D&C investigation: Big solar coming to NYS, some are wary
- New projects will be 10-20 times larger than existing installations
- 90 mainly rural towns and villages have enacted moratoriums on big solar this year
- Pushback at odds with ambitious statewide clean energy goals
Large commercial solar farms, covering dozens of acres with tens of thousands of electricity-generating panels, are certain to arrive in New York state in a big way.
Driven by the Cuomo administration’s expanded emphasis on renewable energy, solar-energy companies and non-profit groups are exploring dozens of projects, including a number in the Rochester area.
“I don’t think there’s any question that New York is an exciting place to be for the solar industry right now,” said Rob Collier, director of project development for Seattle-based OneEnergy Development, which is working on two dozen solar projects in upstate New York.
One wave of new solar farms will be roughly the same size as the largest installations now in place in parts of upstate New York. Another set of projects could be 10 or 20 times larger than that.
For the first time, some of the new generating stations will sell their output directly to the public who choose to sign up.
But the big-solar concept is getting a cool reception in some quarters.
Nearly 90 town and village governments in New York have enacted moratoriums on big-solar development this year, including five in the Rochester area. Most municipalities are seeking a grace period while they figure out how to handle zoning, taxes or fees and other issues and, in some cases; decide whether they want the generating stations at all.
“There’s an awful lot of questions. People want to know ahead of time what they’re getting into,” said Eric Peters, supervisor of the town of Hamlin, which adopted an eight-month moratorium in July. “They don’t want somebody from out of the state coming into their town when we don’t have any benefit out of this.”
Concern in the town was triggered by OneEnergy, the Seattle company, which has explored two locations in the Hamlin area for very large solar farms, and by a Rochester-based non-profit that says it has a signed letter of intent from the owner of a 104-acre parcel in the town that could become the home of a solar installation.
Most of the towns that have established moratoriums are small rural communities without a lot of governmental resources, he said. The concern is they’ll be overwhelmed by lawyers and leasing agents for the well-heeled solar developers.
“They come in and start throwing their weight around and we’re behind the eight-ball,” Peters said. “That was pretty much it. I said ‘No, let’s put a moratorium in place and see what we've got to do to make it fit our community.’
“I’m not sure our community even wants to have these things around them. Until we know, I’m not interested in having somebody push it.”
David Sandbank, director of the NY-Sun program, said the moratoriums are a "good and rational approach." NY-Sun, which promotes and helps finance solar projects, is part of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
"The good news here is there’s a lot of interest in solar. A lot of companies are coming into the state and exploring their options. That’s created an influx of marketing endeavors and zoning questions. Rightfully so, a lot of jurisdictions have said ‘We’re not sure what’s going on here, we want to hit the pause button.’
"Once they understand it, they can hit the go button," Sandbank said.
The drive for big-solar development, with leasing agents knocking on doors in rural communities and local governments reacting with moratoriums, echoes the period when natural-gas developers flocked to some parts of New York in hopes of tapping shale gas.
Those hopes, of course, were dashed when the Cuomo administration banned high-volume hydraulic fracturing in December 2014.
No such ban is likely this time around. Instead, Albany is pushing solar power hard, and commercial-scale solar farms appear to be the logical next step.
Two megawatts ... and up
With a few exceptions, the largest solar farms in New York today occupy five to 10 acres each and have a peak capacity of 2 megawatts* — enough electricity to power roughly 200 homes. That maximum size is set by state rules governing solar installations that are "net metered," an approach used for both small and large solar arrays in which excess electricity is sold back to the local utility.
There are numerous examples locally, the newest of which is a 2.5 megawatt array built for Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva.
These projects also can serve private-sector customers. Bausch + Lomb has a large array next to its North Goodman Street complex. Gore Mountain, the ski resort in Warren County, just welcomed a pair of solar farms totaling 5.3 megawatts in output.
More developments like these, tied to a single electricity consumer,are expected to come in a steady stream. The city of Rochester will get power via a solar farm of about 2 megawatts that will be built atop an old landfill on Lexington Avenue, and Monroe County is planning five 2-megawatt installations — two of them side-by-side in eastern Penfield and three more clustered off Payne Beach Road in northwest Greece.
Solar rising: Rochester looks to sun power
All of these generating stations received state grants through NY-Sun to help cover the construction costs.
Interest in New York solar was given a further boost in August, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced approval of the state Clean Energy Standard initiative, which set a new goal: By the year 2030, 50 percent of electricity used in New York state has to come from renewable sources such as hydro, wind and solar. As of 2014, about 26 percent of the state's electricity came from those sources.
Community Scale
To further that goal, the state also authorized a type of development known as community-distributed solar farms. Electricity from these projects is allocated not to a single institution but to groups of residential and business consumers who want locally generated green energy but who can’t, or don’t, want to install solar panels on their own roofs.
"This has been a real boom in the industry. There are a lot of developers who are interested. There are a lot of customers who are interested as well," Sandbank said.
Indeed, community-distributed solar farms are beginning to pop up all over New York.
In the Rochester area, those ones are being constructed by Sustainable Energy Developments, a Wayne County company solar installer.
The company is finishing up a half-megawatt project near its office in Macedon that will have 100 subscribers. At least one community farm of twice that size is planned for next year.
Company launches community solar option for Rochester
Collier said OneEnergy has looked at several sites in Monroe County for community-scale solar.
