Wedged in the southern flank of Virginia, Charlotte County is home to some 11,500 people who live amidst rolling hills and family farms, pastures and sawmills, a historic Civil War battlefield, and four townlets tinier than many suburban subdivisions.
But this pastoral tableau will be swept up in the green revolution when construction begins here on the nation’s largest solar power facility east of the Mississippi River. The planned 800-megawatt Randolph Solar Project in Charlotte County will replace a commercial lumber farm of loblolly pines with 1.6 million photovoltaic panels covering an area equivalent to seven square miles.
State and federal officials see in solar energy the potential to counteract global warming with an infinite natural resource. With the 2020 passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act, the Old Dominion is among a growing number of states committed to “decarbonizing” its power grid by replacing natural-gas and coal-fired power plants with solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage.
Federal policy is about to inject massive funding to incentivize similar transitions nationwide. The New York Times characterized this year’s omnibus Inflation Reduction Act as the “the largest package of subsidies ever granted to the industry” – a $220 billion package of tax breaks, subsidies, and other incentives for the electric utility sector to invest in solar power, battery storage systems, and other carbon-free technologies.
The momentum behind solar energy could make sunshine the nation’s dominant source of electricity, supplying up to 45% of the nation’s electricity by mid-century, from a meager 2.8% of U.S. electricity generation now, according to a Department of Energy forecast.
But converting to solar has ancillary costs that will become more apparent as time passes. Solar energy facilities require vast stretches of land, converting farms and fields into geometric rows of indigo panels. The South Atlantic region has led the country in newly installed solar generating capacity for the past three years, according to a study from Virginia Commonwealth University, but little information is available on how these facilities are altering the landscape.
And the rapid buildout exposes a moral paradox for the climate change movement: Although done in the name of fighting global warming, some amount of deforestation will be the inevitable result of clearing land for ground-mounted solar panels. Environmental groups say they hope to steer solar farms to “disturbed” or degraded land and rooftops, but those options are often expensive and impractical.
“We’re going to change the character and characteristic of rural Virginia if this goes unchecked,” warned Martha Moore, senior vice president of governmental relations at the Virginia Farm Bureau. “My main concern is the long-term viability of the agriculture and forestry industry in the state of Virginia.”
Moore pointedly avoids using the euphemism solar “farm” when referring to a solar energy facility. She is concerned that replacing agriculture with sprawling solar projects will not only take out valuable land from production but also undercut local farming by reducing business for local sawmills, livestock markets, and farmers’ cooperatives.
This year the American Farmland Trust said that expanding solar power could gobble up as much as 3,900 square miles nationwide, and predicted that many Eastern states could lose between 1.5% and 6% of their undeveloped land to solar facilities – mostly on farmland that’s flat, cleared, and near to existing transmission infrastructure. A Princeton University study this year forecast that achieving a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050 could directly impact a cumulative land area the size of Virginia, with forested lands the most directly impacted by solar deployment in Eastern states.
The environmental groups that have launched waves of lawsuits and press releases to fight oil and gas pipelines, natural gas fracking activity, and power plant ozone violations have largely been absent on this issue.
Instead, solar land conversions have triggered local resistance and lawsuits in Charlotte County and other communities in an attempt to stall or block the projects. Local governments in nearly every state have enacted restrictions, moratoriums, or bans on renewable energy facilities, according to a 2021 study by Columbia University Law School. A study this year on opposition to renewable energy said the most common concern is environmental impacts, including harm to wildlife. As an example, the researchers cited the denial of a state permit to a proposed solar farm in Maryland that would have required clearing trees in an area over 200 acres, or 1/3 square mile.
Virginia will likely require 200 to 250 square miles of land for solar development, based on projections by the state’s two utilities, to add more than 16,000 megawatts of solar power. While that’s not a huge amount of real estate for a state of nearly 43,000 square miles, solar development is often clustered in areas where land is available and farmers are eager to trade up from harvesting soybeans to sunbeams.
