solar

Adirondacks man is counting on solar to keep his dairy farm going. Neighbors not so sure

Jon Close, a farmer from Mayfield with a long beard and wearing a purple sweatshirt, stands outside the Mayfield Fire House.
Jon Close, owner of the Close Brothers Farm in the Town of Mayfield on Great Sacandaga Lake, stands outside the town fire house on Feb. 15 where a public informational meeting on a proposed solar facility on his property took place. Photo by Gwendolyn Craig

By Gwendolyn Craig, Adirondack Explorer

Nearly 100 people attended an open house Wednesday night about a proposed 40-megawatt solar array in the town of Mayfield in Fulton County. If built, it will become the largest solar project in the Adirondack Park to date. The facility plans are an example, too, of some of the park’s remaining dairy farmers looking for a new cash crop to make ends meet.

Solar developer Boralex Inc. is looking to place 200 acres of panels on the Close brothers’ family dairy farm. Fifth-generation farmer Jon Close, 64, said the family owns about 800 acres total, including a bucolic hillside on Great Sacandaga Lake that he will leave undeveloped so as not to ruin the view.

It has been a struggle to keep the farm, Close said, between the stagnant price of milk and trouble finding employees.

“This opportunity came along, so we’re going to take advantage of it,” Close said. “The money that we’ll receive for the panels will keep things going and down the road, it’s our hope that it will be returned to farming, whereas if it goes into homes, golf courses, condos or whatever, it will be gone forever.”

The solar farm is more than double the size of the largest project approved in the Adirondack Park so far. Gov. Kathy Hochul first announced the facility in June, part of a round-up of 22 large-scale renewable energy projects.

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A backlash to new renewables is mounting across the nation

Across the country — from suburban Virginia, rural Michigan, southern Tennessee, and the sugar cane fields of Louisiana to the coasts of Maine and New Jersey and the deserts of Nevada — new renewable energy development has drawn heated opposition that has birthed, in many cases, bans, moratoriums, and other restrictions. 

 Wind turbines in Hardin County, Ohio, on Feb. 3, 2023. (Robert Zullo/ States Newsroom)


By ROBERT ZULLO, Florida Phoenix

BUCYRUS, Ohio — In four terms as a county elected official in northern Ohio, it was the most contentious issue Doug Weisenauer had ever seen.

The state legislature had newly empowered county governments to drastically restrict wind and solar power development, a process formerly overseen by the Ohio Power Siting Board, and the meetings of the three-member governing body for Crawford County (population 41,754) suddenly started becoming a lot more animated. 

“As soon as Senate Bill 52 passed, the anti-wind people, they started converging on our weekly commissioners’ meetings and demanding that we do something,” said Weisenauer, a Republican, like the other two members of Crawford County Commission. 

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Apex Clean Energy, a Virginia company, had been signing leases with locals for a proposed 300-megawatt wind farm, called Honey Creek, but Weisenauer was skeptical it would ever get built, saying in an interview he’d seen more than half a dozen would-be wind projects come and go. 

Ultimately, the commissioners voted 2-1 last year, with Weisenauer the lone no vote, for a 10-year ban on wind development. The commission’s decision was overwhelmingly upheld by county voters in a referendum last fall. 

“I said all along I am not telling people what they can and can’t do on their property,” Weisenauer said. “It got ugly. Our families have been split, and friendships broken. It was bad for our community.”

Crawford County, of course, is far from an isolated case. Across the country — from suburban Virginia, rural Michigan, southern Tennessee, and the sugar cane fields of Louisiana to the coasts of Maine and New Jersey and the deserts of Nevada — new renewable energy development has drawn heated opposition that has birthed, in many cases, bans, moratoriums, and other restrictions. 

With states, corporations, utilities, and the federal government setting aggressive renewable energy goals, as well as big tax incentives such as in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, wind and solar developers have been pushing projects that are igniting fierce battles over property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns. 

And those debates are often happening in a miasma of misinformation and skewed by political polarization. However, some who have seen the backlash to renewable development up close and personal also say developers need to do a better job of being upfront with communities and convincing them of the benefits of their projects.

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Soaring energy prices motivating Connecticut buildings to move to solar

By Braley Dodson, News 8

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — Pete Rappoccio knew he wanted solar panels on Sign Pro’s new building.

It was 2018. The manufacturing facility was set to be about 40,000 square feet, housing printers, and welders. Solar wasn’t a very common feature at the time, but it was a fresh site, and he knew it was time to take the leap.

“It was always something I looked at, and I looked forward to as a possibility,” he said.

About 890 solar panels went onto that roof in Plantsville — enough to power 1,340 houses. Since then, the business has tripled its number of employees, built another facility and is using the extra electricity it’s generated to power a new electric vehicle fleet.

“It’s pretty huge,” Rappoccio said.

From the beginning, that meant not having to pay the supply portion of the company’s Eversource bill. After adding a solar bank to store that extra energy to use at night, Sign Pro is now completely off the grid.

“We’ve been very happy with our solar program and what we’ve done is any surplus money, we’ve reinvested into our company,” Rappoccio said.

It’s a gamble that has already paid for itself, with the cost of the new storage bank alone recouping the price of the investment within four months.

