Now that solar is at shadow cliffs when are they getting some GREEN GRASS????

Perfect location for water slides! Oh yeh they tried that already, what a fiasco, great job on the solar panels heading in the right direction.

Haven't been there since the slides got booted. Be interesting to see if the parking fees taken at the gate went down and by how much.

$7,500,000 to generate 1.2 megawatts? What a joke.

Just for FYI Tesla uses 25 mega watts running load daily so 1.2 monthly is spitting in the ocean. We are being gamed.

Seems like we got a good deal with the panels, carports, recycled water line and more trees + some recharging stations- money well spent for a change! Can't compare shadowcliff to Tesla, that's a huge auto manufacturing plant running 24 hours a day wonder what it cost for that system??

And the best part is nobody uses Shadow Cliffs. Wonder how long before we are Illinois?

Great idea, poor negotiation. Should be charging developers for these good improvements. They can cover the installation and engineering work instead of having to contract out.

A payback in 14 to 17 years is just horrible! The panels will not even last that long. What a big waste of taxpayer money. Solar typically pay for itself in 6-8 years MAX. It is examples like this that proves that our elected officials cannot be trusted with out money.

I also want to know if the park district did a deal with PG&E on net-metering allowing the energy generated here to offset the meters of all park land. Typically when you have solar you cannot make a profit on the energy, even if you provide more than you consume.

@local

I think that the probable reason for the longer payback is that the project not only has to pay for the solar panels themselves, but also the cost of the new steel and concrete carport structure that the solar panels are mounted on. Solar panels mounted onto the roofs of houses have a shorter payback because they only have to pay for themselves. The structure that they are mounted on (the roof of your house) is already there and not considered to be part of the payback equation.

@Whattt :"Just for FYI Tesla uses 25 mega watts running load daily so 1.2 monthly is spitting in the ocean. We are being gamed."

Actually, the article isn't making much sense when it says "solar panels that can generate 1.2 megawatts of energy every year". Megawatts are not a measurement of energy. Megawatts are a measurement of power, or energy delivery per unit of time. If the author of the article wants to talk about how much energy the solar panels can deliver in a year, then she should have used a unit of energy such as megawatt-hours, not megawatts.

I'm so happy to see these wonderful solar panels at Shadowcliffs. Think how much fun our children will have playing on them versus how awful it would have been to spend that $7 Million on upgrading the waterslides. Think how many of our teenagers will be able to have summer jobs provided by the solar panels, not sure what those will be, but they will be great. I can't wait to take my kids to Shadowcliffs to wander under this solar wonder and reflect.