Somerset solar farm riles residents
Maryland has one of the most ambitious renewable energy programs in the nation.
The state has committed to getting 20 percent of its energy from sources like solar and wind by 2022. And a bill awaiting Gov. Larry Hogan's signature would up the stakes even more, raising the standard to 25 percent and moving up the deadline to 2020.
That ambition has consequences — a lesson some Somerset County residents say they are learning the hard way.
They feel powerless, they say, in the face of a developer's effort to build a 6-megawatt solar farm in a neighborhood just outside of Crisfield. They have collected 600 signatures from people concerned about the project, but all signs point toward OneEnergy Renewables making good on its plans.
The state Public Service Service Commission recently signed off on the Seattle-based company's construction application, attaching 19 conditions it must meet as it does so.
The county's planning commission ordered the developer back to the drawing board on the design of its fence-like plantings to ensure neighbors see as little of the 21,000 panels as possible. But if the county cracks down too hard, the Public Service Commission could simply override local requirements.
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"We got thrown under the bus," said Ronald De Clement, a resident and frequent critic of the county's lax zoning policies. The project amounts to an "industrial complex" being placed in the middle of a residential zone, he added.
The panels would replace corn and soybeans on nearly 40 acres of land at the corner of Jacksonville and Plantation Roads. There are nearly two dozen homes within 500 feet of the project, residents estimate.
"This is my backyard. This is her front yard," said Maron Atkins at a hearing Thursday night hosted by OneEnergy at the county's civic center. "It's not going to be buffered. We're going to see it."
Several utility-scale solar projects have been approved across the Lower Shore over the past year, mostly with little fanfare. But the Plantation Road project, which is bordered on three sides by homes, has found the going tougher.
On a night when they green-lighted a separate solar project, one that stands to become the largest east of the Mississippi River, Somerset's planning commission members told OneEnergy to slow down. With about two dozen residents in attendance at the March meeting, the commission declined to move the project forward until the developer satisfied residents' most-glaring concerns.
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The company brought to Thursday's hearing its own representatives as well as a landscape architect and the project's engineer. They tried to assure a few dozen would-be neighbors that a 75-foot setback, which includes a 25-foot-wide strip of plantings, would shield the panels from view.
"In my mind, I see this as a mass growing-together," said Vernon Hustead, the landscape architect, showing a renderings of shrubs lacing over one another in five-year increments.
Most of the crowd balked at the prospect of the plants only reaching only a few feet in height for the first several years. De Clement's proposed solution appeared to be the most popular: installing a wall of evergreens that could be trimmed at the top like a hedge. That way, the screen won't block the panels from the sun, he said.
Leslie "Gia" Clark of OneEnergy said her company chose the site based on its proximity to an existing power substation, its treeless terrain and its having an interested landowner.
As for people's requests, she said: "I'm going to do my best with what is reasonable."
Contact reporter Jeremy Cox at 410-845-4630 or on Twitter @Jeremy_Cox.