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On a dry, rocky patch of his family’s farm in Door County, Wisconsin, Dave Klevesahl grows wildflowers. But he has a vision for how to squeeze more value out of the plot: lease it to a company that wants to build a community solar array.
Unfortunately for Klevesahl, that is unlikely to happen under current state law. In Wisconsin, only utilities are allowed to develop such shared solar installations, which let households and businesses that can’t put panels on their own property access renewable energy via subscriptions.
Farmers, solar advocates, and legislators from both parties are trying to remove these restrictions through Senate Bill 559, which would allow the limited development of community solar by entities other than utilities.
Wisconsin lawmakers considered similar proposals in the 2021–2022 and 2023–2024 legislative sessions, with support from trade groups representing real estate agents, farmers, grocers, and retailers. But those bipartisan efforts failed in the face of opposition from the state’s powerful utilities and labor unions.
Community solar supporters are hoping for a different outcome this legislative session, which ends in March. But while the new bill, introduced Oct. 24, includes changes meant to placate utilities, the companies still firmly oppose it.
“I don’t really understand why anybody wouldn’t want community solar,” said Klevesahl, whose wife’s family has been farming their land for generations. In addition to leasing his land for an installation, he would like to subscribe to community solar, which typically saves participants money on their energy bills.
Some Wisconsin utilities do offer their own community solar programs. But they are too small to meet the demand for community solar, advocates say.
Around 20 states and Washington, D.C., have community solar programs that allow non-utility ownership of arrays. The majority of those states, including Wisconsin’s neighbor Illinois, have deregulated energy markets, in which the utilities that distribute electricity do not generate it.
In states with “vertically integrated” energy markets, like Wisconsin, utilities serve as regulated monopolies, both generating and distributing power. That means legislation is necessary to specify that other companies are also allowed to generate and sell power from community solar. Some vertically integrated states, including Minnesota, have passed such laws.
But monopoly utilities in those jurisdictions have consistently opposed community solar developed by third parties. Minnesota utility Xcel Energy, for example, supported terminating the state’s community solar program during an unsuccessful effort by some lawmakers last summer to end it.
The Wisconsin utilities We Energies and Madison Gas and Electric, according to their spokespeople, are concerned that customers who don’t subscribe to community solar will end up subsidizing costs for those who do. The utilities argue that because community solar subscribers have lower energy bills, they contribute less money for grid maintenance and construction, meaning that other customers must pay more to make up the difference. Clean-energy advocates, for their part, say this “cost shift” argument ignores research showing that the systemwide benefits of distributed energy like community solar can outweigh the expense.
The Wisconsin bill would also require utilities to buy power from community solar arrays that don’t have enough subscribers.
“This bill is being marketed as a ‘fair’ solution to advance renewables. It’s the opposite,” said We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway. “It would force our customers to pay higher electricity costs by having them subsidize developers who want profit from a no-risk solar project. Under this bill, the developers avoid any risk. The costs of their projects will shift to and be paid for by all of our ‘non-subscribing’ customers.”
The power generated by community solar ultimately goes onto the utility’s grid, reducing the amount of electricity the utility needs to provide. But Conway said it’s not the most efficient way to meet overall demand.
“These projects would not be something we would plan for or need, so our customers would be paying for unneeded energy that benefits a very few,” he said. “Also, these credits are guaranteed by our other customers even if solar costs drop or grid needs change.”
Advocates in Wisconsin hope they can address such concerns and convince utilities to support community solar owned by third parties.
Beata Wierzba, government affairs director of the clean-power advocacy organization Renew Wisconsin, said her group and others “had an opportunity to talk with the utilities over the course of several months, trying to negotiate some language they could live with.”
“There were some exchanges where utilities gave us a dozen things that were problematic for them, and the coalition addressed them by making changes to the draft” of the bill, Wierzba said.
The spokespeople for We Energies and Madison Gas and Electric did not respond to questions about such conversations.
To assuage utilities’ concerns, the bill allows third-party companies to build community solar only for the next decade. The legislation also sets a statewide cap for community solar of 1.75 gigawatts, with limits for each of the five major investor-owned utilities’ territories proportionate to each utility’s total number of customers.
