Virginia Landfill Reborn as Solar Farm Powering 750 Homes

Trash turned into treasure takes on a whole new meaning in Albemarle County, Virginia, where an old landfill is now powering 750 homes with sunshine.

More than 7,000 solar panels now sit where garbage once piled up at the former Ivy Landfill. Dominion Energy converted the 14-acre site into Virginia's first solar farm built on a closed landfill, proving that land with a messy past can still have a bright future.

The project solved a tricky problem. Nothing can be built into the ground at the site because waste sits buried below. Engineers got creative, anchoring the solar panels with rocks on top of the covered landfill instead of digging foundations.

"This is a really exciting trend for us because it's an eco-friendly use that is on a piece of land that has little to no options in terms of use," said Tim Eberly, spokesperson for Dominion Energy. The company plans to replicate this approach on other previously disturbed sites like old mining locations across the state.

The Ripple Effect

This single project represents just the beginning of a much bigger clean energy push across Virginia. Dominion Energy expects the state's energy demand to double over the next 20 years and plans to build dozens more solar facilities to meet growing needs.

The Ivy Landfill solar farm shows how communities can rethink spaces that seem unusable. Closed landfills dot the American landscape, often sitting idle for decades with few options for redevelopment. Converting even a fraction of these sites into solar farms could generate massive amounts of clean energy without touching pristine land.

Other states are already taking notice of Virginia's landfill-to-solar model. The approach lets communities generate local power while avoiding the debates that sometimes arise when solar farms compete with agriculture or natural habitats for space.

For the families in Albemarle County, the transformation means something simple and powerful: their electricity now comes from a place that once represented waste, turned into a source of renewable energy that will keep producing for decades to come.