A sign for the Harrietstown Business Park is seen here Tuesday. (Enterprise photo — Sydney Emerson)

SARANAC LAKE — The Harrietstown Town Council has entered into a non-binding agreement with a solar farm company which is investigating installing a solar array at the Harrietstown Business Park in Lake Clear.

The letter of intent the town signed on Thursday is not a lease. But it does allow Connecticut-based Lodestar Energy to begin its investigations at the site near the town-owned airport in Lake Clear, with the potential for a lease option opening in around 20 days.

The letter of intent includes a 100-day “exclusivity period” during which the town agrees to not lease the land to anyone else while Lodestar does soil testing and submit an application to National Grid for permission to tap into the grid.

Harrietstown Supervisor Jordanna Mallach said the opportunity is “exciting” for the town.

They’ve been trying to attract businesses to the business park for years, and have open space there. Lodestar is not asking to build a solar array yet but asking for a year-to-year lease option to start investigating the project.

The potential lease option, which can be read in the town meeting agenda at tinyurl.com/caj5b6xj, starting on page 55, proposes a $5,000, one-year lease option with two additional years of optional lease options if the project is appearing feasible.

Mallach said, array or no array, the town would still get paid in this investigation period. If the plan is feasible, the town business park might get a solar array. If not, she said, “no harm, no foul.”

After this investigation period, if the solar farm is a go, the town and Lodestar would renegotiate a 20-year lease. That lease is proposed at a price of $1,200 per acre with 1% annual increases. This would bring in between $25,000 and $30,000 in rent to the town annually.

Lodestar would pay for all associated taxes and insurance, and would start paying rent when the system is commercially operational.

These projects have a “high failure rate” in their early phases as circumstances disqualify them from taking off, according to Lodestar representatives, who added that people should not get their hopes up too much on this project. But Harrietstown’s property passed the “desktop review” which is sort of “unique” according to Lodestar representatives. This desktop review is to see if the solar farm could connect with the local electric grid, sussing out the hosting capacity of the infrastructure — feeder lines and proximity to a substation with the capacity to handle the extra load.

Lodestar Vice President of Project Development Terrance Nolan said they visited the site on Friday and found it relatively flat, secluded and amenable to solar.

This potential solar array at the Harrietstown business park would cover 25 acres — all of the 20-acre Phase 1 of the business park, and 5 acres of Phase 2. This would block access to portions of Phase 2, but Lodestar is proposing two arrays with a new road allowing others access to the rest of the lots.

The Adirondack Park Agency would need to approve any solar array, and the town would conduct a site review, too.

There was no public comment on the project at Thursday’s board meeting but councilmembers had some questions, mostly about decommissioning. They wondered if there is a plan if at some point Lodestar stops producing solar energy there. Nolan said they do have plans and that there are new methods allowing solar panels to be recycled now.

“We’d prefer them to be recycled rather than put in a landfill,” Nolan said.

He said the panels have 25-year warrantees and lose efficiency at a slow rate after that, so they are long-lasting.

In the past few years, Mallach has been contacting solar companies through the Adirondack North Country Association’s clean energy conferences and pitching the idea. She said for most companies, they’ve told her this area is too small for what they do and they felt it was not profitable. But she said Lodestar representatives have told her they believe it would be profitable for their business model. The company is expanding into New York with completed projects in western New York and one in the works in Ticonderoga.

Councilman Jeremy Evans reiterated that wants to leverage power generated there for local assets like the town-owned Adirondack Regional Airport, Birch Park Community and business park tenant Bionique Testing Laboratories, which recently received approval from the APA for a large expansion on their plot.

Bionique Business Manager Doug Crowell told the town board last month that the lab has a “really high electric bill,” and that he thinks a solar farm would be a good neighbor. But he added that to remain viable in future years, Bionique needs to be able to expand further and he was concerned about getting “landlocked.” The lab has 5 acres of property at the park right now and is going to fill that up with its expansion.

Last week, Bionique sent the town a letter indicating an interest in purchasing a 4.5-acre parcel in Phase 1 for $26,000, next to existing building site, between its facility and the proposed solar array.

The town of Harrietstown already has one solar array — the 10-acre Saranac Lake Community Solar farm run by RER Energy Group on state Route 86 north of Lake Colby, which opened three years ago.

At the time, it was the first community solar project of its size in the Adirondacks. The energy harvested there is put into the electric grid, but residential and commercial customers can subscribe monthly to the solar service and use the electricity credits generated by the farm as part of their National Grid power bill for a 10% savings with no subscription fee.

Adirondack Medical Center, less than a mile down the road from the current solar farm, receives a large portion of the energy produced there.