Community solar arrays would be limited to 5 megawatts, with exceptions for rooftops, brownfields, and other industrial sites, where 20 megawatts can be built.
No subscriber would be allowed to buy more than 40% of the output from a single community solar array, and 60% of the subscriptions must be for 40 kilowatts of capacity or less, the bill says. This is meant to prevent one large customer — like a big-box store or factory — from buying the majority of the power and excluding others from taking advantage of the limited community solar capacity.
Customers who subscribe to community solar would still have to pay at least $20 a month to their utility for service. The bill also contains what Wierzba called an “off-ramp”: After four years, the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin would study how the program is working and submit a report to the legislature, which could pass a new law to address any problems.
“The bill is almost like a small pilot project — it’s not like you’re opening the door and letting everyone come in,” said Wierzba. “You have a limit on how it can function, how many people can sign up.”
In Wisconsin, as in other states, developers hoping to build utility-scale solar farms on agricultural land face serious pushback. The Trump administration canceled federal incentives for solar arrays on farms this summer, with U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announcing, “USDA will no longer fund taxpayer dollars for solar panels on productive farmland.”
But Wisconsin farmers have argued that community solar can actually help keep agricultural land in production by providing an extra source of revenue. The Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation has yet to weigh in on this year’s bill, but it supported previously proposed community solar legislation.
The bill calls for state regulators to come up with rules for community solar developers that would likely require dual use — meaning that crops or pollinator habitats are planted under and around the panels or that animals graze on the land. These increasingly common practices are known as agrivoltaics.
The bill would let local zoning bodies — rather than the state’s Public Service Commission — decide whether to permit a community solar installation.
Utility-scale solar farms, by contrast, are permitted at the state level, which can leave “locals feeling like they are not in control of their future,” said Matt Hargarten, vice president of government and public affairs for the Coalition for Community Solar Access. “This offers an alternative that is really welcome. If a town doesn’t want this to be there, it won’t be there.”
A 5-megawatt array typically covers 20 to 30 acres of land, whereas utility-scale solar farms are often hundreds of megawatts and span thousands of acres.
“You don’t need to upgrade the transmission systems with these small solar farms, because a 30-acre solar farm can backfeed into a substation that’s already there,” noted Klevesahl, a retired electrical engineer. “And then you’re using the power locally, and it’s clean power. Bottom line is, I just think it’s the right thing to do.”
More than a decade ago, residents of Loudoun County, Virginia, banded together to buy up treasured open space before it became a strip mall and housing development, donating the land to the Piedmont Environmental Council instead. The nonprofit has maintained it as a unique blend of cattle pasture, a nature preserve, and a community farm that donates its yield to a local food pantry.
Now, a small corner of the farm has become what organizers say is a first for the state: a crop-based agrivoltaics demonstration project. They hope the combination of solar panels and vegetable farming will showcase how much-needed renewable energy can complement, not harm, agricultural lands, at a time when data centers are demanding more and more electricity.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act requires the state’s largest utility, Dominion Energy, to stop burning fossil fuels by 2045 and to develop 16,100 megawatts of land-based renewable energy by 2035 — mostly in the form of solar.
Virginia has more than enough room to meet that target without threatening great swaths of farmland. Using a conservative metric that 10 acres of land can host 1 megawatt of solar capacity, a Nature Conservancy analysis found that the state has 40 times more suitable land area than needed for solar fields, even after ruling out over 2 million acres of “prime conservation lands” including farmland.
Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University determined that large-scale solar today is erected on less than 1% of the state’s cropland. Under a “high-growth scenario,” that figure could rise to 3.1% by 2035, including 1.2% of the state’s federally designated prime farmland. Yet low-density residential development may pose a far greater threat to those spaces, according to research by the nonprofit American Farmland Trust, which advocates for “smart solar” that doesn’t jeopardize agricultural land.
In fact, many landowners find that renting a portion of their land to solar companies can help their farming enterprise pencil out financially, reducing pressure to sell their property to developers. An acre of land, after all, may yield hundreds of dollars if devoted to crops but thousands if leased for panels.
And yet there’s no doubt that solar has grown exponentially in the state in the last decade, and that it has disproportionately displaced farmland. Cropland makes up 5% of Virginia’s total acreage but 28% of the land area now used for large-scale solar, the Virginia Commonwealth University researchers found.
