put things into context, we must take into account one Solar Energy Industries Association’s report, where it was revealed that one megawatt of solar energy is more than enough to power a national average of 173 homes,
More on the given facility would reveal how it is actually built on 36 acres of company-owned property along Interstate 81 and the Potomac River. As site was previously an ash landfill for the former R. Paul Smith Power Station, the partners would harvest, back in 2022, more than three million tons of ash for use in cement manufacturing before successfully closing the landfill.
“Our solar projects create construction jobs, support U.S. manufacturing and help us accommodate increased demand for electricity. We are committed to ensuring that our customers have the right mix and amount of generation to support their everyday needs, and our solar facilities are a growing part of that,” said Dan Rossero, Vice President of FirstEnergy’s West Virginia Generation.
In essence, Mon Power and Potomac Edison employed 54 local union workers for construction at the site. We must also mention a piece of data that says solar panels, racking system steel and supporting electrical equipment, used across the facility, were all were made in US.
This West Virginia solar program markedly delivers a rather interesting follow-up to the 2020 bill passed by West Virginia Legislature, a bill which authorizes electric companies to own and operate up to 200 megawatts of solar generation facilities, helping them meet the state’s electricity needs.
In practice, the stated program is likely to involve the development of solar projects on brownfield or impacted industrial properties, while simultaneously encouraging economic development in West Virginia. This happens to be the case because a number of companies need, a portion of the electricity they purchase, to be generated by renewable sources.
Moving forward, Mon Power and Potomac Edison plan to develop five distinctive solar projects that, on their part, will pack together 50 megawatts of solar generation.
This comes after companies completed their first solar project at Fort Martin Power Station (18.9 megawatts) in early 2024, and Rivesville solar site (5.5 megawatts) last fall. In total, they now have 30 megawatts of solar capacity.
Among other things, it must be acknowledged that, when packaged together, these five projects will create more than 87,000 solar renewable energy credits (SRECs) available for purchase by customers who support renewable energy in West Virginia.
For better understanding, SRECs are certificates that showcase environmental attributes of solar power, and therefore, prove solar energy was generated on the purchasers’ behalf. For every megawatt hour of solar renewable electricity generated, one SREC is produced.
Anyway, Mon Power and Potomac Edison’s excellence in what they are doing can also be understood once you consider they have, thus far, enrolled residential customers, as well as large commercial and institutional customers, including the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Morgantown, and the town of Harpers Ferry.
Making the given development even more significant, though, would be their parent company i.e. FirstEnergy.
Founded in 1997, FirstEnergy’s rise up the ranks stems from its network of electric distribution companies, a network which also translates to one of the nation’s largest investor-owned electric systems, serving more than six million customers across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York.
The company’s transmission subsidiaries operate, at the moment, an estimated 24,000 miles of transmission lines that connect the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions.
