LAFAYETTE, IN — Officials are one step closer to heavily restricting the development of solar farms in Tippecanoe County, after the Area Plan Commission voted Wednesday evening to advance a proposed ordinance change that left both anti-solar community members and pro-solar advocates unhappy.
Should county commissioners give the ordinance final approval at their meeting next week, no future solar farms in the county could be larger than 400 acres, and no more than 6,000 acres in the county total could go to solar development.
Developments would also be required to be at least 500 feet away from the property lines of homeowners, be composed of contiguous acreage and include noise- and glare-cancelling infrastructure.
Community members, many of whom are concerned about noise pollution and the destruction of farmland, said Wednesday they don’t believe the new restrictions on solar development go far enough. Pro-solar advocates, for their part, think the rules are too strict and will effectively kill any more solar development in the county.
What both sides can agree on, though, is that the ordinance advanced by the APC isn’t anywhere near where they would like it to be.
“The committee did put a lot of time into this, and that certainly is appreciated,” commissioner Tom Murtaugh told the crowd, which filled the committee’s meeting room from wall to wall as community members swarmed downtown to share their thoughts on the ordinance. “And I know for some, it’s not working out the way they expected.”
The late-evening vote came at the tail end of nearly an hour and a half of public comment, in which speakers railed against the ordinance, solar developers, the commissioners and even each other.
Neighbors, enraged by what they argued was an unwillingness of the commissioners to consider solar developments’ impact on local communities, passed out a 23-page packet to attendees outlining a host of changes they wanted to see to the ordinance. 
Some of those neighbors, wearing matching red clothing to show solidarity against the impending vote, stood in unison across the room and lambasted the exclusion of farmers from the decision-making process.
Activists, including community members and Purdue students, decried those opposed to solar developments as being “stubborn” and falling for the propaganda of “fossil fuel oligarchs.”
Out-of-state solar developers, themselves hoping to build in Tippecanoe County one day, pleaded with the commissioners to avoid enacting a “de facto ban” on renewable energy.
And even some members of the committee that drafted the ordinance last month said they believe it had been altered by county staff to overzealously end solar development.
“I want to say to the public, the ordinance that you have before you with these extreme provisions is not the ordinance we worked to develop,” said Jane Frankenberger, a Purdue professor who sat on the committee. “I talked to the APC staff yesterday to see if committee members could write a dissent, and if not, if our names could be removed.”
After commissioners last year implemented a yearlong moratorium on solar construction in the county, the APC assembled the “solar study group” in the hopes of nailing down exactly what the future ordinance should include. It included professors, industry experts, local residents and engineers.
But the committee’s original draft last month drew significant public pushback from neighbors, who said the initially proposed 200-foot property boundary and lack of a limit on size would interfere with neighborhoods.
The committee members themselves also seem to have struggled to reach an agreement internally on what the ordinance should actually say, largely leaving the nitty-gritty details up to the commissioners. 
“It became clear that we weren’t going to be able to achieve a full consensus on every single proposed change,” said APC Executive Director Ryan O’Gara.
In response, the APC rewrote large sections of the ordinance, Frankenberger said, imposing new acreage limits and stripping the ability of developers to build on select agriculture-zoned land.
That last change, in particular, would lock out 41% of the county’s currently available land from being used at all for solar farms. 
“The ordinance in front of you would put Tippecanoe County in the category of counties who will fall behind because they overrestricted renewable energy,” Frankenberger told the commissioners. “I have watched in amazement as a small but vocal group opposed to utility-scale solar has so effectively lobbied for the extreme and outlandish provisions in this draft ordinance.”
In response, some audience members shouted and jeered, demanding Frankenberger sit.
Advocates for solar development argued that the ordinance would effectively make it impossible for future developers to find a site for their planned solar farms. There are very few places in the county, they said, where development of contiguous, 400-acre sites could readily begin.
“As the ordinance is written now, it essentially puts a ban on solar,” said Anna Sorg, a Purdue student and member of a host of campus sustainability groups. “If the regulation is adopted as written, there will be little to no incentive for solar development in this county.”
But neighbors disagree, pointing to a host of sub-400 acre solar projects currently being developed across the state.
According to a fact sheet they passed out to the meeting’s attendees, more than 70 different such projects are in the works.
The required distance between property lines and solar farms — called a setback — is also reasonable, they argued.
