Oswego ECO Commission Casts Shadow on Solar Farm Idea

Oswego or perhaps Yorkville one day may be home to the largest solar farm in the United States, if not the world.

But the company proposing the plan, Dynamic Solar LLC, has a lot of work to do first.

The original proposal put before the and the United City of Yorkville in early November called for a 700-megawatt solar facility to be built somewhere in Kendall County. The largest photovoltaic facility in the Unite States, in Nevada, is only 48 megawatts, although there are several bigger facilities in the planning stages.

After reviewing the proposal at the request of Village President Brian LeClercq, the Environmentally Conscious Oswego Commission passed a resolution this week asking the company to address three main areas of concern, Commission Chairman George Stenitzer said.

1. The business plan has to be solid.

Stenitzer said the commission questioned some figures in the original proposal, including the number of jobs that would be created. The proposal claimed 50,000 jobs would be created, but when questioned, the figure was lowered to 14,000, according to Stenitzer. He also said the figures the company proposed on the price tag for local land seemed a bit off.

"Land acquisition costs were lower than market cost around Oswego," Stenitzer added.

2. Risks and liability need to be addressed.

A couple of commissioners were concerned whether the town should be in the electricity business in the first place, Stenitzer said; however, the bigger issue was the size and responsibility, particularly fiscal, of the building and running of the plant.

"The utility becomes the dog, and the village becomes the tail," he said.

3. The developer needs to have experience with plants of this size.

"While we like idea, specific proposal does not meet those conditions," Stenitzer said.

There are fours partners in the newly founded Dynamic Solar LLC, according to one of the partners, Thomas Blalock, who also owns T&L International Manufacturers and Distributors and Renewable Energy Services LLC of DeKalb. Dynamic Solar, according to Blalock, will be the project manager, working between the cities and other entities to create the solar farm.

"Dynamic Solar will just be a facilitator between the cities and the entities it takes to build this thing," he said.

Blalock's partner Everton Walters, president and chief executive officer of WCP Solar Services LLC of Naperville, said they were partnering with a large solar manufacturing facility based in Rockford.

The plan, at this point, calls for about 6 square miles of land, or 25,000 acres, Blalock said. Where that land might be would not be revealed until the village bought it, he said.

The group would seek federal and state grants and other funding and then build Phase 1, a 5 megawatt facility, Stenitzer said. The revenue generated from that would go to fund the next phase until, in 15 to 20 years, the full 700 megawatt utility would be in place.

When informed of the ECO Commission resolution, made at the Dec. 12 meeting, which he did not attend, Walters said, "I definitely cannot give snap answers to these points. … We will address the concerns and make movement from there."

"A prefeasibility study is being performed," Blalock said. "Before the two municipalities can go forth, they have to see if this is viable."

Blalock added that he and his partners will be meeting with village officials in January to further discuss the proposal.

"I think this may have started something," said LeClercq, a proponent of some kind of renewable energy is Oswego. "When all is said and done, maybe this takes off, maybe this does not."