This playbook is an introductory guide for local governments to facilitate large-scale solar projects in Southwest Virginia. In a region that has a long history of energy production, solar technologies offer enormous potential for economic development and job growth. Large-scale solar can take many forms, including rooftop or ground-mounted installations at local corporate offices, nonprofit organizations, or schools. It can also encompass utility-scale projects over many acres on former agricultural or timberlands, mined lands, or industrial sites. Regardless of the type of project, solar is a widely popular, cost-competitive energy choice that helps create sustainable and prosperous communities. This playbook is directed to municipal and county governments that have an essential role to play in encouraging large-scale solar projects. The first section provides an overview of state and national trends, including recent state legislation that will impact local oversight of solar development. This is followed by an overview of the solar project approval process from a developer’s perspective. The next section is an overview of the state and local permitting process for solar projects, followed by other development considerations such as local tax revenue options, financing incentives, and considerations for solar on brownfields and previously mined lands. The playbook concludes with a step-by-step guide for local governments to facilitate large-scale solar development. This playbook is part of the Solar Workgroup of Southwest Virginia’s effort to bring solar energy and associated jobs to the region. Over the past few years, the workgroup has met with stakeholder groups and crafted a strategy for local solar energy development. The workgroup has collaborated with cities and counties to bring SolSmart designation to eight counties and cities, implemented group purchase campaigns for commercial solar, and led research efforts.
Tag Archive for: Solar
Renewable energy is a promising alternative to fossil fuel based energy, but its development can require a complex set of environmental tradeoffs. A recent increase in solar energy systems, especially large, centralized installations, underscores the urgency of understanding their environmental interactions. Synthesizing literature across numerous disciplines, the researchers review direct and indirect environmental impacts both beneficial and adverse of utility scale solar energy (USSE) development, including impacts on biodiversity, land use and land cover change, soils, water resources, and human health. Additionally, they review feedbacks between USSE infrastructure and land atmosphere interactions and the potential for USSE systems to mitigate climate change. Several characteristics and development strategies of USSE systems have low environmental impacts relative to other energy systems, including other renewables. We show opportunities to increase USSE environmental co benefits, the permitting and regulatory constraints and opportunities of USSE, and highlight future research directions to better understand the nexus between USSE and the environment. Increasing the environmental compatibility of USSE systems will maximize the efficacy of this key renewable energy source in mitigating climatic and global environmental change. Utility scale solar energy systems are on the rise worldwide, an expansion fueled by technological advances, policy changes, and the urgent need to reduce both our dependence on carbon intensive sources of energy and the emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Recently, a growing interest among scientists, solar energy developers, land managers, and policy makers to understand the environmental impacts both beneficial and adverse of USSE, from local to global scales, has engendered novel research and findings. This review synthesizes this body of knowledge, which conceptually spans numerous disciplines and crosses multiple interdisciplinary boundaries. The disadvantageous environmental impacts of USSE have not heretofore been carefully evaluated nor weighted against the numerous environmental benefits particularly in mitigating climate change and co benefits that solar energy systems offer. Indeed, several characteristics and development strategies of USSE systems have low environmental impacts relative to other energy systems, including other renewable energy technologies. Major challenges to the widespread deployment of USSE installations remain in technology, research, and policy. Overcoming such challenges, high lighted in the previous sections, will require multidisciplinary approaches, perspectives, and collaborations. This review serves to induce communication across relatively disparate disciplines but intentional and structured coordination will be required to further advance the state of knowledge and maximize the environmental benefits of solar energy systems at the utility scale.
This guide has been developed to share knowledge and learnings from agrisolar practices around Australia and the world, to assist proponents of utility-scale solar, and the landholders and farmers who work with them, to integrate agricultural activities into solar farm projects. As solar grazing is the dominant form of agrisolar for utility-scale solar, this guide has a strong focus on sharing the knowledge and learnings from Australian projects that have integrated solar grazing practices to date, providing case studies from solar farms currently employing solar grazing, information on the benefits of solar grazing for proponents and farmers, and practical guidance for both farmers and proponents considering solar grazing. A further aim is to contribute to the local knowledge of trends and research from international markets about a broader range of agrisolar models which could be considered for the Australian context. With the deployment of large utility-scale solar farms commencing in Australia from around 2015 onwards, the local experience of agrisolar practices is still developing and currently dominated by the practice of sheep grazing on solar farms. The first known Australian solar farm to implement agrisolar practice was the Royalla Solar Farm which began grazing sheep in 2015. Since then, there have been over a dozen solar farms that have introduced grazing, and it has proved to be an effective partnership for both solar farm proponents and graziers. ‘Solar grazing’, as it is known, is the most prevalent form of complementary land use for utility-scale solar farms. At present, where other forms of agrisolar are being pursued in horticulture, viticulture, aquaculture and cropping, it is typically at a much smaller (ie. nonutility) scale.
