By Bonnie Culverhouse
A solar farm on city-owned property could help residents save even more money on their electric bills by allowing Minden to produce a portion of its own power.
John Coleman of Little Rock, Ark.-based Entegrity made a presentation to Minden City Council members during a recent workshop of a potential plan that could be located at an old wastewater lagoon area near Minden Animal Control and Ewell Park.
“It’s a new world for Minden,” Mayor Nick Cox said. “We are getting our power through LEPA, but that doesn’t limit the amount of generation we could do on our side of the meter. With our old contract, we were limited.”
Power demand over the environment is also changing with AI data centers pulling larger loads of power.
According to Coleman, Entegrity works with “a lot of municipalities around the midwest and southeast. They are all in very similar situations where most of the time they are buying power through contracts like LEPA that are making up 100 percent of the consumption.
“More recently,” he continued, “a lot of local power companies have been trying to figure out how to take at least a percentage of that and have control over that percentage.”
Solar and battery storage are reportedly two of the top investments being made by LEPA.
“Y’all have a system peak of about 37 megawatts, which is pretty sizable,” Coleman said. “The solar project we are looking at would range anywhere from two to four megawatts.
“We are not looking at trying to produce solar to offset a huge percentage of your total load,” he continued. “It’s about responsibly trying to carve out a percentage of that and be able to lock that price in and reduce the dependence on the LEPA contract overall.”
Currently, Minden is paying around seven cents per kilowatt hour with a demand charge of about seven dollars per kilowatt.
“Solar projects are generally worth about 3.5 cents to five cents per kilowatt hour,” Coleman said. “That gives you an idea of the savings level that we are talking about. It’s just a cheaper form of energy, as long as it’s applied correctly.”
The property owned by Minden and being considered is around 32 acres … more than enough to build a solar farm.
“It’s a big tract of land with a good tree line,” Cox said.
Cost to build it is around $6 million, however, if the city is interested in moving quickly, a 50 percent federal tax incentive is available. There will also be a cost to maintain the project.