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The long-fought Coyote Creek solar project in eastern Sacramento County is moving forward again, but smaller. A settlement in an environmental lawsuit will shrink the solar farm’s footprint by about 20%, preserving roughly 3,300 mature blue oak trees on the Barton Ranch property near Folsom.
The deal resolves a California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit against developer Sacramento Valley Energy Center, as reported by the Sacramento Bee. The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors had approved the original 1,412-acre layout on the 2,704-acre Barton Ranch property in November 2025, but conservation groups pushed back hard over the project’s toll on the oak woodland that defines the area’s foothill landscape.
Heather Fargo, president of the Environmental Council of Sacramento, told the Bee her group’s goal was never to kill the project outright. “We would like to see the solar energy produced, so we weren’t trying to reduce the number of panels,” Fargo said. “We were trying to reduce the amount of impact.” The settlement also establishes a conservation easement on Barton Ranch, a mechanism meant to permanently protect the preserved oak acreage from future development.
The scale of what was at stake became clear through environmental documentation reviewed by the California Native Plant Society, which found the original 1,412-acre layout would have required destroying approximately 3,493 native blue oak trees, some estimated to be as old as 850 years. The California Native Plant Society was one of several groups opposing the project, alongside the Environmental Council of Sacramento and the Sierra Club, according to the Bee’s reporting.
Attorneys from Nossaman, representing Sacramento Valley Energy Center, denied many of the lawsuit’s allegations back in April, per the Bee. Representatives for the developer did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the settlement.
When supervisors approved the use permit in a 5-0 vote on November 18, 2025, they cited an estimated $76 million in property tax revenue over 20 years along with regional carbon reduction goals, according to PBS KVIE. Before downsizing, the project was designed as a 200-megawatt photovoltaic solar farm paired with a 100-megawatt, four-hour battery storage system capable of banking 400 megawatt-hours, per project filings in the state’s CEQAnet database. The design also called for an agrivoltaic approach, with the land remaining in agriculture and seasonal sheep grazing woven into the solar arrays, according to the River Valley Times.
Sacramento Valley Energy Center’s push through regulatory channels continued even after the project lost its anchor customer. In January, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District canceled its power purchase agreement for Coyote Creek, citing supply chain constraints, rising costs, schedule delays, environmental concerns, and the pending litigation — a decision Hoodline covered at the time. Before that cancellation, Coyote Creek was expected to supply power to SMUD.
SMUD’s own numbers underscore why that supply mattered: the utility delivered roughly 62% carbon-free power to Sacramento County customers in 2024, a figure heavily shaped by annual hydroelectric output that fluctuates with rainfall. The developer, Sacramento Valley Energy Center, is a subsidiary of D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments, which already operates SMUD’s Rancho Seco Solar II and Sloughhouse Agrivoltaic Solar projects elsewhere in the county, the River Valley Times reported.
Project plans also call for a 1.3-mile generation-tie transmission line running west from Barton Ranch to connect with SMUD’s existing 230-kilovolt powerline inside the Prairie City State Vehicular Recreation Area, state-owned parkland that the line would cross to reach the grid.
With the lawsuit now settled and the footprint reduced, the smaller Coyote Creek project can move toward construction. But the developer still faces a basic unresolved question hanging over the site: finding a new electricity buyer to replace the one that walked away in January.
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