The day after the General Assembly said localities could, Surry County nailed down a revenue-sharing deal for a solar farm that would take up roughly a square mile of open land.
It is a kind of deal that could help rural Virginia feel less like it’s giving up land for power plants that fuel big-ticket data centers in the state’s most prosperous communities.
And it’s a sign of a scramble that’s already underway, with talks between solar developers and rural county officals about ways the industry could lend a hand — basically financial help — to some of the state’s most forgotten corners. Besides Surry, King and Queen County, Sussex County, Richmond County and Caroline County are already working with solar firms on proposals made possible by two new laws that took effect July 1.
“We’re two weeks out of the box and we already have five or six conversations going,” said Tom Swartzwelder, the King and Queen County Administrator who advocated for legislation to bring more solar dollars to rural counties.
In Surry’s case, one of the new bills means the county will get $1,400 a year for each megawatt produced at a new solar farm about three miles southwest of Surry Court House. That adds up to $84,000 a year.
“It’s time for the county to realize some benefits,” acting county administrator Melissa Rollins said.
A second solar bill bill has opened the door for King and Queen to obtain $4 million it needs to provide fiber-based broadband service to everyone in the county, with the county talking with a solar firm about a proposed 149.4 megawatt facility on more than 1,300 acres.
Swartzwelder had teamed up with lobbyist Chip Dicks and the legislator who represents his county, Del. Keith Hodges, R-Urbanna, to push for that bill in this year’s General Assembly session.
“How often do you have two people standing side by side at the General Assembly, with one saying: ‘I need more money’ and the other saying: ‘I want to pay it,'” Swartzwelder said.
That bill authorizes local governments to negotiate financial or other aid from solar developers, in much the same way they can negotiate with developers of residential subdivisions — but with a lot more flexibility than that limited authority allows.
Residential proffers can only address a development’s direct impact — funds or land to handle more students in a school, paying to extending water and sewer lines or make road improvements.
“With a residential proffer, I can’t say I need a new gym for my school” since the proffer has to be volunteered by the developer, Swartzwelder said. The bill Swartzwelder, Dicks and Hodges urged says local officials can tell solar developers what the community needs, and that their requests aren’t limited to the direct impact of a development on public services.
“This could be the biggest expansion of local government authority in years,” Hodges said.
But it is needed, as a matter of environmental justice, he said.
Rural counties, which have already seen large acreages taken out of their tax bases for wetlands banks, nutrient management programs and other environmental measures, also miss out on revenue from solar facilities. Legislation in 2016 exempts 80% of the assessed value of solar equipment from taxation — and that taxation is at the real estate tax rate not the typically much higher machinery and tools tax rate. The idea was to encourage solar projects.
“Talking to our assessor, it looks as if the solar farm would increase the real estate value to about $10,000 an acre from $2,000 to $3,000. But if a developer is spending $100 million on panels, wiring and equipment, most of that wouldn’t be taxable,” Swartzwelder said.
“We’re trying to recruit companies that want green energy, but if you build a solar facility in rural county X, all that investment and those jobs are going to go into suburban county Y,” he said. “But if you take away that much farmland, that’s one farm job. And that’s one truck driver. And a job at the granary.”
Solar farms take great swathes of farm- and woodlands, and they’ve recently been stirring up opposition in rural Virginia.
In Surry, which already has one 142 megawatt plan up and running, with a second 97 megawatt facility coming online in the fall, the Board of Supervisors amended the county zoning ordinance in December 2018 to say solar facilities were no longer automatically allowed on farm land.
The developer, Urban Grid, started talking about revenue sharing because it “wanted to find a way to participate in the new economic environment that allowed utility scale solar generation projects to provide more revenue to local jurisdictions,” its Richmond attorney, Roger Bowers, said.
Solar developers concerned about rural resistance had been signing contracts with western Virginia counties, promising payments in addition to real-estate taxes, though from a local government’s point of view these are difficult to enforce and officials can’t directly ask for them. Swartzwelder said.
But solar energy is a top priority for the state and for Dominion Energy, the electric monopoly that serves most of Virginia.
Dominion plans to add at least 5,200 megawatts of solar generating capacity over the next 25 years– enough to power more than 500,000 people, according to a Solar Energy Industries Association’s formula that weighs Virginians’ average power usage and the amount of electricity-generating sunshine generally available.
“You know, a solar facility changes a community – those were the woods I used to hunt, that was the pond where I used to fish, that was the field they used to farm.” Swartzwelder said. “Look now, and it’s all gone.”
Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com
