Rising sun

In the middle of a muddy 41-acre former brownfield in West Pullman on the city’s Far South Side, John Murphy, sporting a hard hat and a neon-green safety vest, squints into the morning sun. As far as he can see: solar panels.

Murphy, a senior project manager at Chicago-based energy company Exelon, is overseeing the construction of the nation’s largest urban solar-power plant. It’s scheduled to be operational by late next month. Consisting of 32,328 panels, the $63 million ten-megawatt facility, situated on land leased from the city for 25 years, is expected to generate electricity for 1,200 to 1,500 homes annually.

Murphy acknowledges that’s not a significant amount of power. (Exelon’s Braidwood Nuclear Generating Station can produce 2,330 megawatts.) But for the largest nuclear operator in the U.S., Exelon’s move shows a shift toward renewable options. (The company recently opted out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the group’s vocal opposition to climate-change legislation.) “It’s all about baby steps at this point,” says Murphy, a self-identified old-school coal- and nuclear-power guy who, after 25 years with Exelon, has become a believer in the future of solar power. Even so, Murphy knows he and his company are treading in foreign territory.

The biggest unknown, he says, is whether something as variable as the sun’s rays can prove to be a profitable source of energy. The Chicago plant is Exelon’s litmus test. “If I was going to build a gas plant or a nuclear plant or a coal plant, I could tell you exactly how much electricity I’d generate every day of the week. But with solar, I can’t predict with any certainty,” Murphy says. After all, Chicago’s winters aren’t exactly sunny. To anticipate the dreary periods, Murphy and his crews looked back at historical weather tables. “We did some calculations, and it’s close,” he says. “It’s on the hairy edge of whether we’ll be profitable.”

To help keep the project in the black (and its shareholders happy), Exelon is seeking a loan from the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program, an entity created with economic-stimulus money. The company wants the advance to offset up to 80 percent of the project cost. Exelon doesn’t yet have a signed agreement guaranteeing the money, but CEO John Rowe recently told reporters, after testifying before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in support of climate legislation, “We have been given oral assurances.”

“That’s the thing about solar: You put all this money up front,” Murphy says. “With coal, nuclear, oil and natural gas, you build a plant and then you have high overhead expenses because you have to buy fuel. With solar, you take a big initial hit and then, of course, you don’t have to pay for the sun.”

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