Sunny Money
John “J.A.” Devin, whose family holdings and relatives will lease land for the Randolph Solar Project, said he could lease for $35 to $40 per acre to a farmer growing soybeans, or as much as $100 per acre to a farmer growing corn. Instead, the Devins are opting to go with solar developers who pay landowners between $800 and $1,000 per acre, with a 2% annual escalator.
“You can’t argue with economics – it’s just so much more money,” Devin said. “I told my brother: We’ll put solar panels on this land, and we’ll take that money and turn around and buy some more land. We’ll take advantage of this solar while we can.”
Charlotte County Administrator Daniel Witt said the Randolph Solar Project will be a windfall to the county. It will generate $310 million over 35 years in property taxes and revenue sharing agreements that could be used to pay for such services and amenities as public parks and trails, public school renovations, and rescue squad funding. “It’s generational,” Witt said.
Dominion Energy, the Richmond-based electric utility company that owns the Randolph Solar Project, has nearly 33 square miles under option to lease or buy from local property owners, representing 7% of Charlotte County’s land mass. In its final configuration the Randolph Solar Project is expected to take up seven square miles.
When completed, the Randolph Solar Project will be screened by trees and foliage, but in the interim the facility will take an estimated five years to build, with up to 350 workers on site at peak production receiving up to 90 vehicle deliveries a day. Construction crews will use 13 existing access points and add over 40 more to accommodate trucks and other vehicles, according to a county staff analysis. While President Biden has envisioned millions of clean-energy related jobs, the Randolph Solar Project offers a cautionary data point. When completed, it is expected to generate electricity for 35 to 50 years, but will produce just 10 permanent jobs to monitor and maintain the facility.
Until recently, solar farms on the East Coast had been relatively unobtrusive, first maxing out at a 1 megawatt then scaling up to 5 megawatts. The most hospitable habitats for gargantuan projects were sun-drenched Southwestern deserts and the territorial expanses of India and China. But with the solar panel costs plummeting to the point that sunshine is now described as the nation’s cheapest source of electricity, and the promise of large-scale battery backup as a feasible means of managing solar power, solar has pressed ahead as the leading technology to replace greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.
Solar farms are touted as supplying electricity to thousands of residential homes – for example: Randolph Solar’s 800 megawatts will generate enough electricity to power 200,000 residential homes. But the reality is that solar panels generate electricity at peak capacity only about 20% of the time, and those homes will have to get their juice from other sources – offshore wind, legacy nuclear, battery storage or natural gas – the rest of the time when it’s overcast, twilight, or nighttime.
Room to Spare?
Across the country, solar energy is pushing unprecedented boundaries: A 1,310-megawatt solar farm, dubbed Samson Solar, is rising across three counties in northeast Texas. A 1,600 megawatt project, called Mammoth Solar, is under development on 20 square miles of farmland in Indiana. And a 2,700 megawatt project, called Westlands Solar Park, under development on about 31 square miles of contaminated and depleted farmland in California’s San Joaquin Valley, will be the biggest solar energy complex in the world, for now.
In Virginia, dozens of solar projects are in various stages of proposal and development, with three more large projects in the pipeline in Charlotte County alone, bearing such idyllic names as Moody Creek and Tall Pines, totaling a maximum peak output of 537 megawatts and covering more than seven square miles. Dominion Energy is also developing a 600-megawatt Bellflower Solar project in nearby Brunswick County, with more than 12 square miles under option for the project that will take up four square miles.
Neighboring Halifax County has permitted 17 solar farms totaling nearly 700 megawatts covering about 13 square miles. County Administrator Scott Simpson estimated that the county could accommodate as much as 20 square miles of solar farms before it ran out of available land and electric grid capacity needed to assemble these projects.
Solar advocates say there’s plenty of spare land to accommodate solar panel arrays. According to the Biden administration’s Department of Energy, solar energy could supply 45% of the electricity needed to decarbonize the national power grid by taking up just 0.5% of the contiguous U.S. surface area, largely on marginal or disturbed land surfaces, “thus avoiding conflicts with high-value lands in current use.”
John Murawski reports on the intersection of culture and ideas for RealClearInvestigations.
Originally published by RealClearInvestigations. Republished with permission.
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