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Why farmers are becoming the new nemeses of the solar and wind industries
Farms are fast becoming one of the most powerful opponents to renewable energy in the United States, second perhaps only to the fossil fuel industry. And it’s frighteningly unclear how developers will resolve this problem – or if they even can.
As solar and wind has grown rapidly across the country, so too have protests against solar and wind power on “prime farmland,” a loose term used by industry and government officials to describe property best suited for growing lots of crops. Towns and counties are banning the construction of solar and wind farms on prime farmland. State regulators – including those run by Democrats – are restricting renewable development on prime farmland, and members of Congress are looking at cutting off or restricting federal funds to projects on prime farmland.
In theory, meeting our country’s climate goals and industry needs should require very little farmland. But those same wide expanses flush with sunlight and gusts of wind sought after by developers happen to often be used by farmers: A USDA study released this year found more than 90% of wind turbines and 70% of solar farms in rural areas were sited on agricultural land.
It would be easy for an activist or energy nerd to presume this farmland free-for-all is being driven by outside actors or adverse incentives (and there’s a little bit of that going on, as we’ll get to).
However, weeks of reporting – and internal Heatmap News datasets – have revealed to me that farmland opposition actually has a devilishly simple explanation: many large farm owners are just plain hostile to land use changes that could potentially, or even just hypothetically, impact their capacity to grow more crops.
This means there is no easy solution and as I’ll explain, it is unclear whether the renewables sector’s efforts to appear more accommodating to agricultural businesses – most notably agri-voltaics – will stem the tide of local complaints from rural farmers.
“This is a new land use that is very quickly accelerating across the country and one of the major reactions is just to that fact,” Ethan Winter of American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit promoting solar education in farm communities, told me. “These are people who’ve been farming this land for generations in some instances. The idea of doing anything to take it out of agricultural production is just hard for them, for their community, and it’s about the culture of their community, and if solar is something that can be considered compatible with agriculture.”
Over 40% of all restrictive ordinances and moratoriums in Heatmap Pro's database are occurring in counties with large agricultural workforces.
In fact, our internal data via Heatmap Pro has found that agricultural employment can be a useful predictor of whether a community will oppose the deployment of renewables. It's particularly salient where there's large-scale, capital-intensive farming, likely because the kind of agriculture requiring expensive machinery, costly chemicals, and physical and financial infrastructure — think insurance and loans — indicates that farming is the economic cornerstone of that entire community.
Resentment against renewables is pronounced in the Corn Belt, but it’s also happening even in the bluest of states like Connecticut, where state environmental regulators have recommended against developing on prime farmland and require additional permits to build on preferred fertile soils. Or New York, where under pressure from farming groups including the state Farm Bureau, the state legislature last year included language in a new permitting authority law limiting the New York Power Authority from approving solar and wind on “land used in agricultural production” unless the project was agrivoltaics, which means it allows simultaneous farming of the property. The state legislature is now looking at additional curbs on siting projects in farmland as it considers new permitting legislation.
Deanna Fox, head of the New York Farm Bureau, explained to me that her organization’s bottom-up structure essentially means its positions are a consensus of its grassroots farm worker membership. And those members really don’t trust renewables to be safe for farmland.
“What happens when those solar arrays no longer work, or they become antiquated? Or farmland loses its agricultural designation and becomes zoned commercial? How does that impact ag districting in general? Does that land just become commercial? Can it go back to being agricultural land?” Fox asked. “If you were to talk to a group of farmers about solar, I would guarantee none of them would say anything about the emotional aspect of it. I don’t think that's what it really is for them. [And] if it’s emotional, it’s wrapped around the economics of it.”
Surveys of farmers have hinted that fears could be assuaged if developers took steps to make their projects more harmonious with agricultural work. As we reported last week, a survey by the independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association found up to 70% of farmers they spoke with said they were “open to large-scale solar” but many sought stipulations for dual usage of the land for farming – a practice known as agrivoltaics.
