Every so often I can see the virtue signaling of the environmentalists that just makes me laugh. Former Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) may have been totally inept at actually running the city, but he sure was great at getting a ‘sugary beverage tax’ passed, to fight obesity, don’t you know, that’s none of the city’s business. And even though he was fully in support of ‘my body, my choice’ when it came to women killing their yet-to-be-born children, he was adamant and aggressive in fighting the unions to get city employees who wanted to exercise bodily autonomy when it came to taking an experimental vaccine.

Then, about six years ago, in his effort to fight global warming climate change, he pushed a project to get solar power for electricity for city-owned buildings.

Philadelphia begins powering City Hall and the airport by a solar array 100 miles away

The project, begun nearly six years ago under former Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, began producing test power a few weeks ago from an array in Adams County.

by Frank Kummer | Friday, April 26, 2024 | 10:01 AM EDT

Philadelphia has begun pulling large amounts of power for city-owned buildings from a solar array on farmland near Gettysburg.

The project, begun nearly six years ago under former Mayor Jim Kenney, started producing electricity specifically for the city a few weeks ago in Adams County. It is expected to provide up to 25% of power consumed by municipal buildings, including City Hall, Philadelphia International Airport, and the water department.

Philly is under contract to purchase 70-megawatts of power annually from the array.

“We’re feeling great about this project,” said Dominic McGraw, Philadelphia’s deputy director of energy services. “It’s been a long time coming. We’re very excited to move forward.”

If you didn’t know any better, you might thing that there’s a high-power line directly from Energix Renewables (ENGR-TA) to City Hall, but that’s not how this works.

Under the arrangement, city-owned buildings will get power from the panels, although not directly. Rather, the array — the collection of solar panels — feeds to a substation that sends power to the regional grid operated by PJM, which coordinates electricity regionally across multiple states including Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The power is then delivered to Peco territory for use by Philadelphia.

The city owns about 600 buildings. It has a contract to buy solar-generated electricity for those buildings at $44.50 per megawatt hour for 20 years from Energix Renewables, the project’s developer. The rate was established when the project was proposed in 2018. The energy produced by the solar array is not meant to power any homes or businesses in the city.

Simply put, the sparktricity generated by Energix is simply dumped into the grid, and, as it happens everywhere else, it becomes part of the regional electric grid delivering power to anyplace connected to the grid. It’s not as though Energix, or anyone else, can tell individual electrons where to go! Pennsylvania leads the nation with sixteen coal-burning power plants, and I’d like to think that more of the power used by the city comes from Brunner Island, or Spring Grove, both in York County. That “The energy produced by the solar array is not meant to power any homes or businesses in the city” is meaningless in any practical or engineering sense.

But, even more amusingly, as the anti-Semitic, keffiyeh–wearing Usual Suspects have their thus-far peaceful campus protests at the University of Pennsylvania in support of Hamas, it turns out that the power the city is claiming comes from solar at Energix is coming from “the US subsidiary of an Israeli publicly traded company“. 🙂