This report explores the synergies between farming and solar photovoltaics with the premises that agricultural production on farmland should be maintained and farm profitability and soil health should be improved. Instead of focusing on solar siting, this report explores whether a strong case can be made from a public policy point of view for developing solar so that it helps to preserve and improve farmland and the ecosystem in which it is located, while enabling achievement of both energy system and food system goals. Three examples, using Maryland data, analyzed in the report illustrate the potential of this dual farming-plus-solar approach, with solar being on 10% or less of the farm operation: (i) solar on 100 acres leased from a 1,000 acre corn-soy commodity crop operation; (ii) solar owned by the farmer on 16 acres of a 300-acre dairy-grazing operation; (iii) solar on one-acre of a ten-acre horticultural farm. In each case profits increase substantially. Farm economic resilience is improved because solar revenues are independent of the vagaries of weather and crop markets. While the examples are Maryland-specific, the approach for analyzing dual-use solar is broadly applicable elsewhere in the United States.
As an answer to the increasing demand for photovoltaics as a key element in the energy transition strategy of many countries—which entails land use issues, as well as concerns regarding landscape transformation, biodiversity, ecosystems and human well-being—new approaches and market segments have emerged that consider integrated perspectives. Among these, agrivoltaics is emerging as very promising for allowing benefits in the food–energy (and water) nexus. Demonstrative projects are developing worldwide, and experience with varied design solutions suitable for the scale up to commercial scale is being gathered based primarily on efficiency considerations; nevertheless, it is unquestionable that with the increase in the size, from the demonstration to the commercial scale, attention has to be paid to ecological impacts associated to specific design choices, and namely to those related to landscape transformation issues. This study reviews and analyzes the technological and spatial design options that have become available to date implementing a rigorous, comprehensive analysis based on the most updated knowledge in the field, and proposes a thorough methodology based on design and performance parameters that enable us to define the main attributes of the system from a trans-disciplinary perspective. The energy and engineering design optimization, the development of new technologies and the correct selection of plant species adapted to the PV system are the areas where the current research is actively focusing in APV systems. Along with the continuous research progress, the success of several international experiences through pilot projects which implement new design solutions and use different PV technologies has triggered APV, and it has been met with great acceptance from the industry and interest from governments. It is in fact a significant potential contribution to meet climate challenges touching on food, energy, agriculture and rural policies. Moreover, it is understood—i.e., by energy developers—as a possible driver for the implementation of large-scale PV installations and building integrated agriculture, which without the APV function, would not be successful in the authorization process due to land use concerns. A sharp increase is expected in terms of number of installations and capacity in the near future. Along this trend, new concerns regarding landscape and urban transformation issues are emerging as the implementation of APV might be mainly focused on the efficiency of the PV system (more profitable than agriculture), with insufficient attention on the correct synergy between energy and food production. The study of ecosystem service trade-offs in the spatial planning and design for energy transition, to identify potential synergies and minimize trade-offs between renewable energy and other ecosystem services, has been already acknowledged as a key issue for avoiding conflicts between global and local perspectives. The development of new innovative systems (PV system technology) and components (photovoltaic devices technology) can enhance the energy performance of selected design options for APV greenhouse typology.
Researchers present here a novel ecosystems approach—agrivoltaics—to bolster the resilience of renewable energy and food production security to a changing climate by creating a hybrid of colocated agriculture and solar PV infrastructure, where crops are grown in the partial shade of the solar infrastructure. They suggest that this energy- and food-generating ecosystem may become an important—but as yet quantitatively uninvestigated—mechanism for maximizing crop yields, efficiently delivering water to plants and generating renewable energy in dryland environments. We demonstrate proof of concept for agrivoltaics as a food–energy–water system approach in drylands by simultaneously monitoring the physical and biological dimensions of the novel ecosystem. We hypothesized that colocating solar and agricultural could yield several significant benefits to multiple ecosystem services, including (1) water: maximizing the efficiency of water used for plant irrigation by decreasing evaporation from soil and transpiration from crop canopies, and (2) food: preventing depression in photosynthesis due to heat and light stress, thus allowing for greater carbon uptake for growth and reproduction. An additional benefit might be (3) energy: transpirational cooling from the understorey crops lowering temperatures on the underside of the panels, which could improve PV efficiency. We focused on three common agricultural species that represent different adaptive niches for dryland environments: chiltepin pepper (Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum), jalapeño (C. annuum var. annuum) and cherry tomato (Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiforme). We created an agrivoltaic system by planting these species under a PV array—3.3m off the ground at the lowest end and at a tilt of 32°—to capture the physical and biological impacts of this approach. Throughout the average three-month summer growing season we monitored incoming light levels, air temperature and relative humidity continuously using sensors mounted 2.5m above the soil surface, and soil surface temperature and moisture at 5-cm depth. Both the traditional planting area (control) and agrivoltaic system received equal irrigation rates, and we tested two irrigation scenarios—daily irrigation and irrigation every 2d. The amount of incoming photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) was consistently greater in the traditional, open-sky planting area (control plot) than under the PV panels. This reduction in the amount of incoming energy under the PV panels yielded cooler daytime air temperatures, averaging 1.2+0.3 °C lower in the agrivoltaics system over the traditional setting. Night-time temperatures were 0.5+0.4 °C warmer in the agrivoltaics system over the traditional setting (Fig. 2b). Photosynthetic rates, and therefore growth and reproduction, are also regulated by atmospheric dryness, as represented by vapour pressure deficit (VPD) where lower VPD indicates more moisture in the air. VPD was consistently lower in the agrivoltaics system than in the traditional growing setting, averaging 0.52+0.15 kPa lower across the growing season. Having documented that an agrivoltaic installation can significantly reduce air temperatures, direct sunlight and atmospheric demand for water relative to nearby traditional agricultural settings, we address several questions regarding impacts of the food–energy–water nexus system.
