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Aug 17, 2023

Charlotte County mulls land cap on solar projects

By [email protected] | on August 23, 2023 After granting approval for six solar projects — including one of the largest east of the Mississippi, the Randolph Solar Project — Charlotte County

By [email protected] | on August 23, 2023

After granting approval for six solar projects — including one of the largest east of the Mississippi, the Randolph Solar Project — Charlotte County is considering limits on new solar development.

On Thursday, County Administrator Dan Witt directed the Charlotte County Planning Commission to come up with a cap on solar developments that would become part of the county’s Comprehensive Plan. Witt recommended a limit of four percent of Charlotte County’s total landmass as a starting point for discussion, divided between utility or large-scale, medium-scale, and community or small-scale solar projects.

The proposed caps would not impact any projects already approved by the Charlotte County Board of Supervisors.

For the past year the planning commission has been working on updates to the Comprehensive Plan but have offered no insight into what changes, if any, would be made to the approval process for solar energy facilities. During that time, commission members have continued to entertain applications for new solar projects.

Between August 2019 and August 2022, the Charlotte County Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors approved six solar projects, including Randolph Solar, an 800-megawatt array that will be one of the largest of its kind in the U.S.

The other five projects are Twitty’s Creek, Moody Creek, Red House Solar, Courthouse Solar, and Tall Pines. Together these solar developments are expected to take up 26,367 acres of Charlotte County land, of which 7,791 acres will lie within the projects’ fenced areas.

Only two of the projects, Moody Creek and Red House Solar, have been built and are operational. The other four have received conditional use permits. Charlotte County has yet to receive site plans for Courthouse Solar, Randolph Solar and Tall Pines, although each has been issued a conditional use permit.

Another two projects are currently under review by the planning commission — Charlotte Solar 1, LLC – Gibson Project, a 1.9 megawatt facility near County Line Road in the Cullen area, and CPV County Line Solar, a 149.9 MW project near County Line and Crawly Roads and the Thomas Jefferson Highway in the Cullen/Pamplin area. Together these projects would cover an additional 1,271 acres of land, with 772.6 acres under panels or within the fenced area.

Planning Commission Chair Andy Carwile is involved with the CPV County Line Solar, LLC project.

In a written memo to the the planning commission, Witt wrote, “I’ve had conversations with each member of the Board of Supervisors individually, and the overwhelming consensus is that the PC [planning commission] needs to revisit the density issue for solar and provide a recommendation to them.” He also provided the members with a “starting point” for their discussions about a potential solar cap. He suggested they consider a 4 percent countywide density limit. Of that, a 3 percent cap would apply to utility scale projects of 100 megawatts and above, a .75 percent cap would be reserved for projects between 5 and 99 megawatts, and a .25 percent cap would apply to community or small-scale projects of 1-5 megawatts.

Witt concluded that supervisors “believe this type of metric, or something similar, would provide for clear and concise evaluation of future solar project application evaluation by both the PC and eventually the BOS [Board of Supervisors].”

Based on Charlotte County’s total land area of 304,336 acres, the four percent cap would limit the total acreage that could be fenced for solar developments to 12,174 acres. There are already 7,791 acres taken up by the six approved projects. Of that figure, 7,695 acres involve projects rated at 100 MW or higher, 95.5 are projects between 5 and 99 MW and 31 are projects of 1-5 MW.

Witt said the caps he suggested would allow the approval of another 1,435 acres to accommodate one or two more 100 MW projects or greater, 2,187 acres for three to five medium-sized projects and 760 acres or up around 15 small solar projects of 1-5 MW.

Witt’s proposed cap leaves open the door for Carwile’s CPV County Line project to receive a conditional use permit.

Witt did not say what the impetus was for this new push by the Board of Supervisors to consider limits on future solar developments. “Staff encouraged the commission to consider density limits for the county and include those in the comprehensive plan,” Witt wrote in an email in response to questions about the proposed cap. “The planning commission heard comments that the solar companies and/or power grid capacity should dictate the amount of solar for Charlotte County. However, staff would argue that such an approach is not good land use planning.”

During a working session Aug. 14, prior to the Board of Supervisors regular monthly meeting, several supervisors heard a presentation by Amy Martin, director of wildlife information and environmental services for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

In her presentation, Martin explained that while her department works to avoid and minimize the impacts of solar developments on threatened or endangered species and their habitats, the primary decision of where or whether to site a solar project lies with each locality. She also acknowledged that the inter-relationship between wildlife and their habitats and solar power facilities is an emerging issue.

Her agency and others are in the process of developing best practices, said Martin. “I don’t think anyone expected as many solar projects to come through as quickly as they have and so we are all still learning and trying to figure out the best way forward,” she explained.

Some of the problems Virginia DWR has identified include soil compaction, erosion and runoff, altered predator/prey relationships, introduction of invasive species of plants and wildlife if solar facilities are not properly sited, developed or maintained, adverse changes to wildlife habitats, loss of forests, ground and water contamination from materials leaching out of panels, inability to full remediate the land once the project has reached its end life and the loss of cultural heritage.

Because each locality gets the first look at any solar project, Martin stressed the importance of using resources available from DWR — including mapping tools, expert guidance and data — when considering where or whether to approve a solar project in the county.

“In terms of at-risk species and habitat protection, we say, coordinate with and come to us, look to us for information, look into our data services, search the sites yourselves, request applicants search the site. And when they’re [solar developers] coming to you for a [conditional use permit], we want you to tell them that ‘we want you to have done a search of the natural heritage set and the DWR data set, if that is important to you,’” Martin said.

This is the second time in the past year that Charlotte County officials have talked about stemming the loss of agriculture land to solar developers. At their Aug. 8, 2022, meeting, Charlotte supervisors agreed to pause future consideration of conditional use permit applications for solar facilities until Jan. 1, 2024, or until revisions to the county’s comprehensive plan or zoning ordinance, or both, have been implemented.

That moratorium was lifted on March 13 after attorney Carrol Mullen Ching with Fishwick & Associates in Roanoke told supervisors that she believed the moratorium was invalid and contrary to Virginia law. She also called the ban an “unreasonable restriction on use of land” and its enactment “arbitrary and capricious.”

At the time she was representing a solar developer, New Energy Equity, who was interested in building small-scale or community solar projects in the county.

Witt did not give the planning commission a deadline for completing their work on updates to the comprehensive plan, nor did he ask them to pause consideration of the two projects — Charlotte Solar 1, LLC – Gibson Project and CPV County Line Solar — with pending applications for a conditional use permit.

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