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It is no secret that massive solar projects face growing hostility in rural counties. And for good reason. The current approach to solar expansion is for big utilities (or their contractors) to buy lots of rural land, install large scale solar arrays that produce electricity primarily destined for urban areas, and then send the profits to corporate boardrooms. And the rural communities? Apart from some property tax revenues, they are left with nothing but a giant eyesore. Why would a rural community want that deal? Not surprisingly, therefore, Virginia is falling behind in its goal to expand solar production. A new bill, introduced by Democrats Senator Deeds and Del. Sullivan, therefore seeks to fix the '“production” problem. Unfortunately, the bill gets the problem backwards. Rather than giving rural communities a real interest in solar production, it just aims to make it easier for state regulators to force rural communities to accept solar projects they don’t want. Instead, the real problem is… why can’t Virginia create a solar policy that actually benefits rural communities? Imagine, for example, that — instead of promoting mega-scale solar projects owned by corporations — our state legislators devise a plan to support farmers and landowners to develop small-scale solar installations. NRVA has previously written on the benefits of such an approach, providing supplemental income and keeping small farms from going under. The income would not go to corporate boardrooms but rather to those landowners -- and the rural communities where they live. One can imagine that rural communities would be much more enthusiastic about solar if the profits stayed at home and the solar arrays were divided up into lots that are smaller and don’t wreck rural view sheds. Naturally, the big utilities would hate this idea. They have already succeeded in capping how much solar a small-scale landowner can produce and sell back to them based on past usage. They want to control solar production for their own benefit. Their lobbyists would churn out messaging decrying this new idea as wildly unrealistic and bad economics. And they make large campaign donations to both parties. (Indeed, the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP.org) reports that utilities are by far the biggest campaign donors in the state, both by industry and within the energy industry itself.) Of course, it is true that small farmers and landowners would need considerable help to get started. That’s where our legislature should come in. Why not write a bill to create a program that would provide rural communities with the financing, tax incentives, and technical support to get a true rural solar program started? That would be a major change from the “big business first” approach that has defined commercial solar until now. However, Americans have acted boldly before to ensure that rural communities get a fair return on production on rural lands. We can do it again. In any case, forcing rural communities to accept industrial-scale solar they don’t want is never going to work. We can do better.
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