City Council to Vote on Solar Plant Land Lease

By Kevin Robinson in News on Jul 29, 2009 2:20PM

This morning, the Chicago City Council will vote on whether to grant a 25-year land lease to Excelon Corp., ComEd's parent company. The $60 million project, a joint venture of Exelon and San Jose-based SunPower Corp is expected to create 200 jobs directly from the construction of the plant, and the nearly 33,000 solar panels are expected to save over 14,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. Excelon will own and operate the plant, and plans to market the Solar Renewable Energy Certificates it generates.

The land, the site of the former International Harvester plant, has been vacant for nearly thirty years. And if the plant is successful in its claims, it will bring both green-collar jobs and clean energy to the midwest, a potential boon to a region devastated by decades of manufacturing job losses. But Mick Dumke at the Reader has a different take on the lease. "It probably won’t surprise many people out there to hear that the early stages of the project have been advanced with limited transparency or legislative oversight. It's yet another example of how Daley administration officials don't like to talk about what they're up to until the deal's done—their way." Dumke explains: "But the enthusiasm waned a bit once aldermen started asking for details, because the administration wouldn’t provide many.

They did make it clear that aldermen weren’t being asked to weigh in on the whole project—Exelon just needed to be granted immediate access to the property so they could get work under way. At some point down the road they’d come back to the committee with specifics about the lease agreement.
The matter was urgent, aldermen were told, because Exelon wouldn’t go through with the project unless it received loans and credits under the federal stimulus plan. And the deadlines for qualifying were approaching fast." Dumke asked Excelon why they were going to lease the land, instead of buying it outright, but they told him to go to the city for answers. "There has been little if any interest in the site over the years and due to the contamination, it is a complicated and difficult site to market and sell,” [Molly Sullivan, spokesman for the city’s Department of Community Development]. “This lease meets the city's needs as it brings the site back to productive use.” Which leaves Dumke, and us wondering, if Excelon will pay nearly $3 million to lease the land, why not buy it outright?