Posted on 08/02/2022 9:15:59 AM PDT by george76
Virginia lost about 2,000 acres of productive farmland per week in 2021, according to data released in February by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There are many reasons why farmers sell off their land, including development pressures, lack of interest by younger members of farming families, and the difficulties of turning a profit in the face of ever-changing market and weather conditions.
But there is now a new threat to Virginia’s agricultural base, which has a $70 billion economic impact on the commonwealth annually, according to the Virginia Farm Bureau.
In 2015, there were no utility-sized solar “farms” in Virginia. Now there are 44, with more on the drawing boards.
That’s because in 2020, the Virginia General Assembly passed, and then Gov. Ralph Northam signed, the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which requires the two largest electric utilities in the state, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power, to become “carbon free” by 2045 and 2050 respectively. The law sparked a flurry of multi-million-dollar investments in solar installations throughout the commonwealth.
But has this rapid rush to install solar panels on thousands of acres of Virginia countryside been wise, given the fact that Virginia’s population is growing, solar facilities require a huge amount of rural land that could be used for agriculture, and due to a variety of factors including drought, military incursions overseas and supply chain failures, even President Joe Biden has said that the United States is now facing a potential food shortage?
Only three states had more solar energy installations than Virginia in 2021, according to Bill Shobe, energy economist at the University of Virginia. But it’s still a fraction of the total electricity used by Virginians.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, as of January 2022, natural gas accounted for nearly half (48 percent) of all utility-scale electricity generation in Virginia, followed by nuclear (33 percent), coal (10 percent) and renewables (8 percent) – of which solar accounted for only 4 percent. So the real-life effects of a massive switch to solar energy has yet to be felt by most Virginians living in urban and suburban areas.
But rural Virginians are already seeing the effects of allowing industrial-size solar “farms” to replace real farms.
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these new solar installations are being built in rural communities, particularly in Southside and Central Virginia where land is more plentiful than money and local public officials often struggle to pay the bills.
According to the Virginia Solar Initiative, a statewide survey released in April by U.Va.’s Weldon Cooper Center and the Virginia Department of Energy, 51 local governmental authorities have been approached for permission to erect large-scale solar installations in their jurisdictions, and 44 have already approved such applications.
The latest was the Charlotte County Board of Supervisors’ approval in July of a conditional use permit to allow a gigantic 877-megawatt solar installation to be erected on 21,000 acres, which will be one of the largest such facilities east of the Mississippi River. Dominion Energy, which plans on purchasing the solar farm from Reston-based Randolph Solar after it’s built, sweetened the deal by promising the county that it would accelerate its $1 million payment for a previously approved solar project.
A 1,330-acre solar “farm” got the green light in King William County, as did a smaller 268-acre solar facility approved by the Henry County Board of Zoning Appeals.
Rural officials are being courted by solar developers, many from out of state, who offer financial incentives if they vote for special use permits to allow these industrial facilities to be built on land zoned for agriculture. In fact, one of the Virgina Solar Initiative survey participants wrote that local leaders “are keenly aware that solar energy production is highly land-consumptive and that solar energy providers want the lower cost farmland with no development improvements” – in other words, land that is already producing food or could quickly be converted to crop production.
“Once the facility is built, it’s paying into the tax base without making any substantial demands on local services,” Shobe told Virginia Public Radio. “For localities rich in land resources, this can be a very substantial contribution.”
But when local officials focus on the short-term financial benefits without thinking about the future ramifications of allowing these industrial power plants on land that is supposed to be reserved for agriculture, they may be trading one form of environmental degradation for another.
For example, Dr. Rattan Lal, Distinguished Professor of Soil Science at Ohio State University, points out that soil sequesters more than three times the amount of carbon locked in all the plants and animals on Earth. Yet construction and maintenance of industrial-size solar facilities prevents the natural process of soil replenishment from occurring.
And as the Essex County Conservation Alliance points out, “farmland lost is farmland lost forever.”
So ironically, the legislature’s requirement that the largest utilities in Virginia become “carbon free” in less than 25 years means that there will be a lot more carbon-sequestering farmland lost in the commonwealth.
How much? Solar farms require as much as six to eight acres to produce just one megawatt of electricity. Up to 104,000 acres of forest/farmland would have to be sheathed in solar panels made of glass and highly toxic metals like lead and cadmium telluride to produce about 13,000 megawatts of electricity. And that’s only when the sun shines.
Soil degradation is not the only problem. Denuded landscape is more prone to erosion, meaning that nutrients are more likely to be washed into the watershed and wind up in Chesapeake Bay, which the commonwealth is already spending millions of dollars to prevent. In March, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality announced that starting in 2025, solar panels would be considered “unconnected impervious areas when performing post-development water quality calculations” of stormwater runoff, which will likely increase the cost of these installations.
Earlier this year, Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed House Bill 206, which says that if the DEQ finds a potential “significant adverse impact on wildlife, historic resources, prime agricultural soils, or forest lands,” the solar facility in question would be required to submit a mitigation plan for public comment. The bill states that disturbing more than 10 acres of prime agricultural land, 50 acres of contiguous forest, and registered forest land automatically requires a mitigation plan.
These mitigation efforts will raise the price of solar-generated power for Virginia consumers even though the cost of the solar panels themselves, most of which are now made in China, have come down in recent years.