This guidebook is a compilation of information, tools, and step-by-step instructions to support local governments with the development, installation, and maintenance of solar energy projects in their communities.
This Note examines how Section 94-C is an improvement from earlier siting regimes in NYS, which emphasized a time intensive and comprehensive approval process primarily tailored to the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of fossil-fuel power projects. This Note explains how Section 94-C sought to bridge the historical disconnect between old siting statutes with NYS’s more recent priorities for renewable energy adoption and addressing climate change. This Note demonstrates how Section 94-C can bypass massive delays, provided that ORES establishes more reasonable and predictable substantive standards, as well as reduces the complexity and extent of procedural requirements for developers.
This is one of six program guides being produced by the Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) as part of its Sustainable Solar Education Project. The project aims to provide information and educational resources to help states and municipalities ensure that distributed solar electricity remains consumer friendly and its benefits are accessible to low- and moderate-income households
Solar power offers Long Islanders a host of benefits — reductions in greenhouse gases and air pollution, healthier communities, affordable access to renewable energy, and good paying jobs. Solar can also play a significant role in helping address the climate crisis and meeting the goals of New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). This nation-leading 2019 law requires 70% of the state’s electricity to be generated from renewable resources by 2030 and 100% of electricity to be generated from carbon-free sources by 2040. Many people are familiar with residential rooftop solar systems, which range in size from 3 to 10 kilowatts (kW). Larger commercial and utility-scale solar systems, which can generate hundreds to thousands of kilowatts each, offer the opportunity to realize the benefits of solar power more quickly and cost-effectively in the region. This report shows how solar power can be scaled up without impacting the natural areas that are critical for wildlife, water-quality protection, and quality of life on Long Island. Low-impact sites like rooftops, parking lots, and other land already impacted by development, such as capped landfills and remediated brownfields, are excellent locations for the development of commercial- and utility-scale arrays. Building solar on low-impact sites minimizes impacts to natural ecosystems and habitat, reduces the potential for land-use conflicts and community opposition, decreases project cost and permitting times, and avoids the harmful release of carbon pollution that results from the conversion of natural areas for development. The Nature Conservancy and Defenders of Wildlife created the Long Island Solar Roadmap (the Roadmap) with the aim of advancing deployment of mid- to-large-scale solar power on Long Island in a way that minimizes environmental impacts, maximizes benefits to the region, and expands access to solar energy, including access to benefits by underserved communities. The Roadmap’s creation was supported by a diverse group of Long Island stakeholders. Individuals from state, local, and county government; the solar industry; the farm community; environmental and community organizations; the electric utility; businesses; and academic institutions provided input and guidance on design, research, and strategies. The Roadmap identifies low-impact sites for solar arrays on Long Island and shows their energy generation potential. Key findings also highlight Long Islanders’ opinions and preferences about solar development in their communities and provide information about the costs and benefits associated with bringing more solar online. It is our hope that the cohesive set of strategies and actions provided in this report will help lower barriers to low-impact solar development that meets the needs of all Long Island communities and benefits the whole region. Together, the key findings of the Roadmap point toward a promising future for Long Island as we transition to renewable energy. Taking full advantage of Long Island’s solar potential will require the commitment and collective action of a diverse group of stakeholders, including local and state government, Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), PSEG Long Island, the solar industry, commercial and industrial property owners, farmers and farmland owners, nonprofits, and community organizations.
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Harvesting the Sun, the Agrisolar Short Film, is Available Now!March 20, 2024 - 5:52 pm
Case Study: Alaska AgrivoltaicsMarch 20, 2024 - 10:07 am
