In 2018, Cuyahoga County began building a 4-MW solar array on a closed landfill, turning unused land into a local power source

Old landfills are usually written off as dead land. Nobody builds homes there. Nobody farms there. But one site in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, found a new purpose: making clean electricity. According to Conti Solar's official project announcement, construction began in May 2018 on a 4-megawatt solar array built directly on top of a closed and capped landfill, making it the largest landfill solar project in Ohio at the time and the first project of its kind in the state. For many readers who picture solar farms sitting on open fields, this is a different story. It is about turning a problem into a power source.

Why build solar panels on a garbage dump
It sounds strange at first. Why put expensive equipment on top of buried trash? The answer comes down to land. Closed landfills are usually flat, already cleared, and sitting unused once they stop taking waste. That makes them decent candidates for solar panels, which need open, sunny space and not much else. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's RE-Powering America's Land Initiative, many landfills work well for solar because they already sit near power lines and roads, have flat or gently sloped ground, and cost less to lease than open green space. The EPA has screened tens of thousands of these contaminated or closed sites nationwide for exactly this kind of reuse.

There is also a bigger reason this matters. The EPA and National Renewable Energy Laboratory best-practices report notes that the number of active landfills in the United States has been shrinking for decades as older sites close, and waste gets consolidated into fewer, larger facilities. That leaves thousands of acres of capped, empty land scattered across the country. Instead of letting that land sit idle, cities are learning to put it to work generating clean power close to where people actually live.

Inside the Cuyahoga County project
The Cuyahoga County site is 17 acres of former nonproductive land. The build was performed by national solar construction company Conti Solar. Enerlogics developed the project, and law firm McDonald Hopkins handled legal work. The completed array is owned and operated by IGS Solar, an Ohio-based solar provider and affiliate of IGS Energy, one of the nation’s larger independent retail energy providers. Upon completion, the project was projected to generate more than 5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to supply county-owned buildings and facilities. Construction was scheduled to be completed by summer 2018.

It was structured as a power purchase agreement. With this type of contract, the county didn’t have to spend money to purchase or install the panels itself. Instead, Cuyahoga County agreed to buy 100 percent of the project’s electricity through Cleveland Public Power. It’s a relatively cheap, low-risk way for local governments to add renewable energy without a big upfront bill. The solar company takes care of construction and ownership, while the county just pays for the power it uses.

What the county gained beyond electricity
The project was expected to generate additional tax revenue for the county and create roughly 100 local construction jobs during the build. Patrick Smith, vice president of IGS Solar, said the company needed a construction partner experienced with the specific risks of building on a "sensitive landfill site," since these projects require careful engineering to avoid disturbing the waste cap underneath. Matthew Skidmore, Conti Solar's chief executive, added that the company hoped to keep working with IGS Solar on similar projects across Ohio and other Midwestern states.

Such unglamorous, behind-the-scenes climate work doesn't often make the national news. There is often no high-profile ribbon-cutting moment. But that is precisely the sort of change that many US cities are trying to make: using existing infrastructure and forgotten land rather than building on untouched ground.

Part of a larger shift across the country
Ohio isn’t the only state considering this, and the trend has continued to grow well past 2018. According to a Waste Dive report citing the EPA's RE-Powering America's Land Initiative, about 330 landfills across the US were home to renewable energy projects like solar, wind, or geothermal, generating around 4.4 gigawatts of power among them. That's a big increase. Conti Solar itself said it had installed more than 133 megawatts of solar capacity on landfills nationwide, on top of over 500 megawatts of total solar projects since the company started in 2008.

For readers looking for concrete climate action, projects like this offer a tangible example. This isn’t some flashy statement about carbon neutrality by some distant date. It is one particular plot of land, once full of garbage, that has been quietly built to feed power into the grid. As more American cities run out of cheap places to build new solar farms, old landfills like this one in Ohio may end up doing more heavy lifting than anyone expected.