Especially in the early years of renewable-energy construction, some companies set a poor example for responsible development, said Ashish Kapoor, senior energy and climate advisor with the Piedmont Environmental Council. “It was a little bit ‘Wild West,’” he said. “Those early projects in 2018, 2019 — there were a lot of significant runoff issues.”
As solar fields have gone up at a breakneck pace — replacing plots of forests as well as farmland — opposition to them has also grown. Virginia localities approved 100% of solar projects in 2016, according to reporting from Inside Climate News. By 2024, the approval rate had fallen to under 50%.
The increasing number of rejections stems from a “a mix of disinformation and resentment,” Kapoor said. But the tension between solar and farmland is real. “That’s a national thing,” he added. “It’s everywhere.”
Agrivoltaics — the awkward portmanteau of agriculture and solar photovoltaics — has emerged as a potential solution, wherein farmland is kept in production even while it hosts solar arrays. The most common application is sheep: They graze on vegetation beneath the panels and prevent the need for expensive and polluting mowers. Planting flowers in and around panels to supply honeybees and other pollinators is also popular.
Still, the Piedmont Environmental Council team wanted to experiment with a crop-based model because it fits better with what most farmers in the area are doing now: raising vegetables.
“You want to change as little as possible for the farmer,” said Teddy Pitsiokos, who manages the organization’s community farm.
Occupying a quarter-acre section of the nonprofit’s 8-acre community vegetable farm in Loudoun County, the agrivoltaics project is small by design. It features 42 ground-mounted solar panels with a total capacity of 17 kilowatts, two batteries for backup power during outages, and about 2,000 square feet of growing area.
The array will supply more than enough power to meet the farm’s needs, with additional headroom for a planned EV charger and a greenhouse that organizers want to electrify eventually. But the Piedmont Environmental Council isn’t trying to demonstrate scale. Rather, it hopes to carefully measure impact.
With the shade and protection from rainwater that they provide, how do the solar panels affect soil moisture and temperature? What’s the resulting crop yield? What do vegetables grown beneath and near solar panels look like, and how will consumers react? Do any contents from the panels make their way into the crops, posing health problems?
Most research has found that the answer to the last question is no. But the team still plans to test for contaminants in response to public concern as a show of good faith and transparency, and in an effort to address any potential barriers to agrivoltaics from the get-go.
While most crop-based agrivoltaics projects involve growing produce in the ground, the Piedmont Environmental Council’s farm also includes raised beds, which enable educational tours and widen the demonstration project’s relevance.
The beds do increase costs, said Pitsiokos. But the rationale for them, he said, “is so we can create data for people who might be doing this in an urban setting, a parking lot, or on some other nonpermeable surface,” he said. “We have productive agricultural soil; not everybody does.”
The experiment could also help inform compliance with new state rules designed to mitigate land loss from solar: Certain developers have to conserve land on a one-to-one basis for projects on prime farmland, but their burden is less if the array is used for agrivoltaics.
Pitsiokos also wants the data to reach educators, policymakers, and cohorts he hasn’t anticipated yet. “We want to share it with everybody,” he said, “because we know that we can’t predict who might benefit from it exactly.”
Perhaps most of all, the Piedmont Environmental Council hopes the project will reach farmers. Plenty are outspoken on solar, both for and against. But a 2024 survey from the American Farmland Trust found that most Virginia farmers and farmland owners hold nuanced views. Over half would consider solar if they could continue farming under and around the panels, according to the survey, but nearly two-thirds agree that solar developers should be responsible for returning land to a farmable state after an array is decommissioned.
With the project’s first crops of kale getting harvested this month, the Piedmont Environmental Council plans to make real-time data available as soon as this winter, for all to see. But grand conclusions won’t be forthcoming for another two or so years.
“Like with all scientific experiments,” Pitsiokos said, “slow is actually good.”
The future of community solar is dimming, hampered by federal attacks on clean energy and shifts in state markets.
Installations of the shared-solar approach took a nosedive in the first half of 2025, dropping by 36% from the same period last year, according to a new report by consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
Working in collaboration with the Coalition for Community Solar Access, an industry trade group, Wood Mackenzie forecasts that by the end of 2025, installations will fall by 29% from 2024’s record high of 1.7 gigawatts. According to the analysis, growth will likely contract by an average of about 12% annually through 2030.
