James M. O'Neill

Staff Writer, @JamesMONeill1

The Garret Mountain Plaza project received the required permit to cut down trees.

The permit includes a $30,000 fee that will be used to plant trees elsewhere in Woodland Park.

The project is expected to power two office buildings and should be completed by late summer.

New Jersey is ranked fourth in the nation in total solar capacity.

A company that manages an office park on Garret Mountain plans to build a large array of solar panel canopies over its parking lots that will generate enough energy to power two buildings on the site.

To make way for the canopies, the company recently cut down more than 100 trees in the grassy medians between rows of parking spaces on the property, near Garret Mountain Reservation in Woodland Park.

Putting a solar array on commercial property is part of a larger trend in New Jersey, one that is greatly encouraged by environmental groups wherever there is room to harness the sun's energy. But the environmental irony in this case is hard to miss.

“It was a trade-off between the trees and the solar installation, unfortunately,” said Michael Donohue, director of operations for the Mountain Development Corp., which operates three office buildings at Garret Mountain Plaza. “We had to give up something to get something.

“Unfortunately, the trees are in the way, and we did have to remove them,” he said. The shade they produced also would have reduced the amount of solar energy captured by the panels.

The office buildings on the site do not have enough rooftop space to make rooftop solar panels worthwhile, Donohue said. “We wanted to do something that was energy-conscious and financially practical,” he said.

The solar canopies will be installed and owned by New York-based Safari Energy, which will claim the solar credits the state provides to generate solar energy, reducing project costs. Safari will sell back the energy to Mountain Development Corp. Donohue declined to reveal the project’s cost.

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New Jersey has a history of fostering the solar industry and by mid-2016 was ranked fourth in the nation in total solar capacity, with 1,839 megawatts, enough to power 290,000 homes, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. The state ranks behind California, North Carolina and Arizona.

Environmental groups have pushed for the state to develop more solar installations in parking areas.

“New Jersey is the Saudi Arabia of parking lots, and we should be promoting solar canopy parking lots as a strategy to expand the state’s overall use of solar,” said Doug O’Malley, executive director of Environment New Jersey. “It’s a good sign that New Jersey commercial office parks are realizing that their parking lots are ideal for solar.”

On the other hand, cutting down trees for solar projects can cause controversy. In 2015, Jackson Township approved a plan for Six Flags Great Adventure to build a 22-megawatt solar facility on its property in Ocean County, but the project would require cutting down up to 16,000 trees on 66 forested acres amid several state wildlife management areas.

Environment New Jersey, the New Jersey Sierra Club and others filed suit to block the plan, and in the fall Six Flags agreed to hold off on clearing the land until the court case is decided.

“We shouldn’t be giving solar developers a pass from existing environmental regulations because we want to promote solar,” O’Malley said. “Developers should minimize any environmental disturbance and shouldn’t expand their footprint into any abutting forested lands.”

Woodland Park has an ordinance restricting tree removal, and the Garret Mountain Plaza project received the required permit to cut down the trees, said Kevin Galland, Woodland Park’s administrator.

The ordinance requires that a developer replace trees that it cuts down, but in this case, since there isn’t another spot on the property to plant new trees, the permit includes a $30,000 fee that will be used to plant trees elsewhere in the borough, Galland said.

The canopy solar project should be completed by late summer, Donohue said.

The project will generate up to 2.9 million kilowatt hours of energy a year to power the two office buildings, which have a combined floor space of 300,000 square feet, Donohue said. One of those buildings is a nine-story office tower visible from Route 80. Its tenants include PNC Bank, several law firms, an FBI field office and North Jersey Media Group, which publishes The Record and NorthJersey.com.

Solar's growing presence

Many commercial properties now have solar installations in North Jersey. For instance, Bed Bath & Beyond in Totowa installed a 1,651-kilowatt rooftop system, Ikea in Paramus has a 1,063-kilowatt system, and a Target in Clifton has a 616-kilowatt system.

A 1,350-panel solar ring circles the top of MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands, generating 25 times the power needed for the LED display lights that change color based on whether the NFL’s Giants (blue) or Jets (green) are playing.

Some former industrial sites and closed landfills are also being reused for solar farms. Last May PSE&G, the state’s largest utility, which has already built eight solar farms on old landfills and contaminated industrial sites, announced a $275 million plan to build 10 more solar farms on similar abandoned sites by 2021. The plan would add 100 megawatts of solar power, enough to serve about 16,000 homes.

In 2012, William Paterson University in Wayne completed a solar project, including some canopies over parking areas, to supply up to 20 percent of the university’s energy needs. And in 2013, Rutgers University completed an 8-megawatt, $40 million solar canopy system over two large parking lots by the Rutgers Athletic Center on its Livingston campus.

Safari, created in 2008, has developed more than 80 solar projects at malls and commercial sites in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and elsewhere. It has installed a 1,164-kilowatt rooftop solar project at the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, as well as a 1,033-kilowatt project on the roof of the Paramus Park mall and a 980-kilowatt project at the Bergen Town Center mall, also in Paramus.

Mountain Development manages commercial property in five states, though primarily in New Jersey. It operates office complexes, warehouse distribution facilities and two malls, one in Buffalo and another in Springfield, Mass. It developed two of the buildings in the Garret Mountain complex in the early 1980s and bought the nine-story tower there in 2006.