The largest solar farm on the south fork of Long Island is now operation and connected to East Hampton Town’s electrical grid. Accabonac Solar in Springs is the first megawatt scale solar farm in the area, built on a decommissioned town-owned brush dump by Colorado based company AES Distributed Energy.

 

The array consists of 3,456 individual 320-watt solar panels, covering two acres, produce 1.1 megawatts of clean, renewable energy that flows into East Hampton’s electrical grid, enough to power 136 homes annually, according to a statement released by the town.

 

The array will avoid production of greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking 240 passenger vehicles off the road for a year, and the amount of CO2 emissions equivalent to what would be produced from burning 1,236,844 pounds of coal.

 

“The former brush dump, an already cleared and disturbed open space, was a unique opportunity site to produce a significant amount of solar energy,” said East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc in a statement.

 

In 2014, the Town of East Hampton became the first municipality on the East Coast to adopt the goal of meeting 100 percent of community-wide electricity needs with renewable energy sources by 2020, and to meet the equivalent of 100 percent of annual community-wide energy consumption in all sectors (electricity, heating, and transportation) with renewable energy sources by 2030.

 

The town says that a diverse group of technologies, policies, and approaches is in-use to achieve those goals.