On one of the fields where students learn about agriculture, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore will soon be planting a new kind of crop with a constantly renewable yield - 20 acres' worth of photovoltaic panels, the largest solar farm in the state.
The 2.1-megawatt system, to be built by Beltsville-based SunEdison, will generate electricity for the 4,100-student campus in Princess Anne when it's finished, which is expected by the end of the year.
"We hope it will be a model for other universities as well as the surrounding businesses in the area," said Suzanne Street, the university's spokeswoman.
The solar farm, about the size of 22 football fields, should help stabilize electricity costs for the historically black university, its officials say. And in the process, they say, getting electricity from the sun should displace more than 100 million pounds of climate-warming carbon dioxide over the next 20 years that a coal-burning power plant would otherwise emit to keep the lights on on campus.
The project, announced this week, indicates renewed interest in the fledgling solar power industry, which had seen new installations slowed since last fall by the slumping economy, industry officials say.
"It's a good sign that they're starting to come back," said Peter Lowenthal, a renewable energy consultant in Washington and regional director for the Solar Energy Industry Association.
Energy incentives in states like Maryland, in addition to increasingly generous federal ones, are turning the Mid-Atlantic region into a hot spot for new solar projects, said Monique Hanis, spokeswoman for the Solar Energy Industries Association.
"We expect it to vie with California for becoming one of the better regions for solar in the next five years," she said, noting that New Jersey has the second-largest amount of solar power generation installed.
Maryland has a long way to go to challenge other states for solar supremacy. Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas boasts the largest photovoltaic system in the nation for now, a 14-megawatt array spread across 140 arid Nevada acres. A batch of much larger ones are in the works.
But by itself, the university project will nearly double the state's solar generating capacity of about 3 megawatts, says Christina Twomey, spokeswoman for the Maryland Energy Administration. The next largest is a roughly 1 megawatt photovoltaic system installed by Constellation Energy last year on the roof of McCormick & Co.'s mill and distribution center in Hunt Valley.
