PITTSBURGH (TNS) — An energy company set its sights on Lawrence County. It went door to door, promising farm owners a steady stream of revenue for decades, a way to keep their farms in the family and secure their children’s future.

In North Beaver — where most land is green and family-owned, where there are fewer than a dozen traffic lights, where everyone seems to know who’s leasing and who isn’t — this energy project has kicked up a storm.

And after a series of lively and impassioned township meetings last summer, the township passed an ordinance outlawing large-scale solar development on farmland.

That baffled Wayne Gill, a landman with Western Land Services, who has been working in the area for years.

Not long ago, he went around North Beaver securing oil and gas leases on behalf of a large shale driller. Many of those farms already had coal leases, and some had been mined or were scheduled to be. When the solar firm needed to assemble a block of land for a 200 megawatt solar project, Gill was dispatched to knock on the same doors that yielded gas leases a few years prior.

”The first thing I did was look at some of the more elderly landowners that did not farm their ground currently and did not have a child or a near relative that had the desire to take that acreage and farm it,” Gill said. “They’re looking at, ‘What is that long-term legacy? How do I preserve that farmland?’”

{p class=”krtText”}Some are leasing their land to other farmers at a rate of $50 to $100 per acre per year. The solar company promised $1,000 per acre for each of the 30 or so years that solar panels would be operating.

The land under the panels would be out of commission for all those years — “resting,” as Gill put it — but at the end, the soil could be redeployed for farming.

Even so, “If somebody don’t want change, they’re not gonna be for it,” he said.

”Out of nowhere, North Beaver Township supervisors decided: ‘We don’t want it.’”

Big solar pipeline

The intersection of large-scale solar development and Pennsylvania’s storied farmland preservation efforts has become a hot topic in the past year.

”Those concerns are common,” said Erin Baker, development director at Vesper Energy, the Texas-based solar developer behind the Firefly project in North Beaver. It is also building a much smaller solar farm in Beaver County called Gaucho Solar.

”I think there are a couple of factors that are important to keep in mind,” Baker said. “One is scale.”

Firefly, if constructed, would sit on just 1% of the farmland in Lawrence County, she said.

But Vesper is one of four large solar firms that has options to lease land in the county. In total, they have at least 4% of the county’s acreage under contract and a larger percentage of farmland acres.

Vesper’s plan is to install 200 megawatts initially and potentially double that, either on land already under option in North Beaver or through new leases, Baker said.

This is part of solar’s meteoric rise in Pennsylvania.

At the end of last year, just 200 megawatts of solar were connected to the grid across the entire state, according to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. Yet the pipeline of new projects is many times that and includes much larger developments. Thousands of megawatts of solar projects have put in applications to be connected to the regional grid, operated by Valley Forge-based PJM Interconnection.

PJM coordinates the flow of electricity for 13 states and must evaluate how a hookup to a new generation source would impact the rest of the grid. There are now so many solar projects in line that PJM recently announced a two-year moratorium for new requests.

The gridlock is not just in the wait line. It’s in the transmission lines, which is a major reason why companies are flocking to rural townships, where there might be available capacity on the grid. Another is long stretches of uninterrupted flat land.

‘We will find

an equilibrium’

The Pennsylvania Grange, the state Department of Agriculture and lawmakers in rural counties have been thinking about solar energy’s interest in farm land and urging caution, if not outright opposition.

”We stand in a state that leads the nation in farmland preservation,” state Secretary of Agriculture Russell Redding said during a panel on solar energy at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in January.

More than 600,000 acres of lane have been preserved, the vast majority through conservation easements. The program, which began in 1988, involves landowners giving up their development rights in exchange for a government payment. Other parcels get tax breaks through the Clean and Green program.

The biggest threat to farmland, Redding said, is not solar but residential development.

Still, the Department of Agriculture would like to avoid having solar panels on prime farmland, he said. The agency sent some recommendations to the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, which serves as a guide to municipalities on matters like zoning ordinances or comprehensive plans.

Redding said there is a place for solar in agriculture and that it could, if done right, be a good way to diversify revenue for landowners and a good source of clean energy for the state.

”We will find a way through the solar conversation and find an equilibrium between those who have a desire for solar, a need for solar, and respect for prime agricultural lands in Pennsylvania,” he promised.

Property rights

When things got heated at North Beaver Township’s solar ordinance discussions last year, Michael McBride was in the minority speaking up for the project. He signed an option agreement with Vesper Energy and said that as a political conservative, he doesn’t want the government restricting his property rights.

McBride, a police officer and the first person in his family not to farm full time — “My dad said, ‘Go do something else. There’s no money in farming,’” — said most of his 500 acres of farm land is ineligible for solar development because it’s preserved by conservation easements.

It’s a choice his grandfather made decades ago, to take a government payment and give up development rights.

”I’m stuck with it,” he said. “But I’ll be darned if I’m gonna tell someone else what they can and can’t do with their ground.”