By Heather Michon
Correspondent
The Board of Supervisors passed a new set of ordinances at their Oct. 16 meeting that will heavily restrict the development of utility-scale solar farms within Fluvanna County.
The ordinances, created by a joint committee of two supervisors and two Planning Commission members, set stringent guidelines for solar projects of two megawatts or greater.
Earlier this year, supervisors removed utility-scale solar farms as a by-right use on land zoned as A-1 (Agricultural). Under the new ordinances, landowners must re-zone property as S-1 (Solar).
As presented to the supervisors, the amount of land open to utility-scare solar development would be capped at three percent of Fluvanna’s total acreage, or 5,400 acres.
Assuming the new zoning was approved, projects would be subject to a long list of regulations covering everything from fencing and vegetative buffers to wildlife corridors and decommissioning.
However, much of the public hearing focused on setbacks—the distance between the solar field and nearby structures, roads, property lines, and water features.
Solar fields would need to be between 375 and 500 feet from nearby dwellings, parcels, or property lines, 300 to 500 feet from roadways, 1,000 feet from the James, Rivanna, and Hardware rivers, and 500 feet from ponds or perennial streams.
For streams, the buffer would extend 500 feet from both sides of the waterway.
This is far more restrictive than most state and local regulations, which generally place setbacks at 100 to 150 feet from water sources.
Solar developers and advocates say the setback from streams, in particular, would close much of the county to solar development.
“These setbacks are completely unworkable,” said Skylar Zunk of Energy Right Virginia. “If these go through, solar will not have a pathway forward in Fluvanna County. There will be no projects, and that will rob landowners of opportunities to earn income from their land.”
Central Virginia Electric Cooperative president Gary Wood said energy costs were climbing dramatically in Virginia, and would likely do so for the next 10 to 15 years. Limiting solar development in Fluvanna County to this degree could have a negative impact on energy bills.
“The co-op have very few tools, and those tools include small, local solar, and that’s what we’d like to make sure we have, an opportunity to still make use of that tool and keep it in the tool bag.”
CVEC’s plans were to build at least more solar field in Fluvanna of around five to seven megawatts.
He asked that the setback on streams be reduced to around 200 feet, which would open more acreage for this type of solar field.
In there deliberations, a majority of supervisor back the removal of the three percent cap on land use. “Our setbacks are a cap in itself,” said Tim Hodge (Palmyra).
But it was the setbacks that Tony O’Brien (Rivanna) said made it impossible for him to vote to approve the ordinances that he himself had helped draft in committee.
While he said he was proud of the job the committee had done, the decisions on the setbacks had been “arbitrary.”
“I don’t want to pass an ordinance that basically says, well, we’re just pretending,” he said. “We’re just pretending and we think we’re smarter than the USDA and the DEQ, than any of these other people.”
He argued that the county allowed people to build houses and driveways right next to waterways. Farmers were allowed to let their animals roam freely and were not required to put in riparian buffers or fence off access to streams, even though the “number one source of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay is agriculture, period.”
O’Brien further argued that limiting solar limited the county’s economic growth, as businesses would not have access to cheap, abundant energy and residents could face higher monthly bills.
None of these arguments were persuasive to the majority of the board. Hodge moved to approve the ordinances without the three percent cap, and the motion passed 4-1, with O’Brien voting no.
