Hall's Warehouse Corporation, a family-owned refrigerated and frozen food storage and distribution company, announced an agreement to build a 2-megawatt solar electric power system to supply electricity to their facility in South Plainfield, N.J. When completed, this project will be the largest rooftop solar electric system serving a private company in the United States.

The solar array will consist of approximately 13,500 solar modules, will produce nearly 3 million kilowatt-hours of clean energy and will eliminate more than 2 million pounds of CO2 emissions annually.

Hall’s will make no upfront investment in the solar project. Instead, Hall’s will purchase all of the electricity produced by the system under a long-term agreement at rates below what they would pay the local utility for electricity.

“We [will] realize savings from day one. The payback is immediate, both for the business and for our environment,” said Bill Jayne, Hall’s co-owner.

The solar power system will be installed as part of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities’ SREC-Only Pilot Program, a new market-based incentive program introduced by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to replace the upfront cash rebates offered in recent years as a means of meeting the state’s legislatively mandated solar power development goals. The program enables the financing for the project by creating a market for trading Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs) in the state and providing a level of assurance on the value of SRECs over an eight-year time frame.   EC