Grazing sheep help manage the vegetation at solar sites in Minnesota.
By Jennifer Bjorhus Star Tribune JULY 3, 2021
Sheep graze through the tall prairie grass, their bleats breaking the quiet as butterflies and insects flit through the native flowers.
The pastoral setting is not a restored prairie. It’s a solar installation in rural Chisago County — one of the 16 in Minnesota run by Enel Green Power, a global renewable energy company based in Rome that supplies Xcel Energy.
In Minnesota, at least, the solar farms are generating more than electricity. Instead of turf, bare ground or gravel, the land beneath Enel’s Minnesota installations were all seeded with native pollinator-friendly grasses, sedges and wildflowers. They’ve matured into rich native habitats for bees, insects and butterflies — in a landscape desperately short of them.
Minnesota state agencies, such as the Public Utilities Commission, Department of Natural Resources and the Board of Soil and Water Resources all encourage such plantings at solar sites as a matter of policy.
“One of the fastest-growing trends in solar, nationwide, is doing better than turf grass under and around the panels,” said Rob Davis, director of the Center for Pollinators in Energy at the St. Paul nonprofit Fresh Energy. That could be food or other types of vegetation.
Minnesota pioneered standards for what constitutes pollinator-friendly vegetation at solar sites — similar to standards for organic products — following legislation in 2016 to prevent greenwashing or false environment-friendly claims, Davis said.
The Monarch Joint Venture in St. Paul is among the groups studying the results.
Laura Lukens, the group’s national monitoring coordinator, has been at several Enel sites with her clipboard this summer taking inventories of the quality and abundance of flowering plants and milkweed, and the native pollinators using them. She’s also tracking the difference between the habitats growing directly under the panels vs. the ones in between. Lukens said she’s excited by what she’s seen.
“We’ve been seeing great things in terms of the floral community and the pollinators using the habitat there,” Lukens said. “I saw monarchs breeding at every site I visited.”
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