And with Connecticut electric companies increasing prices by 50% this year, Rappoccio is glad for that decision he made just a few years ago. He now advocates for other businesses to also make the switch.

“If you see the amount that comes back, it’s amazing,” he said.

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First Solar to build $1.1 Billion Alabama Solar Panel Plant

By Ryan Secard, Industry Week

An Ohio solar panel manufacturer is expanding with a new production facility in Northern Alabama. First Solar Inc. announced Wednesday, November 16 that it would spend $1.1 billion building a new solar panel manufacturing plant in Lawrence County of the state. The latest announcement follows previous announcements by First Solar that it would expand its R&D and manufacturing operations in Ohio.

The Alabama factory, First Solar’s fourth plant and its first outside of Ohio, is expected to employ about 700 people, produce 3.5 gigawatts DC of capacity per year, and come online by the middle of the decade.

In a statement, First Solar CEO gave credit to the infrastructure bill signed in August by President Biden, which included $369 billion in funding for energy security and climate change, and said the new plant would be part of a wider U.S. transition to renewable energy.

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Op-Ed: NJ’s solar industry collapse puts thousands of jobs at risk

Here’s what Gov. Murphy and lawmakers must do to restore a once-thriving industry

By Rodger Ferguson in NJ Spotlight News

New Jersey’s solar industry is collapsing. Installations are down, the solar pipeline is shrinking and thousands of jobs are at risk. This distressing reality is set out in black and white in a recently released report prepared by Sustainable Energy Advantage, LLC (SEA).

Gov. Phil Murphy’s 2019 Energy Master Plan set the stage for New Jersey to achieve 100% clean, renewable energy by 2050. The master plan concluded that New Jersey could meet this goal by reaching 20.64 GW dc of solar installations by 2035. To get there, the state needs to incentivize the installation of approximately 1,140 MW dc, annually, from 2020 to 2035.

Unfortunately, New Jersey installations have declined by an average of 10%-15% per year for the past four years. The projection for 2022 is 280 MW dc — the lowest total since 2015 and only about 25% of the Energy Master Plan’s target. Unless something changes, drastically and immediately, it will be all but impossible for the state to meet its solar installation targets.

The solar industry is a multibillion-dollar industry in New Jersey, with over 6,000 people employed. In years past, the state ranked first in the country in solar installations. Based on current projections, it will fall to 21st within five years. According to the SEA report, whereas New Jersey once ranked first in the country in solar jobs, it has now slipped to 12th. In addition to Gov. Murphy’s ambitious and important clean-energy goals, thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of investment in the state are at risk.

Although many factors contribute to the rate of solar installations, including equipment costs and interconnection delays, the SEA report notes that, at the same time New Jersey’s solar market is contracting, installation rates across the country are rising. In fact, in the same period (2019-21) that New Jersey’s solar market contracted by 23%, the U.S. solar market expanded by 78%. The report concludes that “NJ-specific characteristics and policy choices are the primary drivers of recent trends.”

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What Manchin got for his agreement to the climate bill

Along the way to the $369 billion package, the West Virginia senator secured an array of concessions for his state and for the fossil fuel industry.


By Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman, New York Times

WASHINGTON — In a twist of fate, Congress is suddenly poised to pass the most ambitious climate bill in United States history, largely written by a senator from a coal state who became a millionaire from his family coal business and who has taken more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any of his colleagues have.

That senator, Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, managed to win several major concessions for the fossil fuel industry in the $369 billion climate and energy package, which was made public on Wednesday by Senate Democrats. Mr. Manchin’s vote is critical in the evenly divided chamber because no Republicans support the bill.

What’s inside the Democrat’s new climate bill

The measure requires the federal government to auction off more public lands and waters for oil drilling. It expands tax credits for carbon capture technology that could allow coal or gas-burning power plants to keep operating with lower emissions. Mr. Manchin also secured a promise from Democratic leaders to vote on a separate measure to speed up the process of issuing permits for energy infrastructure, potentially smoothing the way for projects like a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia.

Yet most environmental groups and Democrats were jubilant about the final bill, which would also pump hundreds of billions of dollars into low-carbon energy technologies — like wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles — and would put the United States on track to slash its greenhouse gas emissions to roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

“We just made a deal with Joe Manchin,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, who had pushed for more expansive climate provisions. “I don’t think anybody should have expected that this is the bill I would have written.” But even with the fossil fuel provisions, he said, the measure is “the most significant move in the right direction that the United States has ever taken.”

With Manchin deal, talk of Biden’s emergency declaration may be dead

The legislation, if it passes, is expected to bring big benefits to West Virginia. It would make permanent a federal trust fund to support coal miners with black lung disease. It would offer new incentives for companies to build wind and solar farms in areas where coal mines or coal plants have recently closed. And it would provide generous tax credits for nascent technologies like carbon capture and storage and low-emissions hydrogen fuels, which Mr. Manchin has supported.

“Those are his pet projects,” James Van Nostrand, a law professor at West Virginia University, said. “I think he’s going to say, ‘I used my strategic position to bring back benefits for West Virginia.’ And he’ll probably do pretty well in the next election.”

Read the full story here

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