Atlantic Cape Community College (ACCC) in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Pepco Energy Services, Inc. for solar photovoltaic (PV) installations at two of its campuses as a result of a meeting of the college’s Board of Trustees on Jan. 26.

The installations, at the Mays Landing and Cape May County facilities, will represent a 2.3-megawatt distributed solar array which Pepco will design, own and operate.

It will reportedly be one of the largest land-based solar systems in the state, and a serious rival to the 3.5-megawatt solar installation at William Paterson University in Wayne, announced in January and billed as the largest solar array at a college or university campus in the U.S. The William Paterson solar array is scheduled for completion in 2011.

Arlington, Virginia-based Pepco Energy Services is a subsidiary of Pepco Holdings, Inc. (PHI), one of the largest electric utilities in the Mid-Atlantic region, serving almost 2 million customers in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland and New Jersey. The Energy Services division, spun off in 1995, provides energy management services, energy performance contracting, renewable energy, and combined heat and power generation solutions to industrial, commercial and governmental entities, though it no longer operates in the retail electricity or natural gas marketplace.

Pepco, which generates electricity largely from coal sources to the west of the state, relying on coal for 54 percent of its electricity in 2008, operates in New Jersey under a recently revised renewable portfolio standard (S.B. 3520) which requires utilities operating within the state to get 22.5 percent of their generation mix from renewables by 2020-2021, and 5,316 gigawatt-hours of that from solar by 2025-2026.

Atlantic City Electric, the regional utility which serves the college, buys its electricity from PHI, and thus is under the same renewable energy constraints.

The ACCC installations will be accomplished by putting solar PV panels on top of the carports in six parking lots, with 80 percent of the arrays going to Mays Landing. Pepco will reportedly begin the project in April and finish in September. The systems will generate almost 50 percent of the college’s total yearly energy needs, with a rate per kilowatt hour that Pepco officials describe as “independent” of prevailing market rates for electricity – this latter thanks to Solar Renewable Energy Certificates, or SRECs, acquired as a result of the solar energy installation.

The college will use a $245,000 CORE grant provided in 2007 to cover peripheral costs like consulting fees, and the electricity savings (estimated at $6.8 million over the 20-year term of the PPA) will be used to fund other environmental initiatives.

In addition to the reduced rate, Pepco will also provide the college with a free energy audit of its various campuses and their facilities, and a curriculum module which will benefit Atlantic Cape students who want to study solar energy.

Carbon emissions reduction as a result of the installation are estimated at 2,083 metric tons per year, on an estimated production of 2,900,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or enough to serve about 220 average American homes. This carbon mitigation is equivalent to removing 398 cars from New Jersey roads, or planting 53,402 trees.

For Pepco, which in 2008 designed and built the 2.36-megawatt solar power array at the Atlantic City Convention Center – at that time the largest single roof-mounted solar array in the nation – the installation is additional proof that coal-bound American utilities can successfully expand into renewable solar generation.