Clearly, agrivoltaics and other simultaneous use strategies are what the industry wants to promote. As we hit send on last week’s newsletter, I was strolling around RE+, renewable energy’s largest U.S. industry conference. Everywhere I turned, I found publicity around solar and farming.
The Department of Energy even got in on the action. At the same time as the conference, the department chose to announce a new wave of financial prizes for companies piloting simultaneous solar energy and farming techniques.
“In areas where there has been a lot of loss of farmland to development, solar is one more factor that I think has worried folks in some communities,” Becca Jones-Albertus, director of DOE’s solar energy technologies office, told me during an interview at the conference. However agri-voltaics offer “a really exciting strategy because it doesn’t make this an either or. It’s a yes and.”
It remains to be seen whether these attempts at harmony will resolve any of the discord.
One industry practice being marketed to farm communities that folks hope will soften opposition is sheep grazing at solar farms. At RE+, The American Solar Grazing Association, an advocacy group, debuted a documentary about the practice at the conference and had an outdoor site outside the showroom with sheep chilling underneath solar panel frames. The sheep display had a sign thanking sponsors including AES, Arevon, BP, EDF Renewables, and Pivot Energy.
Some developers like Avangrid have found grazing to be a useful way to mitigate physical project risks at solar farms in the Pacific Northwest. Out in rural Oregon and Washington, unkempt grasslands can present a serious fire risk. So after trying other methods, Avangrid partnered with an Oregon rancher, Cameron Krebs, who told me he understands why some farmers are skeptical about developers coming into their neck of the woods.
“Culturally speaking, this is agricultural land. These are communities that grow wheat and raise cattle. So my peers, when they put in the solar farms and they see it going out of production, that really bothers the community in general,” he said.
But Krebs doesn’t see solar farms with grazing the same way.
“It’s a retooling. It may not be corn production anymore. But we’re still going to need a lot of resources. We’re still going to need tire shops. I think there is a big fear that the solar companies will take the land out of production and then the meat shops and the food production would suffer because we don’t have that available on the landscape, but I think we can have utility scale solar that is healthy for our communities. And that really in my mind means honoring that soil with good vegetation.”
It’s important to note, however, that grazing can’t really solve renewables’ farmland problem. Often grazing is most helpful in dry Western desert. Not to mention sheep aren’t representative of all livestock – they’re a small percentage. And Heatmap Pro’s database has found an important distinction between farms focused on crops versus livestock — the latter isn’t as predisposed to oppose renewable energy.
Ground zero for the future of renewables on farmland is Savion's proposed Oak Run project in Ohio, which at up to 800 megawatts of generation capacity would be the state’s largest solar farm. The developer also plans to let farmers plant and harvest crops in between the solar arrays, making it the nation’s largest agri-voltaics site if completed.
But Oak Run is still being opposed by nearby landowners and local officials citing impacts to farmland. At Oak Run’s proposed site, neighboring township governments have passed resolutions opposing construction, as has the county board of commissioners, and town and county officials sued to undo Oak Run’s approval at the Ohio Power Siting Board. Although that lawsuit was unsuccessful, its backers want to take the matter to the state Supreme Court.
Some of this might be tied to the pure fact Ohio is super hostile to renewables right now. Over a third of counties in the state have restricted or outright banned solar and wind projects, according to Heatmap Pro’s database.
But there’s more at play here. The attorney representing town and county officials is Jack Van Kley, a lawyer and former state government official who remains based in Ohio and who has represented many farms in court for myriad reasons. I talked to Van Kley last week for an hour about why he opposes renewables projects (“they’re anything but clean in my opinion”), his views on global warming (“I don’t get involved in the dispute over climate change”) and a crucial fact that might sting: He says at least roughly two thirds of his clientele are farmers or communities reliant on agricultural businesses.
“It’s neighbor against neighbor in these communities,” he told me. “You’ve got a relatively low number of farmers who want to lease their land so that the solar companies can put solar panels on them for thirty or forty years, and it’s just a few landowners that are profiting from these projects.”