“I’m dismayed by this report,” said John Farrell, co-director of the research and advocacy nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Of the places where we have policies [that drive community solar], it looks like things are slowing down.”
Community solar makes clean power accessible to those who can’t put solar panels on their roofs — be it because they rent, can’t afford them, or have other reasons. Households can subscribe to a share of an off-site array, which is typically 2 to 20 megawatts, per the report, to get credit for the power and save on their energy bills. Third-party developers usually build and own these installations — not utilities.
About 9.1 gigawatts of shared solar have been installed in the U.S. to date, according to the report’s authors. They expect community solar capacity to reach roughly 16 GW by 2030.
The megabill that Republicans passed in July is a major reason for the community solar market’s shake-up. The law set an early expiration date for a key tax credit worth 30% to 50% of the cost of a project. Developers once had until 2034 to claim it; now companies must either start construction by July 2026 and finish within four years or start producing power by the end of 2027.
Because of the law’s passage, Wood Mackenzie slashed its community solar figures through 2030 by about 8%, or 655 megawatts, from its prior forecast, said Caitlin Connelly, senior analyst at the firm and lead author of the report.
But factors at the state level are also contributing to the slowdown. In particular, New York and Maine are driving the steep decline.
Developers in New York, a mature market, are having trouble finding sites, paying higher permitting and land costs, and having to wait an average of nearly three years to get connected to the grid, making projects more expensive to develop, Connelly said.
Meanwhile, in Maine, two regulatory changes are at play. Last year saw record growth as developers sprinted to get projects done by the December phaseout of the state’s net metering program, leading to fewer in the pipeline now, Connelly noted. In June, legislators also passed a bill that retroactively overhauled compensation for community solar power and added fees for new and established projects. The industry has said these provisions will make the state a “pariah for investors.”
Some states, such as Virginia and New Mexico, also have caps on the size of their community solar programs that are limiting new developments, according to Connelly.
And more federal turbulence could be ahead.
The Trump administration is also trying to claw back funding that would’ve supported solar: the $7 billion Solar for All program and the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, programs passed under the landmark Inflation Reduction Act.
“The impact of [losing] Solar for All is one that we are tracking closely,” Connelly said, as the move could stymie community solar in places where it’s just getting off the ground.
While this year is likely to be a rough one for community solar, Connelly sees growth returning in 2026 and 2027. This is in part due to rebounds in Massachusetts and New Jersey, both of which are transitioning into new iterations of existing programs.
Massachusetts will open up its Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program, SMART 3.0, to developers on October 15. And New Jersey recently eliminated a 150-megawatt annual cap and unlocked a whopping 3 gigawatts of community solar capacity.
But that growth is just a temporary reprieve. Over the longer term, the forecast shows community solar installations trending down.
A few factors could change the sector’s fortunes, however.
For one, if states were to start new community solar programs, as well as address interconnection bottlenecks, they could drive up to 1.3 gigawatts of additional capacity through 2030, according to the report. But “we don’t really see any new programs opening up, at least in the near term,” Connelly said. “Policymakers have made a lot of progress in some state markets over the last six months to a year, but the difficulty is getting that legislation over the finish line.”
In deep red Montana, for example, legislators approved a new community solar program, with 100 in favor and 50 opposed, underscoring the model’s growing appeal to Republicans. But Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) vetoed the bill, claiming that it could result in “unreasonable costs” being foisted on other energy customers.
Only 24 states plus Washington, D.C., have passed community solar legislation as of February, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa are all considering shared-solar bills, said Jeff Cramer, president and CEO of the Coalition for Community Solar Access.
Other states could be tempted to authorize a flood of clean, cheap solar power. The grid is facing soaring demand from data centers, electric vehicles, buildings, and manufacturing, and distributed community solar is among the fastest options to deploy.
“If you want to build a new gas plant right now, you’re going to need five-plus years minimum to do it. You want to build a new utility-scale [solar or wind] facility — at least five years as well, and that’s pending the development of new transmission,” Cramer said.
By contrast, community solar has a typical development timeline of six months to two years, he added. “The only kind of capacity that we can build close to load and faster than those timelines to meet load growth and grid congestion is distributed solar.”
