DCE Solar's Ballasted Racking Powers the Nation's First Solar Project on a Formerly Used Defense Site

Some sites tell you no before you even ask the question. A former Army landfill and burn pit, capped, monitored, and legally off limits to anything resembling a shovel, is about as clear a "no" as land can give a solar developer. Nautilus Solar Energy got a "yes" anyway, and DCE Solar's fixed tilt racking system, anchored on prefabricated concrete ballasts, is the reason the "yes" could hold weight.

The 2.8 MW community solar project in Albany County is the first solar farm built on a Formerly Used Defense Site (FUDS) in the United States. The parcel spent decades as the landfill and burn pit for the Schenectady Army Depot-Voorheesville Area, receiving and storing military supplies through World War II and the Korean War. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers still monitors it. Nothing goes into that ground. Not conduit, not piles, not earth screws. That constraint is exactly where DCE Solar's engineering earned its keep.

The Engineering Problem

Steve Dzubak, Senior Project Manager at Nautilus Solar Energy, summed up the challenge plainly: "The major difference between this and a typical solar site is that nothing can go into the ground. You can't bury any conduit, you can't trench, and you can't drive piles for trackers, put in earth screws or anything like that."

Every conventional anchoring method was off the table. The engineered landfill cap had to stay intact, both to satisfy the Army Corps of Engineers and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Getting the structural calculations approved was, by Nautilus's own account, one of the hardest parts of permitting the project.

The DCE Solar Solution

DCE Solar, based in North Carolina, supplied the prefabricated concrete ballasts with posts and the complete fixed tilt racking system for all three sections of the array. The approach let Nautilus build a fully functional solar farm that never breaks the surface of the cap:

Non-penetrating ballasted foundation. Precast concrete blocks anchor the racking through weight alone, with no ground disturbance and no risk to the monitoring wells the Army Corps relies on.

Fixed tilt over tracking. A tracking system would have squeezed more yield out of the site, but tracking hardware needs to be driven into the ground. Because everything had to stay above grade, fixed tilt was the only structurally sound option, and DCE Solar's system delivered it without compromise.

Built for tracked equipment, not wheeled. Ground pressure limits on the cap meant the EPC contractor, AUI Partners LLC, had to use tracked machinery throughout construction. DCE Solar's ballast and racking components were installed accordingly, starting with a compacted gravel pad for each ballast before the racking and panels went on top.

Above ground, everything. Electrical wiring ran through above-ground cable trays rather than trenched conduit, keeping the entire installation consistent with a zero penetration mandate.

A Site That Now Pulls Its Weight

The finished array powers more than 260 households through community solar, offsets the annual emissions of roughly 600 vehicles, and generates lease revenue on land that had essentially none. Construction ran from October 2023 to November 2024, with power now flowing to the National Grid distribution network on a net metered basis.

For DCE Solar, Guilderland is proof of concept for a category of land that the industry is only beginning to take seriously. The U.S. military reported 5,400 FUDS locations nationwide as of September 2021, with 3,800 already remediated. Nautilus has said it would pursue more FUDS projects if the opportunity arises, and the racking and ballast engineering that made Guilderland possible travels well to the next one.

Landfills, brownfields, and other formerly untouchable sites are not going away. Neither is the demand for foundations that can hold a solar array without ever touching the ground beneath it. That is the problem DCE Solar builds for.

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Read the original article from enerG magazine here:(https://www.altenerg.com/back_issues/story.php?sid=3489) *enerG Magazine*, Q1 2025.