Blair County Planning Commission members gave a positive review Thursday to plans to construct a solar farm along Buttermilk Hollow Road and Ski Gap Road in Greenfield Township.

The BL Hileman Hollow Solar Development, doing business as Ampliform LLC Photovoltaic Solar Farm, calls for three areas of solar arrays on a total of 152 acres.

The facility will have a total of 39,101 solar modules generating 20 MW of electricity. Module racks will be installed on steel h-pile beams driven into the ground. Typical arrays will reach 10 feet in height when panels are in most vertical position.

Internal roadways, 16-foot wide gravel, will be constructed to access each array area.

The development will occur on five separate parcels of land and construction will take 6 to 12 months and will occur in phases. This would provide power to approximately 5,000 homes and the panels have a projected lifespan of 25 to 30 years, said Jeff Raykes of Stuart Consulting Group, who reviewed the plans.

“These folks know what they are doing,” Raykes said.

Both roads providing access to the development are state roads. A highway occupancy permit should be obtained for each access point. As such, PennDOT will be responsible to ensure access points are adequate for projected traffic.

There are two potential concerns the township should work with PennDOT to address: The southern and central arrays access roadways will intersect opposite sides of Buttermilk Hollow Road at an offset instead of aligned and the northern array access roadway will intersect Ski Gap Road next to and with minimal separation distance form an intersection with Hillsboro Lane.

The Pennsylvania Natural Diversity Inventory consultation turned up species of concern which are potentially present in the project area. One is the Indiana bat in which avoidance measures — tree cutting and other woodland disturbances only from October to March — were specified. Others are eagles and other bird species for which conservation measures were specified.

The Alleghenies Ahead plan does not directly address solar power or development projects, but the solar project will contribute to the area economy by its construction and its addition of a source of energy, Raykes said.