A new analysis shows that a clear majority of people submitting comments on a planned central Ohio solar farm support the project — a stark contrast with how opponents have portrayed public sentiment.
Open Road Renewables, the developer seeking a permit to build the Grange Solar Grazing Center in Logan County, reviewed more than 2,500 comments submitted to the Ohio Power Siting Board through Feb. 11 regarding its permitting case. After accounting for repeat commenters who submitted multiple times, the company found 80% of commenters expressed support for its project.
A project’s popularity is a potential factor in site permit decisions, but how regulators use that information is the subject of a pending case before the Ohio Supreme Court. Until the question of how state regulators should measure “public interest” is resolved, solar advocates and developers say it’s critical to closely examine public comments before drawing conclusions.
“Anyone can file 10 different comments, but if you’re using that to determine public opinion, just based on nominally how many comments there are, that’s kind of missing the mark,” said Doug Herling, vice president for Open Road Renewables.
Herling took issue with people “gaming” the system, submitting multiple comments to make it appear that the project has more naysayers. The company’s analysis identified more than 600 repeat comments that should not be considered in attempts to quantify support or opposition to the project. As of early February, it found 16 individuals who collectively submitted more than 140 comments, mostly opposing Grange Solar.
Solar opponents, some with ties to fossil fuel groups, have used town halls and other forums to portray utility-scale solar projects as deeply unpopular in rural Ohio. Sustained opposition has led developers to drop plans for at least four large solar developments in Ohio within the past 15 months. Nationally, research released last June by Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law documents hundreds of renewable energy projects facing significant opposition across 47 states.
Permitting in Ohio has become especially contentious since passage of a 2021 law that adds hurdles for siting most wind and solar projects over 50 megawatts. Under the law, counties can block new utility-scale projects before they even get to the state siting board. The law doesn’t apply to fossil fuel or nuclear power projects.
The 2021 law exempts Grange Solar and some other projects because they were already in grid operator PJM’s queue when the law took effect. However, Grange Solar isn’t exempt from a provision in the law calling for two local ad hoc board members to join the state siting board’s seven voting members when it deliberates on the project.
Ohio law requires any new generation project to meet eight criteria. They include consideration of impacts on the environment, water conservation, and agricultural land. Other factors include whether a facility “will serve the interests of electric system economy and reliability” and “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
Ohio statutes don’t spell out what “public interest” means, and the power siting board declined environmental advocates’ requests to define the term when other rule revisions took effect last year.
Yet the board has denied multiple permit applications for solar projects based entirely or primarily on a large percentage of public comments or local governments opposing them. The developer in one such case, Vesper Energy, challenged the siting board’s popularity-contest approach in denying its Kingwood Solar project. The case is now before the Ohio Supreme Court, with oral arguments set for March 13.
That backdrop prompted Open Road Renewables to take a closer look at the comments in the Grange Solar case.
“Given that the siting board puts a weight on local public opinion and any resolutions made by local public bodies, we just felt it deserved that scrutiny,” Herling said.
The company submitted an initial analysis of public comments through Feb. 4 and found three-quarters of 806 unique commenters in the docket favored the project, compared with one-fourth in opposition. Among the commenters within Logan County, supporters still outnumbered opponents by about two to one.
A flurry of filings more than doubled the total number of comments, and the developer prepared an updated analysis through Feb. 11. Among nearly 2,000 commenters, supporters outnumbered opponents four to one. Opinion was more divided within Logan County, but allies still exceeded critics, Open Road Renewables’ most recent analysis said.
Supporters’ reasons for backing the project include jobs and economic benefits. Commenters also approved of the company’s commitment to minimizing impacts on the environment while preserving soil and drainage and screening panels from public view.
“The economic impact is undeniable — jobs for our neighbors and much-needed funding for our schools and public services,” wrote Russells Point resident Sharon Devault in a Jan. 10 comment. “Misinformation about solar energy concerns me. Let’s base decisions on facts, not fear.”
“I support solar energy because of the price of fossil fuels and the problems with them,” said Logan County resident Roger Blank in a Dec. 10 comment.
