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The solar farm next door

Cynthia Roy looks outside her home and sees a mountainside lush with trees in the small Carbon County borough of Nesquehoning, about 15 miles southeast of Hazleton. What she doesn’t see is the massive solar farm hidden within.

Tucked away in a valley at the bottom of Nesquehoning Mountain, a gigantic field of tens of thousands of solar panels sends power to the PPL Electric Utilities grid.

Roy said she and her neighbors along Park Avenue, who live the closest to the facility, hardly think about the giant energy-making operation. They are affected more by the freight train that rumbles past their homes, blowing its horn, twice a day enroute to nearby industrial sites.

“Honestly, it doesn’t affect us at all,” said Roy, 51. “We are very much into clean energy and helping the environment. We’re all for solar.”

When the Nesquehoning solar farm was proposed and approved more than 15 years ago, the green energy project faced little to no opposition, unlike the fierce resistance many similar proposals now face across Northeast Pennsylvania.

Solar farm projects have surged across the country in recent years, boosted by hefty tax credits in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act aimed at lessening the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and combating climate change, especially in areas adversely impacted by abandoned coal mines.

The trend has not materialized as fast in Pennsylvania. The state ranks 21st in the nation in solar production, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

More than 15 utility-scale solar projects like the one in Nesquehoning have been proposed across Northeast Pennsylvania in the past few years.

Nearly all of them have been rejected by local zoning boards or municipal governments after residents voiced concerns. One of the few exceptions was a solar farm approved in Clinton Twp., Wyoming County, that was proposed by natural gas giant Williams Companies to supplement its natural gas compressor station there.

From Newton Twp. in Lackawanna County to Lehman Twp. in Luzerne County to Rush Twp. in Schuylkill County, residents packed zoning meetings in recent months to express concerns about  proposed solar farms’ possible water runoff, noise and glare, plus deforestation that could affect wildlife. They worried about the possibility of fires, the potential loss of property values and the visual impact of a vast sea of solar panels. They complained their municipalities would get no benefit as all the power produced goes to the grid.

A common refrain from objectors was they were not opposed to green energy projects, but didn’t want one so close to where they live.

Each project was rejected.

A project in Hazle Twp. remains in limbo as the zoning board there is considering the proposal and plans to announce its decision on Dec. 2 after a series of marathon meetings the past few months.

Joe Green, a senior director of New York City-based MN8 Energy, the developer of the proposed Hazle Twp. project, noted solar developers are often confronted by a “not in my backyard,” or NIBMY, mindset with concerns about the visibility of the solar panels being the “biggest challenge.”

“I started out in wind. I’ve heard it before, that ‘I’m all for renewable energy, but not here.’ I run into it all the time. If it’s not here, where? Ultimately, what it comes down to is — the truth is — it’s change. People just like the way things are,” Green said.

Developer: Solar farms are good neighbors

A native of Shenandoah in Schuylkill County, Green said solar companies search for sites close to transmission lines and energy substations with relatively flat, open land and few houses nearby to avoid opposition. A natural barrier of trees to address visibility concerns is desirable, too, he said.

That’s why his company thinks the proposed Hazle Twp. site on 963 acres along Club 40 Road near Stockton Mountain Road, close to active coal mining operations is ideal.

“If you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t know it was there,” Green said.

While local municipalities across the region race to rewrite zoning ordinances that were silent about solar farms, Hazle Twp. already had one on the books requiring such projects be at least 1,000 feet from residential property lines and 500 feet from a public road.

Out of the hundreds of solar projects his firm has developed across the nation, Green said Hazle Twp.’s zoning restrictions are among the most restrictive.

Developers of solar farms don’t have eminent domain abilities like the government, so they deal with “willing landowners” close to power lines looking to lease or sell their property, he said.

“You can’t build your own power lines. You have to tap into the existing ones,” Green said.

Green said solar farms are in fact “good neighbors” that make no sound beyond their perimeter fences, emit no nighttime light, require very limited on-site maintenance, and “go to sleep when the sun goes down.” Many sites are conducive to creating a pollinator and wildlife-friendly environment, such as grazing areas for sheep, like the arrangement at Shippensburg University in Selinsgrove, he said.

“We are in the business of renewable energy and combating climate change,” Green said.

In recent years, the only solar farm projects to be approved in the region were the one Clinton Twp. and others in Plains Twp. in Luzerne County and West Brunswick Twp. in Schuylkill County. A proposal in Taylor, Lackawanna County, was rejected by the zoning board there, but the developer won its appeal in county court.

Green noted solar farms are safely decommissioned and removed after their 30-to-50-year lifespans. Municipalities generally make solar companies take out surety bonds to ensure a safe decommissioning or to protect against a company going out of business.

