The $22 million south-side Farmers Park mixed-use development completed the installation of 120 solar panels on the office building housing Spencer Fane LLP and other tenants.
Owner Matt O’Reilly and silent partners of Green Circle Projects LLC worked with Missouri Sun Solar LLC on the project designed to produce roughly 42,000 kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity annually. The carbon footprint reduction is equivalent to planting 771 trees, replacing seven gas-fueled cars with hybrids, taking 168 cars off the roads or stopping 12 rail cars of coal. The price of the installation was undisclosed in a news release.
“We’ve reached a critical tipping point in the solar industry where the reduction in (photovoltaic) pricing combined with the increases in utility costs create a favorable payback period for solar,” O’Reilly said in the release. “It now competes with other efficiency measures such as HVAC efficiency upgrades and building envelope enhancement.
“We previously have designed our buildings to be ‘solar ready’ with the proper angles and conduits in place, but now we’ll be looking at solar as a standard installation on most new construction.”
Green Circle Projects also plans to install solar panels on the fifth and final building under development at Farmers Park. Slated to wrap in spring 2017, Guaranty Federal Bancshares Inc. (Nasdaq: GFED)
recently announced it would open a branch and move its executive offices to 26,000 square feet of the planned 55,000-square-foot building, 2144 E. Republic Road.
Farmers Park also is seeking to add two new electric car charging stations to complement its other energy efficiency initiatives, according to the release.