Some supporting commenters also dismissed project foes’ claims that Grange Solar would hurt tourism in the area. A Jan. 13 comment by Sharon Lenhart said they would continue to visit Logan County and Indian Lake. “The substantial investment in public services will likely make the area a more attractive destination,” Lenhart wrote.
The Ohio Chamber of Commerce also filed a supportive comment on the Grange Solar project, reflecting the business group’s more vocal advocacy for clean energy as a tool for economic development and grid resiliency.
Yet more comments have been submitted in the Grange Solar case, including additional duplicates and comments by opponents who have already weighed in. For example, Logan County resident Shelley Wammes contributed 14 comments in a Feb. 12 packet and another on Feb. 14. Wammes, who did not respond to questions sent via email by Canary Media, also filed 13 comments against the project last August and September.
“I am happy to see that Grange is really trying to take these things into account and recognize that there is support for this project within the community and that it shouldn’t just be outweighed by [a] few loud voices who are shouting a lot of misinformation,” said Shayna Fritz, executive director of the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum. In her view, people’s ability to lease their land for energy projects is a property rights issue.
Nolan Rutschilling, managing director of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council, said it’s important that state regulators consider the substance of comments, not just use them as a straw poll for measuring popularity.
Instead of just counting comments, “each perspective and comment must be considered for its substance — especially the truth of any claims — and who the comment represents,” Rutschilling said.
In another solar permitting case last summer, half the unique arguments presented during local public hearings lacked factual support, said Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, a professor at Cleveland State University College of Law who served as an expert witness for the Ohio Environmental Council.
In her view, numbers can provide a sense of the extent of support for particular arguments opposing or supporting a project. But if 1,000 people support a specific point for or against a development, that’s still just one issue for the power siting board’s consideration. An argument based on false information may not deserve weight at all. Other comments are just statements of opinion without evidentiary support, she noted.
“The value of the arguments is as important, or arguably much more important, than the numbers,” Robertson said. “All of this, of course, assumes the agency really wants to know.”
The power siting board’s staff investigation of the Grange Solar project is due by March 3, and the evidentiary hearing is set to start on April 7.
When a solar energy developer approached Halifax County, North Carolina, in the early 2010s about renting its former airfield in Roanoke Rapids, community leaders had a condition.
“If they were willing to lease this land for the very first solar project in the area, the county needed to get something back in return,” said Mozine Lowe from her office, which overlooks the 20 megawatt solar farm now atop the old airport. “What they got was this building.”
Of course, it’s more than a building. It’s the headquarters for the Center for Energy Education, the nonprofit Lowe has run since 2016 that works to maximize the benefits of large solar farms in rural America — one community, one school child, and one worker at a time.
Lowe, who grew up about five miles from where she now works, had graduated from Greensboro’s North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University but worked across the country, from California to Washington, D.C.
When she returned to this rural county of less than 50,000 near the Virginia border, formerly a hub of farming and textiles, she said she didn’t see a lot of change.
“The jobs were the same,” she said. “I didn’t see people making the connection between solar energy and what’s happening with the climate and the impact on rural communities, and I just wanted to try and help from that angle.”
The Center conducts educational programs for children of all ages, who come in by the busload from surrounding schools both public and private. It holds a Solar Fest every year to celebrate clean energy with community leaders, drawing hundreds.
Through collaborations with local educational institutions like community colleges, the center has also helped to train a new workforce in jobs that pay roughly twice what workers are earning at the fast-food chains off Interstate 95.
“We have trained more people than most other people around here to become solar installers,” Lowe said. “We want them to be first in line for our jobs.”
And there’s outreach to solar companies themselves in North Carolina as well as Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, where the Center also has offices. The goal is to help them become better community partners.
Geenex, the Charlotte-based developer who built the solar farm at the airport and over a dozen others in the vicinity, is still involved in the Center, and the company’s chairman also chairs the nonprofit’s board.
But Lowe and other staff at the organization say not every solar developer is committed — at least at first — to working with community leaders in Eastern North Carolina.
“Geenex is a very good partner,” said Reginald Bynum, the Center’s community outreach manager. “They’re a good player. But there are only a few of them. Other companies will say, ‘This is your ordinance? Great. This is all I have to do.’”
