At some farms, it’s more lucrative to harvest sunshine
FOR MORE than a century, Dawson Singletary’s family has grown tobacco, peanuts and cotton on a 530-acre farm amid the coastal flatlands of North Carolina. Now he’s making money from a different crop: solar panels.
Singletary has leased 34 acres of his Bladen County farm to Strata Solar for a 7-megawatt array, part of a growing wave of solar deals that are transforming US farmland and boosting income for farmers.
Farmland has become fertile territory for clean energy, as solar and wind developers in North America, Europe and Asia seek more flat, treeless expanses to build. That’s also been a boon for struggling US family farms contending with floundering commodity prices.
“There is not a single crop that we could have grown on that land that would generate the income that we get from the solar farm,” said Singletary, 65.
The rise in solar comes as the value of crops in the Southeast – with the exception of tobacco – has dropped. Cotton prices have fallen 71 per cent in the last five years. Soybeans are down 33 per cent, and peanuts have slipped 16 per cent.
Solar companies, meanwhile, are paying top dollar, offering annual rents of US$300 to US$700 an acre, according to the NC Sustainable Energy Association. That’s more than triple the average rent for crop and pasture land in the state, which ranges from US$27 to US$102 an acre, according to the US Agriculture Department.
“Solar developers want to find the cheapest land near substations where they can connect,” said Brion Fitzpatrick, director of project development for Inman Solar Inc. of Atlanta. “That’s often farmland.”
Developers have installed solar panels on about 7,000 acres of North Carolina pasture and cropland since 2013, adding almost a gigawatt of generating capacity, according to the NC Sustainable Energy Association. Georgia has added 200 megawatts on fields and cleared forests over the same period, much of it farmland, according to the Southface Energy Institute of Atlanta.
The number of megawatts developers can generate per acre of farmland varies, based on weather patterns, size of the panels and contours of the land. On Singletary’s farm, Strata Solar installed 21,600 panels, each about 6 feet by 3 feet (1.8 meters by 914 centimetres). Combined, they can power as many as 5,000 local homes.
Farmers typically lease a portion of their land, signing 15- to 20-year contracts with developers who install the panels and sell the power to local utilities. In rare cases, farmers have leased their entire property to solar companies.
Singletary signed a 15-year lease in 2013, with two 10-year extension options, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based Strata sells the power to Duke Energy. He declined to disclose financial terms.
Government incentives have played a key role in the spread of solar farms built on real farms. North Carolina granted developers tax credits equal to 35 per cent of their projects’ costs though a programme that expired at the end of 2015, helping make the state the third-biggest US solar market. In Georgia, the Public Service Commission passed a bill in 2013 requiring the state’s largest utility, Southern Co.’s Georgia Power, to buy 525 megawatts of solar by 2016. Both policies sent companies scouring for open space to build. Solar panels have buoyed tax bases in impoverished rural counties, said Tim Echols, a member of the Georgia Public Service Commission. They also let farmers diversify their income with revenue that’s not subject to markets or unpredictable weather patterns.
“Solar and wind farms have become a new stable income stream for farmers – and they don’t fluctuate with commodity prices,” said Andy Olsen, who promotes clean energy projects in rural areas for the Chicagobased Environmental Law & Policy Centre.
Not everyone is happy to see solar panels or wind turbines becoming more common on farmland. British lawmakers have pushed to limit large clean energy projects on farms, saying they blight the landscape and squeeze out local food production. Similar criticisms have surfaced in the United States, where local officials have pushed for zoning changes to restrict solar developments to industrial properties.
“I get a lot of complaints from neighbours” who don’t like the looks of the 1-megawatt solar system, Tim Sheppard said. The system occupies about five acres of his 135-acre cattle farm in Brasstown, North Carolina.
Despite a recent flurry of building, solar panels cover less than one tenth of 1 per cent of all farmland in the state, said Maggie Clark director of government affairs for the NC Sustainable Energy Association.
For Singletary, the Bladen County farmer, the solar panels will let him retire without selling his family land.
“It gives me way to keep the farm,” he said. “I’d like to pass it to my grandchildren someday.” — WP-Bloomberg
There is not a single crop that we could have grown on that land that would generate the income that we get from the solar farm. Dawson Singletary, farmer