Van Kley spoke to a concern voiced by his clients I haven’t really heard addressed by solar developers much: overall impacts to irrigation. Specifically, he said an outsized concern among farmers is simply how putting a solar or wind farm adjacent or close to their property will impact how groundwater and surface water moves in the area, which can impact somebody’s existing agricultural drainage infrastructure.
“If you do that next to another property that is being farmed, you’ll kill the crop because you’ll flood the crop,” he claimed. “This is turning out to be a big issue for farmers who are opposing these facilities.”
Some have tried to paint Van Kley as funded or assisted by the fossil fuel lobby or shadowy actors. Van Kley has denied any involvement in those kinds of backroom dealings. While there’s glimpses of evidence gas and coal money plays at least a minor role with other characters fomenting opposition in the state, I really have no evidence of him being one of these people right now. It’s much easier and simpler to reason that he’s being paid by another influential sect – large landowners, many of whom work in agriculture.
That’s the same conclusion John Boeckl reached. Boeckl, an Army engineer, is one of the property owners leasing land for construction of the Oak Run project. He supports Oak Run being built and has submitted testimony in the legal challenge over its approvals. Though Boeckl certainly wants to know more about who is funding the opposition and has his gripes with neighbors who keep putting signs on his property that say “no solar on prime farmland,” he hasn’t witnessed any corporate skullduggery from shadowy outside entities.
“I think it’s just farmers being farmers,” he said. “They don’t want to be told what to do with their land.”
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A review of Heatmap Pro data reveals a troubling new trend in data center development.
Data centers are being built in places that restrict renewable energy. There are significant implications for our future energy grid – but it’s unclear if this behavior will lead to tech companies eschewing renewables or finding novel ways to still meet their clean energy commitments.
In the previous edition of The Fight, I began chronicling the data center boom and a nascent backlash to it by talking about Google and what would’ve been its second data center in southern Indianapolis, if the city had not rejected it last Monday. As I learned about Google’s practices in Indiana, I focused on the company’s first project – a $2 billion facility in Fort Wayne, because it is being built in a county where officials have instituted a cumbersome restrictive ordinance on large-scale solar energy. The county commission recently voted to make the ordinance more restrictive, unanimously agreeing to institute a 1,000-foot setback to take effect in early November, pending final approval from the county’s planning commission.
As it turns out, the Fort Wayne data center is not an exception: Approximately 44% of all data centers proposed in Indiana are in counties that have restricted or banned new renewable energy projects. This is according to a review of Heatmap Pro data in which we cross-referenced the county bans and ordinances we track against a list of proposed data centers prepared by an Indiana energy advocacy group, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the power going to these data centers is consistently fossil. Data centers can take years to construct and often rely on power fed to them from a distributed regional energy grid. But this does mean it would be exceptionally costly for any of these projects to build renewable generation on site, as a rising number of projects choose to do – not to mention that on a macro level, data centers may increasingly run up against the same cultural dynamics that are leading to solar and wind project denials. (See: this local news article about the Fort Wayne data center campus).
Chrissy Moy, a Google spokesperson, told me the Fort Wayne facility will get its power off of the PJM grid, and sent me links to solar projects and hydroelectric facilities in other states on the PJM it has power purchase agreements with. I’d note the company claims it “already matches” all of its global annual electricity demand with “renewable energy purchases.” What this means is that if Google can’t generate renewable energy for a data center directly, it will try to procure renewable energy at the same time from the same grid, even if it can’t literally use that clean power at that data center. And if that's not possible, it will search farther afield or at different times. (Google is one of the more aggressive big tech companies in this regard, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo details.) Google has also boasted that it will provide an undisclosed amount of excess clean electricity through rights transfers to Indiana Michigan Power when the tech company’s load is low and demand on the broader grid is peaking, as part of Google’s broader commitment to grid flexibility.
