The Energy Values Lab in the Department of Community Sustainability, led by Doug Bessette, at Michigan State University has been selected for a $2,500,000 award by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office! This interdisciplinary and multi-institution project aims to answer a single comprehensive research question: how can we speed large-scale solar permitting processes, while also reducing community burdens, improving community outcomes, and improving residents’ perceptions of solar? Put simply, how can we develop solar both fast and fair?
We expect this work to generate actionable insights to improve large-scale solar siting processes and outcomes for host communities and the solar industry, speed solar deployment, and ensure that all Americans benefit from the clean energy transition. Learn more about the project here.
One of the chief concerns of rural residents faced with large-scale solar (LSS) proposals are those projects’ impact to the local agricultural economy.
While the construction of LSS creates temporary jobs and economic activity at local businesses, e.g., hotels, gas stations, restaurants and hardware stores, once the project is complete and operational, the full-time equivalents (FTEs) generated by LSS are minimal.
One project-operator told me 1 FTE could manage about 100 MWs of solar.
This doesn’t include landscaper contracts, which can be considerable, but also may be entered into by companies that are ex-local, i.e., “not from around here.” Typically the bigger the project, the less likely your local landscaping company is getting that contract. It’s just easier for operators to sign huge contracts with firms that can maintain hundreds of acres across a region.
Another concern is that tenant farmers can’t pay landowners what solar developers can pay for access to land. Farmers can pay a few hundred dollars per acre, while developers often pay $1000 (or more) per acre. This can drive local farmers out of business.
While much of what you read is about how the overall impact to state or national farmland of LSS may be small (1-2% of farmland lost), if you’re the farmer losing access to land you’ve farmed for decades, that news isn’t encouraging–or even relevant.
Baker touts the environmental benefit of planting ground-cover under and around panels and the lack of production agriculture avoiding pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer use.
To be sure, these are huge, and legitimate, environmental benefits. If you’re a neighbor of that project, your local water quality may improve. Your local ecosystem may benefit from the lack of monoculture.
However, the dollars spent on those supplements are also lost. So that environmental benefit also comes with a significant economic loss. Baker argues his 1300 MW project will avoid 1000 tons of fertilizer annually and tens of thousands of gallons of herbicides and pesticides. Some producer and distributor, perhaps a local one, is losing those contracts.
That’s a huge benefit for the local environment. But also a significant loss to the local ag economy.
And here we see, that there is no silver bullet, there is no “win-win.” There’s a winner, and there’s a loser. And it only depends on what side you’re on to determine which is which.
This study, published in Energy Research & Social Science, and led by Karl Hoesch at UofM, explores one community solar project in a rural community in the upper peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan. The project contained a carve-out for Low-Middle Income (LMI) households identified through participation in the National Weatherization Program (WAP).
Through nine semi-structured interviews, 44 phone surveys, and analysis of two years of monthly energy consumption and bill data we sought to understand three energy justice impacts on the targeted community and participants’ perceptions of the program and its processes. We show that positive distributional, procedural, and recognition justice outcomes from community solar are achievable in a context without supportive legislation, under certain conditions. These results may have implications for expanding community solar to LMI households in small towns both in the United States and abroad.
There was a provocative story in Reuters this morning about concerns over the removal of topsoil, increased soil erosion, and increased sediment runoff resulting from large-scale solar development. Anybody that’s witnessed construction of a LSS project understands the significant earth-moving and grading that accompany installation of the panels. There is undoubtedly an impact to the land. Does that impact lessen over time and with proper groundcover, the planting of pollinator species in particular, sure, but let’s stop arguing there’s no impact to prime farmland. Especially since the number of LSS projects that have been decommissioned and returned to ag production stands at, well, zero.
As solar energy development accelerates, how do Americans actually feel about those large scale solar, or LSS, farms they see along the highway or near their neighborhood? A new survey has found that for residents living within three miles of a large-scale solar development, positive attitudes outnumbered negative attitudes by almost a 3-to-1 margin.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Michigan State University and the University of Michigan surveyed almost 1,000 residents living near solar projects — the first time a representative survey of this kind has been deployed nationally. More here.
Cheap panels mean a speedy transition, more solar farms, more clean electricity, more progress toward his net-zero goals. But cheap panels are made in China. So, more solar development necessarily means more investment in the Chinese solar supply chain, and necessarily less invested in onshoring that supply–bye bye CubicPV!
However, if Biden goes all out, incentivizing, and (hopefully) ultimately relying on, domestically manufactured solar, then the price will inevitably increase, meaning a slower transition, less development, less progress. Slower progress means less wins, which for Biden is essentially the same thing as a loss.
This problem isn’t going away. Navigating it will be difficult, if not impossible. And what’s so frustrating is that this problem is essentially the result of our giving up our competitive advantage so long ago. Not just on solar, but all things manufactured.
Jake White successfully defended his MSc. Thesis this afternoon examining residents’ perceptions regarding and preferences for alternate development to urban and brownfield solar development in Michigan.
He examined three communities and projects via an Every Door Direct Mail Survey. For more on his work see his Conversation article!
Congrats, Jake! Looking forward to your PhD beginning in the fall!
Michigan residents overwhelmingly want more solar power.
In the spring of 2023, nearly two-thirds of 1,000 state residents surveyed supported additional large-scale solar development.
In the Energy Values Lab at Michigan State University, we study how the public, and specifically community members living near large-scale wind and solar projects, perceive those projects and the processes by which they are approved.
According to a survey we conducted in the fall of 2023 that has not yet been peer reviewed, there may be less support in urban Michigan communities, particularly among those already living close to an existing solar project. Fewer than half of the 158 residents who took our survey supported their local project…