Michael Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never,” told the Thomas Jefferson Institute’s Virginia Energy Consumer Conference last October that solar panels are cheaper now due to multi-billion-dollar subsidies by the Chinese government, which uses dirty coal and forced labor to produce them. He also noted that “there is no plan” to deal with the huge amount of hazardous waste from obsolete solar panels once they have reached the end of their 15-to-25-year life span.
That means that some solar farms erected in Virginia in 2021 will start becoming hazardous waste sites in 2036, even before the Virginia Clean Economy Act’s “carbon free” mandates kick in.
“Once you deal with the cost of the waste, electricity from solar ends up being four times higher than they had anticipated,” Shellenberger, TIME Magazine’s 2008 “Hero of the Environment, pointed out. “I changed my mind about renewables when I understood that they require significantly more land,” he added. “Princeton University just confirmed about 300 times more land on average to generate the same amount of electricity from a wind farm or a solar farm as from a natural gas or nuclear plant.”
Thanks to the General Assembly, Virginia is on track to lose a massive amount of food-growing and carbon-sequestering farmland for an inefficient and intermittent technology that could quadruple electricity prices and create thousands of acres of toxic waste.
Local officials who are thinking about approving special use permits to allow more industrial-sized solar facilities to be built on agricultural land in their jurisdictions owe it to their constituents to tally up all of the potential future costs – especially the loss of irreplaceable farmland – as well as the benefits before signing off on this supposedly “free” form of energy production.
Perhaps the UGLIEST installations I have ever seen as I have taken several road trips in recent years are the windmills and solar farms!
If I were King for a Day, I’d have all of them destroyed!
Talk about the UGLIFICATION OF AMERICA!
😉👌
Just teach people to photosynthesize their own food.
Seems the dems want to starve everyone so they can keep a light on.
It’s just unbelievable to me as I drive through Virginia Tidewater counties the number of cornfields that are now ugly solar panel fields. Corn is cool to touch but solar panels on a sunny day will burn the hand right off your arm. So we’re making heat instead of oxygen and that’s supposed to be good.
And I like my personal solar array on my property. It's saving me money by making me buy less power from the grid while having all the comforts of a 2-story home with extra power hungry luxuries like a hot tub and an EV. But it's not 100% dependable. I still have to buy some power from the grid.
That's the difference between decentralized solar and utility-level solar. Solar is horrible as a utility-level source.
Farm land is the best for growing.
Locking it into solar is insane, by the true definition of the word.
They can’t even be insane correctly:
Just take the farmer’s land, due to nitrogen or whatever. Then build ‘immigrant’ housing on it. Then put the solar on top of that.
Best growing land in Orange County CA is now paved over and lived on.
Not to mention China purchases of American farmland is a crops genetics and biosecurity threat to our food supply. All kinds of plant viruses, parasites, molds, and bacterial weapons could be released across our country to starve us to death. They won’t have to fire off one bomb.
This is so stupid and unnecessary and in the end catastrophic.
Perhaps the UGLIEST installations I have ever seen as I have taken several road trips in recent years are the windmills and solar farms!
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Agree. Both the giant windmills and solar farms are hideous.
From amber waves of grain to silicon slabs of solar collectors.
“Southside and Central Virginia”
Wait a minute. Those are red counties.
It would be great if they started putting solar farms all throughout Northern Virginia. Don’t the Democrats there want to see the results of all their efforts?
Just drove from Indiana to North Carolina and back, there is no lack of farmland that isn’t visible from US and state highways or close enough to highway exits for the common suburban folks to build McMansions on. As long as they stay away from the productive bits of the corn and wheat belts, converting one percent of farmland into solar farms and new walkable cities has no problem if the green crooks keep their hands off the modern seeds and techniques. The ideal place for solar farms is the plains, and that is a really slow adoption as the wind their still destroys the solar mounts, the cattle would enjoy the shade and shelter.
except for one minor issue.
Your utility is FORCED to purchase your power whether it needs it or not. So that is why you are saving money.
when that little perk goes away, what will you save?
We’re burning our food supply with ethanol and now using up our valuable farmland all in the effort to fight this nebulous enemy of “Climate Change”. The chickens will come home to roost very shortly.
No farms, no food.
You couldn't be further from the truth. I put zero power onto the grid, and the utility buys no power from me. In fact, I paid a little extra to buy an inverter model with the "zero export" option (sometimes called a "no report" option in solar-ease). That's how important it is to me to not put power onto the grid.
As far as the utility is concerned I'm just a normal power buyer like you except that I buy less power.
You can still buy whole chickens for .99 cents a pound. Buy em all and one chicken lasts 4 people a week of carefully prepared meals. You can fit one chicken whole into each one two quart canning jar. Add salt and a bullion cube brine into each jar. Canning hot water bath. Keep in cool dark place. No refrigeration needed.
Same thing happening in Ohio and the same disturbing lack of scientific analysis about their ecological ramifications.
One of the most interesting maps on solar installations (5,600) I’ve seen. Incredible what is happening in our country. This map shows the extent: https://seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects-list
Solar works well in Californistan, because large parts of it are desert. It doesn’t work so well in the southeast, because it requires the conversion of farm land.
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