Solar Citizen Spotlight

David Hall

Crowding the bank of the lower Merrimac River in the northeast corner of Massachusetts, the small coastal city of Newburyport has seen its share of innovation since its incorporation in 1764. It hosted the first ever U.S. Coast Guard station, state mint and treasury, built the first clipper ship and carried out the first ‘tea party’ rebellion against the British tea tax. Today its identity is as an historic seaport with a vibrant tourism industry and a wealth of historic buildings. It organizes waterfront concerts in summer, an annual literary festival and a week-long ‘Yankee Homecoming’ festival.

The city also plays host to a downtown shopping mall, the Tannery, named after the business that was once housed in the restored mill complex on Water Street. And the Tannery can claim its own share in the Newburyport story of innovation, thanks to David Hall of Hall and Moscow, the management company. David has been instrumental in making the mall the largest user of solar PV power in the city, with 392 panels on the roof of two of the buildings and a highly visible pole-mounted 1.2kW tracking array in the main parking lot. The system is designed for a total capacity of 60kW, the most power that Hall and Moscow would be able to offset from the site under Massachusetts’ net metering laws. And in 2007, it produced a monthly average output of over 6 MWh.

Going green came naturally to David, for whom conservation is something of a family tradition. His father, Gordon, has a long resume in woodland conservation, while David has worked with the Fish and Game Department on Alaska’s North Slope and, with his partner Michael Moscow, sits on the Board of the Conservation Law Foundation.

“For me,” says David, “the events of 9/11 were a catalyst. I thought of them in terms of a failure of energy policy and looked for ways of mitigating that failure, to the extent that I could, in my work. I found that the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative had grant money available for solar installations amounting to $2.85/watt, and used that to offset over 30% of the upfront cost. We finished the installation by November 2004.”

In fact, the installation process was trickier than David makes it sound. Bear in mind that some of the buildings in question date back to the nineteenth century, and you may understand the problems of trying to integrate solar arrays with old, non-uniform roofs. The supporting rack systems work best, and can be installed fastest, on an uninterrupted and uniform surface. As the photographs show, that is far from an accurate description of the obstacle-strewn roofs of the Tannery. Even so, the solar contractor, Solar Market of Arundel, Maine, squeezed as many panels into the available space as the weight-bearing performance of the roofs and the impedimenta on them would allow.

“The installation process was a constant compromise between getting the optimum tilt angle, keeping the overall weight down, and minimizing the engineering costs,” says David.

David’s initiative is finding favor with his forty or more retail tenants and their customers. The arrays feed the lighting, heating and cooling systems for the common areas both inside and outside the mall buildings. All the occupants, including the Hall and Moscow management office, pay for the power generated at or slightly below market rate, payments going toward the interest costs on the loan David took to install the system. So tenants pay a little less for their power, and customers get a first-hand experience of renewable energy at work.

The tracking array under construction…

The decision to include a tracking array in the system, and to install it in such a conspicuous location, was a deliberate one on David’s part. It has become a keynote of the site, symbolizing an advanced application of an ancient form of energy. And it may also have been responsible for a wave of green thinking in the city at large: the Newburyport Chamber of Commerce is now investigating ways of targeting carbon neutrality on a wide basis.

…and in operation

As for David, he is thinking even greener, targeting the fifth building in the mall complex for a possible thermal solar concentrator installation, and the disused tannery smokestack for a small wind turbine!