At least eight community-distributed solar farms being developed by other companies, each of them nearly 3 megawatts in size, have been approved by state officials in the Rochester-Finger Lakes region. Five of them will be Ontario County, two in Seneca and one in Genesee, according to information from NYSERDA.
A Rochester non-profit group that promotes solar, ROCSPOT, has been soliciting developers nationwide to construct as many as nine sizable community-distributed solar farms in Monroe County. Between them, the sites could host 16 megawatts' worth of solar panels, and perhaps more.
"We've been working on a model for shared solar that allows for equitable access for low- and moderate-income individuals, fixed-income seniors, renters, people who can’t afford a roof much less solar panels," said Susan Spencer, ROCSPOT's founder. "That’s a complicated proposal to put together, to say we could serve Brighton and the northwest quadrant (of the city) equally."
Working with a Colorado collaborator, ROCSPOT says it has signed letters of intent with the owners of the nine possible sites — three in Rochester and others in Penfield, Webster, Brighton, Ogden, Parma and Hamlin.
Proposals from developers were to be reviewed this fall.
Bigger still
Beyond the 2 megawatt solar farms that are proliferating over the countryside is a possible wave of utility-scale arrays, acre upon acre of solar panels selling electricity onto the grid.
At present, there is precisely one in New York state: the Long Island Solar Farm, which has 164,000 solar panels spread over 60 acres in Suffolk County. The 32-megawatt generating station, which sells electricity directly to the local utility, opened in 2011. It was set up and financed differently from other New York solar facilities.
It might not be alone for much longer. As of last week, 20 solar projects — most 20 megawatts in size but one as large as 98 MW — were on the list of proposed New York power plants requesting connections to the statewide grid. Their combined capacity would be nearly equal to that of the Ginna nuclear power plant in Wayne County.
The number of solar projects on the list doubled in two months, indicative of developers' growing interest in the New York market in the wake of Cuomo's announcement.
Many of these projects, if not all, will be submitted to a NYSERDA program where they will compete with wind farms and other big renewable-energy projects. Winners will be awarded 20-year contracts and receive renewable energy credits, which the developers can sell to increase their revenues.
State officials say they find the number of large solar projects on the list "encouraging," and an indication that solar developers do indeed intend to compete for clean-energy dollars.
The program is new, and the outcome not predictable. "It’s difficult to speculate what will happen in five years. Our goal is to procure renewables at the least cost to ratepayers. It depends on how solar competes," said Doreen Harris, NYSERDA's program manager for large-scale renewables.
► How big is a 20 megawatt solar farm?
Collier, of Seattle-based OneEnergy, said his company is eager to see the final Clean Energy Standard regulations. "It takes a lot of reading of the tea leaves in trying to see how the draft regulations and proposals will play out, but everyone is optimistic," he said.
If all goes well, his company — and others — could break ground on the utility-scale solar farms within two years, he said.
Moratoriums "part of the process"
Two of the sites that One Energy has explored for 20-megawatt arrays are in northwest Monroe County, in the Hamlin-Clarkson-Sweden area. As part of the process, company representatives approached landowners there about leasing property for solar installations.
That work, along with rumors that ROCSPOT was eyeing land in the town as well, set off alarm bells in the town hall.
"I said 'Look, we don’t have anything on the books. These people are coming out here. We need to have things in place before the projects come in to town, not after," said Peters, the town supervisor. "You don’t want to get caught flat-footed."
The Hamlin town board approved an eight-month moratorium in July. The nearby town of Sweden has held a public hearing on a big-solar moratorium, but its board hasn't voted.
The town of Kendall, just west of Hamlin in Orleans County, adopted a six-month moratorium in late September. "We’re in the embryonic stages and we want to make sure we do the right thing for the town and for the residents, and for the solar companies too," supervisor Tony Cammarata said.
Such moratoriums have become almost routine in rural New York.
“There has been a significant push by the solar industry,” said Steve Ammerman, a spokesman for the New York Farm Bureau, which has been communicating with farmers about solar leases for months. “It is similar to the natural gas industry when they were looking for farmland to lease.”
The bureau, an agribusiness support and lobbying group, advises farmers to consult a lawyer before signing a long-term deal that would tie up acreage for decades.
Unlike the payments that some farmers would have received from gas companies, lease income from solar panels likely won’t be enough for a farmer to retire on, Ammerman said. But done right, “it can be an opportunity for the farms to make some extra income when they seriously need it.”
For his part, Collier said short-term moratoriums are “part of the process.” He understands the concern that rural communities have, and believes those concerns can be assuaged.
“We found that we can work with the town," Collier said. "We have successfully gotten what we think are very fair and reasonable zoning laws in place that meet the town’s need for rural farmland protection, but still allow a reasonable amount of solar development to occur.”
Apples to oranges on solar farms
* Solar panels produce electricity in direct current form. Before that electricity can be fed on to the grid and supplied to customers, it must be converted (inverted, to use the correct phrase) to alternating current. The wattage is reduced when electricity is inverted from DC to AC.
This gives rise to the somewhat confusing size descriptions of solar farms. The capacity of solar arrays is always expressed in DC figures. But New York state, when it capped the size of net-metered solar farms at 2 megawatts, was using AC terms.
That's why some solar farms' capacity appears to exceed the cap. They really don't. It's an apples-to-oranges thing.
