There’s not much you can do with an old mound of trash, but the Omaha Public Power District and Douglas County have a plan. It’s to take a capped landfill that closed in 1989 and turn it into a solar array. A solar facility of utility-scale on a landfill is the first of its kind in Nebraska. The project is a partnership between OPPD and Douglas County.
“The fewer people that are on the landfill is probably the better,” said Kent Holm, director of Douglas County Environmental Services. “Maybe in the future, there will be some uses that potentially could be here. But for now, we see this as a potentially viable use and a good renewable energy source.”
The transformation is made possible by a $3.5 million grant from the Nebraska Environmental Trust. “We had been working to find ways to get this done and look for key enablement things to occur that would allow us to move this forward. And so the Nebraska Environmental Trust really did that for us,” said Brad Underwood, OPPD’s vice president of systems transformation. The 160-acre plot of land is expected to generate just a fraction of OPPD’s overall energy output, but they say it’s worth it.