It's a safe bet that no one in this quaint little railroad town, with its cotton-processing operations and Main Street cannery, ever expected to see a farm quite like the one sprouting a few miles down the road. Located along Interstate 40 on 35 acres of newly cleared land that bakes under the July sun, the West Tennessee Solar Farm is growing into an otherworldly latticework of pilings and metal racks pointed southward. Very soon the contracting firm Signal Energy should begin mounting 21,000 solar panels onto the racks. And when work is finished early 2012, it will be the largest utility-scale solar installation in the state and one of the biggest in the Southeast, producing enough clean, renewable power for more than 1,000 homes. The $31 million project, funded by a Department of Energy grant the state received under the federal stimulus bill, will generate electricity to be sold to the Tennessee Valley Authority and distributed on its grid. A second phase, now on hold, will include construction of a welcome center that will highlight for motorists the potential of solar power. "The point is not only to demonstrate commercial-scale production (of solar power) but to have this public-education component to it," said Paula Flowers, project director for the University of Tennessee Research Foundation, which is managing the solar farm. This 5-megawatt project, on a site in Haywood County less than 40 miles northeast of Memphis, is the latest and most prominent of several solar initiatives across Tennessee and the Mid-South.
