OLIVE TOWNSHIP, Mich. — If you take Lake Michigan Drive all the way to the lakeshore, you're traveling the same path Grand Rapids' water supply takes to town.
It's about 30 miles.
The journey to town for the water requires non-stop work of massive pumps, moving as many as 55 million gallons of water daily.
That requires quite the electric bill cost. Some months, the electricity bill alone is $140,000.
Wayne Jernberg would know. He's the water systems manager for the city of Grand Rapids, a job he's been doing for decades.
“The pumps have no idea where their energy source is coming from. They just know they’ve got a job to do,” Jernberg said.
This is why the city of Grand Rapids says the solar array, now in a formerly empty field, makes so much sense. The panels melt themselves in the winter. Underneath them, there are native species planted to help pollinators.
The city put in a berm, or natural barrier, around the panels, something Ottawa County residents wanted: to block the sight line of the solar array.
“It is supplying all of its electricity directly to our Lake Michigan Filtration Plant, which provides water to all of our customers,” Alison Sutter, sustainability and performance management officer for the city of Grand Rapids, said.
The solar array exists as what is known as "behind the meter." In other words, it's off of the Consumers Energy electric grid. The power it generates entirely goes to the filtration plant.
READ MORE: Grand Rapids officials activate solar array at Lake Michigan Filtration Plant
Jernberg says seeing the bill dropping has been gratifying, in more ways than one. The environmental impact of placing the panels in is the equivalent to taking 1,000 cars off the road in terms of carbon emissions.
“To see we’ve made a dent in it, in terms of what our costs are, at a facility like this... We serve six retail communities and six wholesale communities. We serve a population of 325,000 people in the West Michigan area,” Jernberg said.
The solar grid on a sunny day can produce as much as 15% of the total energy the plant uses. It still works in the winter, but during the summer is when water usage is at its highest and the solar array is at its best.
It's a good chunk of change off the electricity bill. Water filtration, though not glamorous, is a service people in Grand Rapids depend on. It is always running, always using energy, when most people wouldn't notice it otherwise.
“Over 24 years, it’s expected to save a net of $1.55 million,” Sutter said.
The city also doesn't have to maintain the array. It is owned and operated by CMS Energy. CMS maintains the panels, to Jernberg's delight. He says they're experts on water filtration, not solar energy. The city leases the land to CMS for roughly $120,000 yearly. In turn, they get around $200,000 of energy out of the deal, with a rough estimate of cost savings being $80,000.
The city is eyeing more land for more solar energy in order to meet its goal of 100% renewable municipal energy. The next location would be the Butterworth Landfill. The landfill's cap has created some learning curves, but the city says that space can only be three things: a grassy field, a parking lot or a solar array.
They believe, based on the success of the array out near Lake Michigan, that the array is the best way to go. By using green energy it would keep our Lake Michigan water a beautiful blue, for years to come.
READ MORE: Solar power poised to surpass wind as Michigan's #1 renewable energy source
