Maryland puts a number on gas-price risk: $298m to $515m, on a reclaimed coal mine

Take the contract apart and the hedge becomes a specific bet. The state's offtake is 250,000 MWh a year ^[3], so 20 years of it is 5 million MWh ^[1]. Set the projected savings of $298m to $515m against that volume ^[2] and Maryland is claiming between $59.60 and $103 of avoided cost per megawatt-hour delivered ^[2]. That is not a rounding adjustment on a utility bill. It is a forecast of what fossil-indexed supply will cost from 2028 into the late 2040s, and the announcement does not publish the price curve the saving was measured against.

The internal spread says something too. The top of the range sits 73 percent above the bottom ^[7], which is wide for a figure carried into a Board of Public Works vote, and Department of General Services Secretary Atif Chaudhry cited "approximately $300 million in savings" ^[6], effectively the floor. Splitting the range instead gives about $20m a year ^[3], across a government portfolio that the 15 percent figure implies runs near 1.7 million MWh annually ^[5].

The volume is worth reading against the nameplate as well. Drawing 250,000 MWh from a 300MW array is 833 hours of full-output running, under a tenth of the 8,760 hours in a year ^[4]. Maryland is contracting for a minority share of what Jade Meadow III should generate, and the source does not say who buys the balance, which is the part that determines whether the thing gets built.

What other large buyers can copy is the land. A reclaimed mine in Garrett County arrives with interconnection, roads and high-voltage lines nearby, which the state says saves millions in transmission buildout ^[9], and it keeps the array off farmland that is still in production ^[10]. Ningxia's Ningdong park sits over coal subsidence zones, and Germany's Cottbus Ost floats panels on a flooded lignite pit ^[11], so mine-to-solar is a known move. What Maryland has added is a public dollar figure attached to the volatility it believes it dodged, and a procurement record that other buyers chasing load growth can point at when their own boards ask why a 20-year term is prudent.

None of it arrives soon. Site preparation and major construction are targeted for 2026, with commercial operation and grid delivery in 2028 ^[5], putting the end of the term around 2048 ^[8]. The 100 percent clean electricity mandate for 2035 ^[8] falls in the middle of that, and will be met mostly by other purchases. The 1,200 jobs are peak-development jobs in engineering, site management, trade labour and technical design ^[7], which is to say they are attached to the build, not to the operating plant.