I reached out to Tom Wilson, an energy systems technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-focused organization that studies modern power and works with tech companies on flexible data center energy use, including Google. Wilson told me that in Indiana, many of the siting decisions for data centers were made before counties enacted moratoria against renewable energy and that tech companies may not always be knowingly siting projects in places where significant solar or wind generation would be impractical or even impossible. (We would just note that Fort Wayne, Indiana, has an opposition risk score of 84 in Heatmap Pro, meaning it would have been a very risky place to build a renewable energy project even without that restrictive ordinance.) It also indicates some areas may be laying down renewables restrictions after seeing data center development, which is in line with a potential land use techlash.
Wilson told me that two thirds of data centers rely on power from the existing energy grid whereas surveys indicate about a third choose to have at least some electricity generation on site. In at least the latter case, land use constraints and permitting problems really can be a hurdle for building renewable energy close to where data is processed. This is a problem exacerbated when centers are developed near population centers, which Wilson said is frequently the case because companies want to reduce “latency” for customers. In other words, they want to “reduce the time it takes to get answers to people” via artificial intelligence or other data products.
“The primary challenges are the size of the data center and the amount of space it takes to build renewables,” he said. “They are moving from 20 megawatt or 40 megawatt data centers to 100, 200, 300 megawatt data centers. It’s really hard to locate that much renewable [energy] right near a population center. So that requires transmission, and unfortunately right now in the U.S. and in many other countries, transmission takes a significant amount of time to build.”
The majority of data centers are served by regional power grids, Wilson told me. Companies like Google, Meta, and others continue to invest in renewable energy procurement while building facilities in areas that have restricted new solar or wind power infrastructure. In some cases, companies may feel they’re forced to seek these places out because the land is just plain cheap and has existing fiber optic cable networks.
At the same time, there are large data centers getting energy generated on site, and how they each approach their energy sources varies. It’s also not always consistent.
For instance, Meta’s new Prometheus supercluster complex in New Albany, Ohio — potentially the world’s first 1 gigawatt data center — will reportedly have a significant amount of new gas power generation constructed at the facility, even though the company also struck a deal with Invenergy over the summer to procure at least 400 megawatts of solar from two projects in Ohio that already have their permits. One is in Clinton County and was fully permitted but resulted in a years-long fight before the Ohio Power Siting Board and included conservative media backlash. The other is in Franklin County and got its permits in 2021, before a recent wave of opposition against solar projects. Prometheus itself will be sited on the Licking County side of New Albany, where solar has been extremely difficult to build, even though most of this Columbus suburb is in solar-supporting Franklin.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI data center notoriously relies on a polluting gas plant in Memphis, Tennessee. The surrounding Shelby County had a solar moratorium until mere months ago that residents want to bring back. An affiliate company of xAI used for the project’s real estate is subleasing land near the data center for a solar farm, but it is unclear right now if it’ll power the data center.
In the end, it really does seem like data centers are being sited in places with renewable energy restrictions. What the data center developers plan to do about it — if anything — is still an open question.
And more on the week’s most important fights around renewable energy projects.
1. Ocean County, New Jersey – A Trump administration official said in a legal filing that the government is preparing to conduct a rulemaking that could restrict future offshore wind development and codify a view that could tie the hands of future presidential administrations.
2. Prince William County, Virginia – The large liberal city of Manassas rejected a battery project over fire fears, indicating that post-Moss Landing, anxieties continue to pervade in communities across the country.
3. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – The Sooner state legislature on Monday held a joint committee meeting on solar and wind setbacks featuring prominent anti-wind advocates.
4. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – The developers of a large-scale solar project are suing the county over being rejected.
5. Dane County, Wisconsin – The Wisconsin Public Service Commission approved Invenergy’s Badger Hollow wind project – the state’s first new fully-permitted wind energy project in more than a decade.
A conversation with Courtney Brady of Evergreen Action.
