Shipping company Old Dominion Freight Line, Inc., recently got into solar by installing a 1.8 megawatt array at its warehouse in Thomasville, N.C. The array is capable of producing enough power to meet roughly 90 percent of the warehouse’s energy needs.

The company purchased the system and sells all of power generated by the array to Duke Energy through a power-purchase agreement, according to Jayna Long, sustainability manager for Old Dominion.

“North Carolina has a system size limit of 1 megawatt for net metering. The energy produced is sold to Duke Energy, with the revenue from the sale applied to offset energy costs of the building,” she said. “Due to variations in energy prices and uncertainty of the exact lifespan of the system, we do not have an exact figure of how much energy will be saved over the system’s lifetime. However, we are anticipating a reasonable payback and an annual energy production of over 2.2 million kilowatt hours per year.”

It’s the first time the company has installed solar on one of its sites, and it’s being used as a pilot for the company.

“Since we are using the project to evaluate the efficiency and payback of solar PV systems, we are monitoring the system’s production numbers,” Long said.

The company chose North Carolina as its first solar location because it’s the company’s home state and had good incentives for solar last year.

“Our corporate headquarters is only 10 minutes away from the Thomasville warehouse, allowing us to directly oversee the installation of the project. In addition, the site’s strategic location will make it easier for us to monitor the system for this first trial,” Long said.

The company could start evaluating other sites for solar as soon as this summer.

“We will pay close attention to the system’s production numbers in May and June, when the weather and daylight hours will be optimal for maximum solar production in North Carolina,” Long said. “We anticipate that the solar panel system will reach its peak energy output during these months.”

At that point the company will start evaluating other locations with incentive programs to determine if such systems could have environmental benefits and acceptable paybacks.