“The average setback across all counties in Indiana is just under 450 feet,” said Joe Sobieralski, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who sat on the APC’s study committee. “We got 500 feet. That’s not absurd, right? And if you look at the data on all the operational solar facilities in Indiana, most, the majority, almost 90%, are on 300 acres or less.”
Community members weren’t pleased. While some solar advocates called the new rules “draconian,” neighbors throughout the meeting insisted that restrictions be brought to even higher extremes beyond simple size limits.
But Mark Schuler, a senior manager for the company behind the Rainbow Tour Solar Project that was voted down by county officials last year after significant public pushback, said he couldn’t foresee any developers wanting to come to Tippecanoe County again with the new restrictions.
“No utility-scale developer can develop in your county with the original ordinance that was up there,” he said. “The new setbacks are deal killers for anybody coming to town.”
After the 1,700-acre Rainbow Trout project was halted in August, Geenex and RWE Energy, the companies behind Rainbow Trout Solar, filed a civil lawsuit to reverse the decision. 
In December, Circuit Court Judge Sean Persin ruled that a group of 11 neighbors who fought the proposed solar development will be allowed to intervene in the company’s lawsuit.
“If you’re going to give me something to help protect my property value, I’m going to listen,” farm owner John Ade said in response to Schuler. “But when you have no alternative, then we’re going to be back in court.”
Schuler also argued that new proposed limits on the setbacks of substations — units in solar farms that manage power supply — would be difficult to work with under the current regulations. 
Commissioners approved new rules that would require substations to be placed at least 1,000 feet away from property lines, after neighbors insisted that the noise caused by them would be too overwhelming.
For a future project he hopes to build, he said, the substation would be “much, much smaller” than other comparable substations and wouldn’t pose a noise issue.
“It won’t look anything like that giant monstrosity that you can put out there,” he said. “Ours is very small, less than two acres.”
The crowd erupted into laughter, throwing jeers at Schuler.
“Oh, only two acres?” someone sarcastically shouted.
Some of the other suggestions community members floated during the marathon of public comment included: restricting solar construction projects to 8 a.m. through 5 p.m. during weekdays, inserting language that would require ease-of-access routes for emergency vehicles, requiring solar developers to repair neighbors’ drainage systems and laying more stringent restrictions on the decommissioning of solar projects.
“I’m not here to speak ill of solar. I don’t think most of us in this room are enemies of solar power,” Joshua Brant, a Democrat who is running to represent District 23 in the Indiana Senate this year, told the commissioners. “But instead of having two different conversations, we should be working together toward a collaborative approach.”
As Brant spoke, suggesting instead that the county require solar panels be installed on newly built homes in the county, commissioners warned he was running over his allotted time to give public comment.
“All right, let me just skip to the chase,” he responded.
“Please!” someone in the audience yelled back.
Also at issue Wednesday was whether the APC had given enough of an input to the county’s farmers, whose land could largely be used for solar development should restrictions be relaxed.
Multiple speakers, including Tippecanoe County Farm Bureau President Donna Scanlon, pointed out that no farmers were appointed to the APC’s study committee when it was formed last year. 
On Monday, the members of the Farm Bureau drafted a letter to commissioners decrying what they called a violation of farmers’ property rights. They argued that solar development would unnecessarily diminish surrounding property value and destroy fertile topsoil in the county.
“It is fundamentally unsound to sacrifice irreplaceable, historically top-tier farmland for subpar use,” the letter read, “as well as to permit the degradation of our productive soils and wildlife habitats in the name of ‘green’ energy.”
Steve Shelby, a landowner from the western part of the county, told the commissioners he thinks the exclusion of farmers from the committee led to large blind spots in the ordinance.
“Seventy-five percent of the land in Tippecanoe County is farmland,” he said, turning to the crowd behind him. “But of all the experts on that committee, how many of them were farmers?”
APC commissioners did offer some concession to community demands, though, opting to add some stricter language to part of the ordinance and decrease the amount of sunlight a solar panel could reflect.
Most of the suggestions the anti-solar public made weren’t addressed as commissioners began to vote.
“We have gotten a lot of public input,” APC commissioner Gary Schroeder said. “As we make ordinances, they can’t be perfect the first time, and this is the second go around. … So I appreciate everybody’s input.”
Only three APC members voted against the ordinance, O’Gara said. It will go to the county commissioners on Monday.
Contact Seth Nelson at nelso615@purdue.edu.

source