This week I chatted with Courtney Brady, Midwest region deputy director for climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. Brady recently helped put together a report on rural support for renewables development, for which Evergreen Action partnered with the Private Property Rights Institute, a right-leaning advocacy group. Together, these two organizations conducted a series of interviews with self-identifying conservatives in Pennsylvania and Michigan focused on how and why GOP-leaning communities may be hesitant, reluctant, or outright hostile to solar or wind power.
What they found, Brady told me, was that politics mattered a lot less than an individual’s information diet. The conversation was incredibly informative, so I felt like it was worth sharing with all of you.
The following chat was edited lightly for clarity. Let’s dive in:
Okay, so tell me first why you did this report.
Clean energy deployment is getting increasingly challenging for a variety of reasons. What’s happening on the federal level is one thing, but something we don’t talk about much in the climate movement is what’s happening locally, what actually determines the odds of a project being successful and incorporated into the grid.
The side of the story we often hear that’s the loudest is from people at the local level who are opposed to these projects, and it limits our ability to understand the nuances. It’s not always that everyone opposes these projects in their community — that’s often not the case. We talked to several farmers in this report who are using these projects as a lifeline to keep farms in their families’ hands, generate income, preserve their farms. These projects can provide an income lifeline for these farms.
Something we tried to accomplish with this report was to understand the different perspectives, what was driving them. The only way we could do that was by going out and talking to these people in their own communities, on their own land.
The group we worked with has a very conservative background. They work on Republican campaigns. They’re very involved in local government relations. And they were the ones who were able to go out and interview these folks about what this means for their communities.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed the head of the League of Conservation Voters about the way that renewables are perceived as culturally left wing. Are there any takeaways in your research about how to deal with that?
You know, I expected to hear a little bit more of that political ideological leanings than what we actually got in these interviews. Our partners went out and interviewed seven folks; four of the case studies were in Pennsylvania, and three of them were in Michigan. It was a mix of local government officials and landowners themselves, most of whom were farmers. And they asked them, What are you hearing in your community? Where’s the opposition coming from?
I’d assumed this would be a left-versus-right, red-versus-blue issue, but this is not what we heard. We heard a lot about a lack of information or misinformation in these communities and the crucial incomes these projects can provide to landowners themselves. Again, everyone in this report that was interviewed identified as a conservative or said they were Trump supporters. It’s interesting to hear that hasn’t impacted their views of clean energy at large. They were either really happy with the projects they’d sited or still trying to get projects sited years and years later.
When you talked about misinformation, what came up?
The sizing of these leases. We heard about fears in communities that land was going to be completely overtaken over by solar or wind.
Some of these farmers said one of the biggest things they heard from their neighbors was that we’re giving away hundreds and thousands of acres to solar projects and wind projects and taking away land that should go towards crops and food. We’re hearing from these farmers that a lot of this land is no longer fertile, so providing a temporary solar lease allows that farmer to continue generating revenue while letting that land breathe.
People really had this fear of farmland being completely converted to energy production. I don’t know where a lot of that came from. We asked if that was something spread on the internet and we heard, Neighbors talk and there are Facebook groups. So there’s this overblown fear about the size of projects.
When it comes to these interviews, it does seem like you spoke to a lot of people who believe what you say. But did you speak to people who don’t believe this stuff? Because right now we’re seeing cases where opposition is either winning over county commissioners or voting out of office local officials who believe exactly what you heard from some folks.
We’ve heard so much of the opposition. It’s trending, really growing across the country. And understanding the root of why opposition is there is important. But so often we don’t hear the other side of it, these really nuanced perspectives.
There are these folks in the middle who are really thematic in these interviews — this is not about energy but a core American property rights issue. That resonates with people regardless of party.
The other piece is, there’s fear in communities of being the person to speak out against groups that are loud, the ones who want to kick people out of office over energy things. So it was really important to elevate these voices and in the interviews just made a lot of common sense. This was about elevating voices that don’t always get a seat at the table in discussions around these issues.