SILVERTON

Clock is ticking on solar farms to be completed after Oregon adopts strict rules

Bill Poehler
Statesman Journal

The clock is quickly ticking away on dozens of solar farms approved, but not yet built in the Willamette Valley.

The state Land Conservation and Development Commission adopted new rules prohibiting solar farms being built on high-value farmland, and many previously approved solar farms are nearing the expiration under their conditional land use approvals.

If they don’t go forward soon, they won’t be able to.

“Anything that was approved in 2017 has to have a permit in 2019," said Marion County planning director Joe Fennimore, "and a lot of those are coming due and I don’t know how many of those are going to go forward. As far as I know, none have applied."

An aerial view of a solar farm owned by Volcano Solar, LLC on 35th Avenue NE in Keizer Tuesday January 15, 2019.

In Marion County, there are 32 photovolatic solar arrays proposed to be built on high-value farmland.

Of those, five have been completed – locations outside Gervais, Silverton, Turner, Salem and Woodburn – and four more have received permits.

Fennimore said the ones that have received permits may still build under the old code as long as they show progress.

But that leaves 23 solar farms in the county that must get permits in less than a year to fall under previous rules, and seven of those must be done by the end of the year or will never be able to go forward. 

“This is basically a prohibition of solar in the Willamette Valley,” said Amy Berg Pickett, senior community engagement and permits manager for Cypress Creek Renewables.

It’s likely many of the approved solar farms will never be built.

“What 72 percent of (property owners who applied for solar farms) are going to find out when these two years are up is that they don’t have an application anymore, and they’re not going to be happy,” said Roger Kaye, president of Friends of Marion County.

Solar farms on high value farm land in Oregon

Oregon started to incentivize solar projects in 2011 by giving property tax exemptions for changes to the value of property due to installing a renewable energy system such as solar arrays.

Also in 2011, the LCDC limited the size of individual solar arrays to 12 acres on high-value farmland, 20 acres on non-high value farmland, and 100 acres on land not suitable for growing crops.

Counties were given the choice to not allow solar farms, but none did initially. Marion County received its first applications for a solar array in 2015 and more trickled in until the county commissioners removed it from the planning code in early 2018.

There are 289,363 acres of farmland deemed high value in Marion County.

If any of the specified types of soil are on a portion of any of a farm property, the entire property is determined to be high value and thus off limits to solar development.

A former grass seed field alongside I-5 just south of Woodburn, Oregon, now hosts this commercial solar array, which was installed last fall.

As many as 140 proposed solar farms in EFU land have been submitted for approval in Oregon, but a small number have been constructed.

If most of those don’t soon, they likely never will.

Past coverage: Neighbors win fight against solar farm

Berg Pickett said her company developed three of the five operating solar farms in Marion County and completed the land use process for four more.

Of the projects her company has completed, one was built on soil deemed high value, she said.

Much of what has held up the approved solar farms from going forward is the companies receiving financing to build the solar arrays – which can be millions of dollars depending on the size – and rates with utility companies are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

Though companies like Cypress Creek still have the option to build the solar arrays where they have conditional use permits, they are under a strict time frame as they won’t be able to reapply under the new rules.

“The sunset is very detrimental to the project timeline,” Berg Pickett said. “You do need extensions to get projects to the finish line. Almost every project we do, we get extensions. You just don’t know what the timeline will be.”

Aerial photo of a solar installation near Silverton.

Dual-use exception, but not in Marion County

The state commission approved one exemption to the prohibition of solar arrays on high-value farmland, a dual-use exemption.

In the dual-use model, the solar arrays on prime farmland may be built up to 20 acres if they serve multiple purposes, such as beehives or being used for grazing as well as solar production.

But the new state rules leave the choice to allow dual-use facilities up to the counties.

As the Marion County Commissioners removed allowing solar farms from the county code in early 2018, it is unlikely they would add even the dual-use option back.

“They’d have to want that add that back in,” Fennimore said.

Related:Portland General Electric planning renewable energy project in eastern Oregon

But as the commissioners didn’t show much enthusiasm about solar farms on prime farmland when they removed it from the planning code last year, which makes it unlikely they would want to add the dual-use exception in.

“That’s why they chose to opt out of it when they did that last year,” Fennimore said.

One of the sites in Marion County – a 17-acre dual-use site named Sheep Solar near Turner – falls under the previous dual-use rules.

A study published by Oregon State in November 2018 showed solar panels could double crop yields for grasses favored by sheep and cattle on unirrigated farmland by maintaining higher soil moisture in the shade during hot months.

Oregon’s commercial solar future

The new rules that restrict where solar farms can be placed in Oregon limit solar development, especially in Marion County where areas with lower classification soils are few and have been picked over by developers.

"They want to ring around high-use areas," Kaye said. "They would love to have a ring around Salem, probably just outside the (Urban Growth Boundary)."

Large solar arrays like the massive solar arrays in California – such as the 5,100-acre site being developed near the Arizona border – can’t happen with Oregon’s 100-acre cap.

And the land in the sparsely-populated portions of the state such Central and Eastern Oregon would be a great distance from power transformers.

The Cypress Creek Renewables solar energy farm under construction near Silverton, Ore., on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2017.

The most likely hope for solar power in Oregon now is on rooftops.

Many of the state rules, such as the property tax exemptions, still apply on homes and businesses, but those systems are usually designed to produce only enough power for their own structure.

California passed a law requiring rooftop solar on all new home construction starting in 2020.

But large-scale production of solar power – arrays large enough to power the buildings on a city block – could be over.

“Oregon has significant hurdles,” Berg Pickett said. “Basically what developers are probably going to be doing are looking at other states where you have favorable land use.”

bpoehler@StatesmanJournal.com or Twitter.com/bpoehler