Catching rays: Solar panel project planned for inside the old Danada horse track

One look around the former Dan and Ada Rice estate, and you can see how the couple reached the pinnacle of their sport.

Their most famous racehorse, Lucky Debonair, won the Kentucky Derby 60 years ago next May. The Rices re-created a bit of the Kentucky good life with a 19-room brick home, a long white barn and a half-mile training track on the grounds of their Wheaton-area estate called Danada.

Today, no horses are bursting out of the old starting gate. But DuPage County forest preserve officials plan to bring something that’s still electrifying to Danada — a solar power system.

As proposed, the ground-mounted solar array will be located inside the oval within the former horse track near the forest preserve headquarters west of Naperville Road in Wheaton. The system is expected to offset 110% of the building’s electricity consumption.

“We’re happy to be the leader in showing all the good benefits that come from solar and green energy investments,” Forest Preserve President Daniel Hebreard said.

The installation will rank as the second-largest array in the forest preserve district and the largest ground-mounted array.

“It really is not going to change the aesthetics of the racetrack itself,” Hebreard said.

The turf track is sometimes used by people walking with their dogs and the occasional birding group. A Great blue heron rookery — a colony of nests high in the branches of bare trees — can easily be seen from the track, as noted by the Daily Herald’s “Words on Birds” columnist Jeff Reiter. Danada also hosts races and other events that need a special-use permit.

There will “still be room for canopies or tents in there and for people to gather,” said Hebreard, adding that “it’s really not going to take up so much space as I think some people would think.”

Verde Solutions, a company that completed a solar development at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, provided the “most advantageous proposal” for the project, said Jessica Ortega, the district’s manager of strategic plans and initiatives.

The up-front cost will be roughly $1.159 million, and Verde will help the district obtain $964,892 in available state and federal incentives, which results in a net cost to the district of $194,987, Ortega said.

“This is a green win, a green win all around,” Hebreard said, “because after receiving various grants and incentives, the district will see full payback in less than five and a half years, exceptional value for our green-leading organization.”

There is a tunnel that the Rices built underneath Naperville Road to make it easier for horses to go between the farm and the track, said Claire Svehla, history and archives consultant for the nonprofit Friends of Danada. The horses would be bred and born in Lexington and then come up to Wheaton for training, Svehla said.

“The Rices would brag about the fact that in their Kentucky-style barn, they basically spared no expense in taking care of the horses,” Svehla said. “They had an on-site veterinarian, they had an X-ray machine, all the bells and whistles of it.”

The district acquired the Rice home and surrounding property in the 1980s and later opened the Danada Equestrian Center on the east side of Naperville Road.

Forest preserve officials considered putting rooftop solar panels on their headquarters on the west side of the road, among other options.

“All these options would offset our electricity consumption, except for the rooftop-only option, so we did not include that option here for advancement,” Ortega told commissioners earlier this year.

Consultants with the nonprofit Delta Institute also have outlined how the agency can reduce its carbon footprint. The project team released a report last year suggesting the district’s “greatest opportunity for integrating solar energy rests with ground-mounted systems, either over underutilized turf, degraded land, or parking lots, provided these locations are not prone to flooding.”

The district might put an educational information sign to explain the goals and the “whys” of the solar array, Hebreard said. He reiterated that “it should not affect any of the fencing and the structure and the capacity for people to use that area.”

Officials are expected to bring forward a contract with Verde for approval at the next available commission meeting.