Pennsylvania Potato Grower, Producer to Use Solar to Cut Costs

Keith Masser, a seventh generation potato farmer, is no dummy. A graduate of Penn State with a Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Engineering, Masser always has his eye on the bottom line. This includes not only the best, most productive, and most wholesome ways to grow the humble but essential potato, but ways to get it to market, in all its myriad forms, at a cost that remains competitive with other potato producers.

For Masser, who is both president of Keystone Potato Products and president/CEO of Sterman Masser Inc., the parent company, the most recent effort to stay ahead of the curve involves installing solar photovoltaic panels to cut electricity costs for his Sacramento, Pennsylvania-based factory.

The project is doable thanks to a $1 million grant from the Commonwealth Financing Authority, or CFA (also known as the Pennsylvania Financing Authority), which was established as an independent agency to administer Pennsylvania’s allocations under the economic stimulus package, as funded through ARRA (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).

For this western Schuykill County potato grower/processor, the grant will go a long way toward installing what is anticipated to cost in excess of $5 million, but will in the long run save Masser and his company a bucketful of cash, given the fact that Allentown-based regional electric utility PPL Electric will be raising its rates 30 percent in 2010 due to the removal of rate caps on electric prices by the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission.

For the average residential user, this whopping increase means more than $378 in additional electricity costs per year. For a business the size of Masser’s, the increase brings tears and tearing out of the hair.

Fortunately, the Hubley Township zoning board (in whose jurisdiction the proposed solar field will ‘sprout’) has already approved the solar installation. For Masser – who in 1978, 1990 and 1999 made more than $8 million in improvements to the factory, including expanding the packing area, automating the packing line, and enlarging the cooler and storage space – this latest expenditure seems like the natural extension of a desire to keep ahead of the times and rising electricity rates.

The solar farm will go on 80 acres of farmland, on a sloping hill just off Fearnot Road, with the large, black solar panels making an interesting visual addition to what is otherwise a field of two-foot tall potato plants.

The solar field, which can accommodate about 159,000 solar panels, for a total output of about 11 megawatts (or enough to power about 1,400 homes), will likely end up about the same size as the Wyandot Solar Project in Ohio – which on completion this summer will be the largest in the state, and possibly in the Midwest.

In this case, though, it will power Masser’s potato processing plant, sorting and grading produce that makes its way to more U.S. dinner tables than any other farm crop except wheat.