Solar’s Lofty Ambitions Are Eating Ever-Larger Expanses Of Land

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 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.

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