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Show of hands.
Who hates solar energy?
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Anyone… anyone… Bueller.
It’s like hating puppies.
Now, I’m not saying Lincoln County hates puppies but it’s getting difficult to know what the good people in the southern section of the Sioux Falls metro actually would approve following the rejection of plans for a small-scale solar operation near Lennox.
In November, the County Commission rejected, on a 3-2 vote, a proposal by US Solar to put up panels on 60 acres of private land just north of the community.
The City of Lennox liked it.
The Lennox School District was all in.
Xcel Energy was planning to buy the electricity and pump it into the grid.
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Three members of the Lincoln County Commission, however, decided it was a bad idea.
Why?
Drainage.
That’s right, drainage.
Now it just seems like we’re making up reasons to say no.
Let’s remember for a minute that Lincoln County is rather infamous for saying no to developments.
Wind farms.
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Carbon-sequestration pipelines.
A prison.
No, no, no.
Which is their right and all, but it does seem a tad shortsighted given what the future of our metropolitan area holds.
Leaving hyperscale data centers out of the equation for a moment, we’re all going to need more electricity. That’s just a fact.
All those gadgets and computers and, dare we suggest it, farm operations need power.
Where is that going to come from? Not Lincoln County apparently.
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A few weeks ago at the Growth Summit organized by the Sioux Metro Growth Alliance I was fortunate to meet Peter Schmitt. It was completely by chance as he was slipping out of the conference in an effort to beat the impending winter storm and the precarious trip back to Minneapolis.
Schmitt, as luck would have it, is director of project management for US Solar.
We exchanged information with a promise to catch up and talk about the potential and challenges for expanding power production in our little corner of the world.
In truth, at that point I didn’t make the connection between Schmitt’s company and the Lennox project.
That all came out in the phone conversation we had some time later.
The plan was for US Solar to put in the panels to produce 7 megawatts of energy that would be purchased by Xcel, which has put out a call for proposals for such projects.
The current landowner would continue to own it and the company would remove the panels after 25 years.
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US Solar met with all the parties involved, including the city, school district, township and neighbors. The drainage concerns were raised then but the company felt they had addressed those issues.
Underlying the specific issues of this one solar project is an ongoing discussion about the loss of farmland to urban sprawl and other uses.
Which is a fine discussion to have except for one point, putting in solar panels doesn’t take land out of production, it just changes it.
It’s true you can no longer drive a combine through there but you can still produce vegetables and other small scale crops. It can still be used for grazing, particularly sheep.
And if we’re being honest for a minute, industrial-style row crop production – corn and soybeans – with generations of chemical application and drain tiling hasn’t left a spotless legacy.
It’s just what we’re used to.
That’s been frustrating to Schmitt of US Solar.
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“There are a lot of opportunities for solar to go hand in hand with agriculture,” he told me. “We had amended and tailored this project. We were going to have prairie habitat and pollinator grasses grazed by sheep within the fence and then also some additional vegetable production outside of the fence, which we thought would fit quite nicely with the agricultural legacy of the land. Unfortunately we didn’t quite win over Lincoln County this time.”
There’s a chance this particular project could be revisited, Schmitt said, but it would take one of the three dissenting voices on the commission to reconsider their vote.
“This was a pretty new technology for the area, a new opportunity for the area,” he said. “And there was maybe a little bit more trepidation than was warranted for it.”
Lincoln County notwithstanding, Schmitt said his company sees a lot of opportunity in South Dakota. The conference in Sioux Falls focused on the future of energy and was attended by about 250 community and economic development officials.
Schmitt said after he presented during one of the panel discussions, several attendees expressed interest in learning more, including a mayor from the area who said he’d completely changed his mind about solar.
Among the benefits are increases in property tax revenue for cities, counties and schools districts. The Lennox project, for instance, would have generated an estimated $850,000 over its 25-year lifespan. Roughly $261,000 of that would have gone to South Dakota’s general fund, while $589,000 would stay within Lincoln County.
The company primarily works in the “community solar” space, which focuses on partnering with municipal and cooperative electricity providers. Projects are typically in the five to 50 acre range and helps those providers offset their costs and increase their supply.
“We’re talking to a few other groups around the state as well because we see South Dakota as having a major opportunity to be a bigger player in the solar space than they already are. South Dakota already has wind in a major way. It has a lot of hydro resources in the west, but there’s also a lot of solar resources in South Dakota if we can find ways to work together with communities and connect it to markets,” Schmitt said.
These solar operations can be constructed and operating quickly, compared to other forms of energy such as coal or natural gas. They don’t require major transmission line upgrades and, while it’s obvious should be restated, don’t pollute.
“We are the fastest deployable resource in the country at the moment and the cheapest,” Schmitt said. “Solar especially at this distribution scale, 3 to 5 megawatts, 60 acres and below projects, these are 18-month to 24-month turnarounds from signing a contract with a land owner, with a farmer, to to put them online.”
Excel is a huge company, to be sure, that is trying to find ways to provide electricity to customers and make money under the parameters established by the Public Utilities Commission.
But beyond Excel are dozens of cooperatives and small towns that serve rural areas. The coops, especially, have been innovators in finding ways to bring power to people and places historically underserved by the major utilities.
Small-scale production makes a lot of sense for much of South Dakota, where the sun shines and the wind blows.
“We’re still bullish on South Dakota,” Schmitt said.
What say you Lincoln County?
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