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A Texas global energy company’s plans to build nearly 30 acres of solar panels in Mayfield on the mountainside above Business Route 6 are unrelated to the data center industry, Mayor Al Chelik said.
Plans by Solar Star Mayfield 1 LLC — a limited liability company operating under Houston-based TotalEnergies — for a 28-acre solar farm have stirred fears among residents about whether they would fuel power-hungry data centers. The company’s representatives will testify before borough council during a public hearing June 10 at 6 p.m. in the Mayfield Borough Municipal Building, 739 Penn Ave., according to public notices published May 27 and May 29 in The Times-Tribune. The solar farm would be in the 600 block of Business Route 6 on the west side of the road.
While public hearings often culminate with a decision to approve or deny a project, Chelik said next week’s hearing is intended to be informative. Mayfield principally permits solar farms in the heavy commercial area surrounding the Business Route 6 corridor, which means they do not need special approvals like conditional use designations often used to regulate data centers.
Property owners have the right to use their property how they feel as long as it complies with the law, and Solar Star Mayfield has met the borough’s requirements, Chelik said, pointing to their standards on noise, glare and decommissioning.
“You may live on one side of town and say … ‘We’d rather see trees,’ but that’s not their decision,” Chelik said. “They have no right to be telling somebody how to use their property if they’re using it legally.”
Council will vote during the meeting next week to consider the borough planning commission’s recommendation on Solar Star Mayfield’s land development application, Council President Diana Campbell said in a text. The planning commission will meet Wednesday to review the plans in order to make its recommendation.
Solar Star Mayfield, 1201 Louisiana St., Suite 1800, Houston, Texas, filed its zoning permit application for “installation of ground-mounted photovoltaic solar panel arrays and associated accessories including access roads, security fencing, and concrete pads for electrical inverter equipment” with an accompanying site plan signed March 9. The Houston address corresponds with TotalEnergies, which describes itself online as a global integrated energy company that produces and markets energies in the oil and biofuels, natural gas, biogas, low-carbon hydrogen, renewables and electricity markets.
The project, which uses the address 603 Scranton Carbondale Highway, will not require any public water or sanitary sewer service, with employees anticipated to make two to three site trips per month for maintenance, according to the plans and application. The site plan depicts a vertical stretch of solar panels extending along much of the property’s northeast border, with additional panels throughout the center of the site.
Solar Star Mayfield would be leasing the land from Mayfield Realty Group LLC, according to the public notices. Mayfield Realty Group, 513 Grandview St., Clarks Summit, acquired the land seven years ago for $600,000, according to a property transaction recorded March 1, 2019. The realty group and Solar Star then signed a memorandum to lease the property Dec. 20, 2021, according to a copy of the document filed with the county June 15, 2022.
Chelik said the developer first contacted the borough in 2024 expressing interest in building a solar farm. Mayfield immediately reached out to the Lackawanna County Regional Planning Commission for sample ordinances as they assembled their own, he said.
“You just can’t put an ordinance up that makes it so restrictive that you can’t put anything there,” Chelik said.
Municipalities in Pennsylvania must allow for every type of lawful land use somewhere within their borders, from landfills to data centers. Failing to provide for every use exposes a local government to legal challenges over exclusionary zoning.
Mayfield Borough Council adopted standards regulating the construction, operation and decommissioning of large-scale solar electric energy facilities in August 2024, later amending those standards in October 2024 to reduce the minimum setback requirements from 150 feet to 50 feet. The borough reduced the setback requirements out of concern it could be challenged in court and ruled overly restrictive, Chelik said. The heavy commercial zoning district only requires 10-foot setbacks property lines, so solar farms still need an additional 40 feet, he said.The borough’s land-use legislation designated large-scale solar electric facilities as principal permitted uses in its heavy commercial zoning district, which encompasses the Business Route 6 corridor and Plank Road north of Chestnut Street.
While principal permitted uses do not require public hearings, Mayfield’s ordinance mandates that, if the borough determines a solar farm zoning application is complete, it will have 60 days to schedule a public hearing before council where the applicant will present the project and answer questions, according to the ordinance. The public will also have the opportunity to ask questions and comment. Following the hearing, council will have 45 days to issue a written decision approving or denying the application.
With commentary circulating on social media about the proposal, Chelik emphasized it is not related to data centers. There are no data centers proposed in Mayfield, he said.
“If you don’t get the data centers, if you’re successful, then this energy is going into the grid, and it’s cheaper to produce than what PPL is producing right now, so there should be a savings,” he said. “Secondly, if the data centers go in, you’re going to need a hell of a lot more energy than we have right now, so a solar farm would help mitigate some of the increases that people are going to feel.”
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