“At the end of the solar project’s life, the project is literally unbolted, the support structures plucked from the ground and the land is ready to go back into farming or other uses,” Green said. “In contrast to other development options which are essentially permanent in nature — housing, warehouses, businesses — solar is intended from day one to be temporary and offer to future generations an option for what will then be the best and highest use of the land.”

Nesquehoning: From coal to solar

Nesquehoning, once a key producer of energy like many regional municipalities when coal was king, is again at the forefront of American energy, harvesting renewable energy from the sun.

A big reason is its past as the home of the former coal-fired Hauto Power Plant, strategically built in 1913 near Nesquehoning Mountain to power the local coal mines. Once the largest anthracite-burning power plant in the world, it was later acquired by the company that is now PPL.

Over the years, PPL built a series of transmission lines through the borough that led to major substations, which made Nesquehoning an attractive location to the solar farm developer, said Nesquehoning Council President David Hawk.

Developed by Green Energy Capital Partners, the solar farm was built on 100 acres of land leased from prominent Carbon County businessman Dave Kovatch.

At the time it was proposed, the developer said the $65 million project would be the largest in Pennsylvania and second largest in the United States, powering 1,450 homes. The company said it would reduce 320,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions in its first 30 years, the equivalent of planting 25,000 trees. Since the initial phase began operation, the solar farm has since expanded and nearly doubled in size.

The solar farm is situated at the bottom of a mountainside between a series of warehouses and commercial buildings and along the Nesquehoning Creek, which is open for fishing. One of its nearest neighbors is the Nesquehoning Conservation Club, which has a nature area and pond next to its clubhouse that residents enjoy for recreation and fishing.

“When it was first proposed, there were people saying it was going to cause problems with noise, runoff into the Nesquehoning Creek, those sorts of things,” Hawk said. “Since it’s been in there, it hasn’t generated anything negative, really. It’s been a quiet neighbor up there that goes about its business.”

The closest residents on Park Avenue say they can’t see or hear the solar farm, even when trees are bare in the fall and winter.

Park Avenue resident Tom Hunadi, 67, said the only impact the solar farm has had on the borough and neighborhood was during the months of construction with increased truck traffic and work to clear trees and level land.

“I have no issues with it,” Hunadi said. “There was more opposition when they were talking about windmills. They would have been on top of the mountain.”

Is solar on mine-scarred land the solution?

In the wake of many rejections of solar farms in the region, some have suggested future proposals be eyed for the vast tracts of abandoned coal mine land in Northeast Pennsylvania.

That’s already the position of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

A variety of state agencies that are stakeholders in solar development have recommended projects should “prioritize reuse and repurposing of previously impacted lands to make these sites viable alternatives for hosting grid-scale solar development compared to greenfield areas such as agricultural and forested lands,” according to the Solar Energy Resource Hub managed online by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offered incentives in this regard, too, as part of the Biden’s administration’s goal to achieve net-zero emissions in the energy sector by 2035.

In addition to increasing tax credits for solar projects to a maximum of 30%, the legislation created several “bonus” 10% credits for projects built on certain mine-scarred land or in active coal-mining areas. Additional bonus credits are available to those built in low-income communities and those that use all American-made products.

Earth Conservancy, the nonprofit that owns and is trying to reclaim 16,500 acres of mine-scarred land in Luzerne County, completed a solar farm feasibility study for many of its sites in April 2023. The organization’s consultant identified two sites — in Sugar Notch and the Wanamie section of Newport Twp. — where a solar farm could work if funding was secured for land reclamation.

In other parts of the state, former coal mine sites are being eyed for solar farms. What’s being billed as the largest solar farm in Pennsylvania is being built on 2,700 acres of former coal-mining land in Clearfield County with the help of a $90 million federal grant.

But that project has caused controversy, too, as all of the energy the facility will produce has already been purchased by New York for 20 years to meet that state’s clean energy goals.

That fact didn’t sit well with Paul Rashko, vice chairman of the Hazle Twp. Zoning Hearing Board, at a recent hearing about the proposal there.

“It’s all going to New York,” Rashko said of the Clearfield County project. “A lot of people now are like, ‘We made a mistake.’”

At a subsequent meeting on the topic, Rashko agreed with an attorney for a resident who said the project won’t benefit the township.

“I don’t see it benefiting anyone here,” Rashko said.

Attorney Mark McNealis, who represents the developer, argued that a solar farm at the site, much of which is zoned industrial, would be much less impactful to nearby residents than what could already be built there without zoning approval. Some examples are warehouses, a heavy equipment yard, truck terminals and fueling stations, he noted.

“That stuff could generate a lot of traffic and pollution. It could be noisy,” McNealis said. “It would be much more intrusive to people who live nearby than this solar facility would.”

More online

An interactive map of proposed NEPA solar farms accompanies this story at citizensvoice.com.