BOWLING GREEN — City-owned farmland northeast of Bowling Green soon could convert to a solar panel field and power station.

About half of a 317-acre site at Carter and Newton roads would host a 20-megawatt solar field, if approved by city council. The project has been on council’s agenda for about a year as it went through changes, but the city’s board of public utilities approved its latest iteration April 25, and council is expected to take up the project again Monday.

If approved, the field would generate enough electricity for about 3,000 homes, or 4.5 percent of the city’s electrical usage, and increase the percentage of electricity the city uses that comes from renewable sources to nearly 40 percent, said utilities Director Brian O’Connell. Residents shouldn’t notice a difference.

“Under the new structure, we anticipate no cost increase in our power supply costs,” Mr. O’Connell said.

Originally, the project would have been developed and owned by American Municipal Power, an Ohio-based nonprofit municipal utilities group of which Bowling Green is a member. With that setup, Bowling Green had expected electricity costs would have increased by between 1 and 1.5 percent, Mr. O’Connell said.

Council had gone through two readings of the project in 2015, but delayed a third reading when a new idea came about. A subsidiary of private company NextEra Energy Resources will build the solar project and sell the power generated to AMP. The city plans to use 13.74 megawatts.

“That’s part of the beauty of this from AMP’s perspective,” said Kent Carson, an AMP spokesman. “AMP, in the last five, six years have taken on a lot of construction projects and a lot of construction risks.”

Because of those changes, Mr. O’Connell said, the city isn’t expecting rates to increase. NextEra, as a private entity, is eligible for tax credits that reduce the cost per megawatt, making it more feasible for them to construct the facility than AMP.

Tax credits, transmission savings, and renewable energy credits will bring the cost per megawatt hour down from $85 to $35, according to board of public utilities’ documents.

NextEra also will use a “single axis tracker system” on the project, which allows the solar panels to rotate with the sun, instead of remaining stationary. That will increase the power input of the solar field.

City and AMP officials deferred to NextEra questions about the expected cost and potential for jobs. A message left for a NextEra spokesman was not returned Friday.

Contact Nolan Rosenkrans at: nrosenkrans@theblade.com or 419-724-6086, or on Twitter @NolanRosenkrans.

First Published April 30, 2016, 4:00 a.m.