Some county ordinances, like that in Halifax, need to be updated, Bynum said. Many still call for a 75-foot buffer between the rows of solar panels and neighboring properties. That figure is “so 2018,” said Bynum. It should be doubled, he said.
Most solar farms are also built on private land — often bits of farmland that can help cotton growers and other farmers guarantee income. But developers usually obtain the leases first, before airing the project in public.
“That’s the backwards process of solar,” Bynum said. “They’re talking to landowners and securing that land, and then they’re coming to commissioners.”
What’s more, simply following ordinances isn’t enough, Bynum says. What’s needed is for solar developers to work with local residents to develop community benefits agreements — documents that memorialize pluses to the area, from minimizing construction impacts to providing jobs.
“It’s a 30-year commitment to the community,” he said, “because your farm’s going to be here 30 years. They’re asking for that, and they deserve that.”
Critically, say Bynum and other advocates, solar developers need to work with community leaders to provide benefits beyond tax revenue — an undeniable good, but one that isn’t “seen” by anyone except county bookkeepers.
And though a recent study from the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association shows that solar farms today take up a fraction of a percent of the state’s farmland, the figure is a full 1% in Halifax County, and on pace to triple in the coming years, according to the Center’s research.
“From rural citizens’ standpoint, that’s a lot,” Bynum said. “You have to really understand what they’re seeing.”
Part of what they’re seeing is the result of a simple fact: solar farms aren’t just growing more abundant in parts of rural America. They’re also much larger.
In North Carolina up until 2016, the average utility-scale solar development was 5.8 megawatts covering 35 acres of land, per the Sustainable Energy Association. After a 2017 state law made larger solar farms easier to build, the average system size increased to 13.6 megawatts and covered 115 acres of land.
“Projects have gotten bigger,” said Carson Harkrader, the CEO of Durham-based Carolina Solar Energy, who appeared on a recent clean energy panel with Bynum. “As they’ve gotten bigger, people freak out a little bit.”
And while many folks’ worries about the visual impact of solar panels can be mollified — with tree buffers, setbacks, and information about the safety of the structures — some are easy targets for opponents.
“The opposition has become much, much, more organized. There are national groups, funded by the oil and gas industry,” Harkrader said. “With this opposition that is more organized and has more resources, it’s much harder.”
In some cases, opponents may fill a vacuum left by solar companies who lined up projects before the pandemic and have only recently begun to start construction.
That’s what happens, said Bynum, “when you miss steps in keeping citizens updated with the project — particularly when you started talking about it five years before. Commissioners change, a lot of tribal knowledge evaporates.”
And sometimes, it only takes one or two community members to force the issue with local politicians. Both neighboring Northampton and Halifax counties have passed moratoriums on new solar farms recently. Halifax acted after just a few people appeared at their meeting, concerned about the loss of trees.
Having talked with county commissioners, staff at the Center are hopeful the moratorium will end quickly as planned, after the county has updated its ordinance. But the “pause” on solar farms is an example of the constant game of whack-a-mole solar developers and their advocates must play.
Lowe says that’s why the Center is so vital.
“What makes us unique is that our work is mainly community engagement,” she said. “Our stance is to be neutral, and to provide factual information. I think we need to tell more success stories.”
SOLAR: Colorado and California researchers find community solar programs have expanded clean energy access to renters and lower-income communities. (Canary Media)
ALSO:
GRID: A remote Alaska community is left without power for weeks after mechanical failures disable the diesel generators it relies on. (KYUK)
CLIMATE: California officials warn an extended heat wave forecast to grip the state this week and next could raise wildfire risk and ozone pollution, pose health hazards and strain the power grid. (Los Angeles Times)
UTILITIES:
HYDROGEN: A California startup working to develop hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft shuts down after failing to secure adequate financing. (Canary Media)
WIND:
OVERSIGHT: Analysts predict the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Chevron doctrine could have significant ramifications for federal energy and climate regulations in the West, but it may take decades for the consequences to become clear. (High Country News, WyoFile)
OIL & GAS:
GEOTHERMAL: A southwest Colorado craft beer company powers its operations with 100% geothermal energy. (Denver 7)
NUCLEAR:
HYDROPOWER: A California firm looks to design high-performance, fish-friendly hydropower turbines that could extend the life of some facilities slated for decommissioning. (MIT Technology Review)
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