Hickory Ridge Landfill


The Hickory Ridge Landfill is a municipal solid waste landfill located in Conley, Georgia, United States and privately owned by Republic Services. The site was opened in 1993 and closed in 2006; it contains nearly 9,000,000 cubic yards of waste.
The Hickory Ridge Landfill was capped in October 2011 with a dual-purpose landfill closure system referred to as an Exposed Geomembrane Solar Cover. Developed by Carlisle Energy Services, the closure system provides renewable electricity via solar panels,
The project is the second installation of an EGSC and is the world's largest installed system of its kind. At the time of commissioning it was the largest solar photovoltaic system in the state of Georgia. It also represents a $5,000,000 investment by Republic Services supported by a $2,000,000 grant from the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority.

System Details

The landfill closure system features a green, 60-mil scrim reinforced TPO geomembrane cover 48 acres in total. A one-megawatt photovoltaic solar panel array is located on the southwest and southeast slopes of the landfill in an area approximately ten acres.
The one-megawatt solar array features over 7,000 flexible solar laminates, composed of 36 laminates bonded one at a time to 12' wide by 120' long panels. Each photovoltaic roll was rated at 5,184 Wp DC.
The closure system meets infiltration and erosion criteria as prescribed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, while also capturing the methane gas that is generated by the landfill, turning it into energy in a separate operation. The Georgia Environmental Protection Division approved the landfill closure system as a "Final" closure system.
The photovoltaic system is actually composed of four separate arrays located on the 3H:1V slopes on the southeast and southwest areas of the landfill. Each photovoltaic array is rated for approximately 250kWp DC each; each with a 260kWp DC inverter.
The photovoltaic array is expected to generate 1,300,000 kWh in its first year of production.

Awards

HDR Inc. received the following awards for their engineering work on this project:
American Environmental Group received the for their work as the geomembrane installer for the project

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