Across the country, rural communities are pushing back against large-scale solar development.
For the U.S. to meet its clean energy goals by 2050, the Department of Energy projects that the country needs more than 10 million acres of solar development. Most of that is expected to be built in rural areas. Surveys show that the vast majority of Americans support renewable energy development, but projects planned in rural areas are meeting major resistance.
Reveal’s Jonathan Jones travels to Copake, New York, in the Hudson River Valley. It’s the site of one of the most contentious fights over a proposed large-scale solar project in the United States. Jones looks at what’s driving support and opposition to the project, Shepherd’s Run.
He starts with Bill and Nancy Rasweiler, the owners of land where the project is slated. For years, the Rasweilers have leased their land to local farmers to help offset the costs of maintaining it, but it’s not enough. So they signed a lease with Chicago-based solar developer Hecate Energy. When they brought their plan to the rest of the town in 2017, they met resistance from other residents. During the same meeting, Copake’s town board passed a new law to severely restrict the size of solar development. Jones finds that these kinds of local restrictions are being passed in rural communities across the country.
Jones learns about the community concerns over the project: that it’s too big, takes over prime farmland and negatively affects the environment and nearby homeowners. Residents who support the project say some concerns are a product of misinformation and Shepherd’s Run is one of the many solar projects that has to happen to slow climate change. With the future of the project in question, Jones hears about a working group – a coalition of supporters and opponents of the project that came together to try to influence its design. Jones follows the group’s efforts and how they landed with Hecate.
Finally, Jones looks at ways agricultural communities are trying to make solar work on their land. This takes him to the Corn Belt, where he looks at how the U.S. is already using millions of acres of farmland to produce a less efficient clean energy source: ethanol. Jones also looks at a landmark agreement between the solar industry and environmental groups convened by Stanford University, which calls for advancing large-scale solar development while championing land conservation and local community interests.
Dig Deeper
Read: Community Centered Solar Development Case Study Interviews (Michigan State University and University of Michigan)
Read: Large-Scale U.S. Solar Development: Integrating Climate, Conservation and Community (Uncommon Dialogue from Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment)
Read: Official documents related to Shepherd’s Run solar project (New York State Department of Public Service)
Watch: Copake Solar Working Group Presentation, February 2022 (Craryville Gateway)
Learn more: Shepherd’s Run Solar Farm
Learn more: Town of Copake solar project updates
Learn more: Sensible Solar for Rural New York
Learn more: Friends of Columbia Solar
Learn more: Copake Solar Working Group
Credits
Reporter: Jonathan Jones | Producers: Jonathan Jones and Boen Wang, with support from Steven Rascón, Jim Briggs, Zoe Sullivan, Mara Lazer, Michael Montgomery and Najib Aminy | Editor: Jenny Casas | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Post-production support: Claire Mullen and Missa Perron | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| At the Sir William Angus Family Farm in Copake, New York, Bruce Conover and his son, Justin, are feeding their pigs. | |
| Bruce Conover: | I’m living like a multimillionaire here with this atmosphere. |
| Justin Conover: | Except you gotta work seven days a week. |
| Al Letson: | The Conovers are tenant farmers. They raise cows, pigs, and sheep, here on a postcard countryside with rolling hills, cornfields, red barns, and old tractors. They sell their livestock to local restaurants, markets, and a high-end butcher in New York City. For 30 years, the Conovers have been renting this land in the Hudson River Valley, and it’s never been easy. |
| Justin Conover: | A piece of equipment breaks, a cow gets out, a fence falls down, a tree falls down, there’s a snowstorm, frozen pipes. You always got something to deal with every day. Everything costs a fortune, but 50 years ago there used to be a farm every half-mile through here. I mean, it was totally agriculture. Now there’s probably one or two left. |
| Al Letson: | One of the reasons the Conovers can keep farming here is because the rent is cheap. |
| Bruce Conover: | We have leased this property for thirty-one years with no contract, no nothing. |
| Al Letson: | Unfortunately for their landlords. The rent doesn’t begin to cover the cost of the local taxes and insurance. By 2016, the owners needed to figure out how to make more money off the land, and they decided to try something new; lease most of the farmland for solar energy. The Conovers would lose some of the acres they’d use for grazing cattle to solar panels, but it would also allow them to keep farming there. |
| Bruce Conover: | Solar has to happen, then we understand that. It has to happen to save the farm. It’s not doomsday, but it’ll make a lot of changes. |
| Al Letson: | But not everyone in Copake felt this way. In a town of less than 3500 people, hundreds have spoken out against the proposed solar project. They say it will wipe out farmland, harm the environment, and destroy the character of their community. |
| Speaker 4: | A battle is brewing over a Chicago company’s plans to construct a solar farm in Columbia County |
| Speaker 9: | An online petition opposing the project has received more than 3500 signatures. |
| Speaker 5: | This is a terrible thing to happen, I says, and we can’t take this lying down. Get up, stand up, and let’s fight this, and fight it hard. |
| Al Letson: | This is all playing out as the US is pledging to get serious about climate change. By 2050, the country wants to get to what’s called net zero, drastically reducing carbon emissions to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. And to do that, the Department of Energy says the US needs about 10 million acres of solar energy. Polls suggest that most people support renewable energy development in the US, but there’s a growing backlash, specifically against solar projects in rural communities where these developments are actually being built. |
| Reveal’s Jonathan Jones heads to Copake, New York, the site of one of the most contentious fights over solar in the country. | |
| Jonathan Jones: | The small town of Copake has a motto; the land of rural charm. It’s a little hamlet tucked among rolling hills and lakes. The people who own the land where the Conovers farm are Bill and Nancy Rasweiler. |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | Okay, so I’m Nancy Rasweiler. |
| Bill Rasweiler: | Yeah. I’m Bill Rasweiler. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Bill is a local veterinarian and Nancy is a child psychologist, and they live just outside of Copake. |
| How far are you in terms of a drive from where you are right now to that piece of land? | |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | Seven minutes. I know because we used to take our kids to school because the school’s right next to the farm. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Bill inherited the 900-acre farm from his father, a surgeon. He was part of a privileged class of New Yorkers who bought farmland upstate in the 1970s and ’80s. |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | I do the family history, so even though I’m not a Rasweiler by birth, Bill would rather have me talk mostly. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Nancy tells me that Bill’s father poured tons of money into the farm over the years and built a thriving cattle business. And when his dad passed away in 2014, the Rasweilers continued to lease out part of their land to the Conovers who’d been managers of the farm. That’s kept the land agricultural, but it hasn’t always made the most financial sense. |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | It wasn’t that there was huge financial hardship, but it would’ve been if that’s all we did. I think we just wondered about how to best use that property. |
| Jonathan Jones: | In 2016, New York State was offering generous financial incentives as part of a large-scale renewable energy initiative, and developers were searching for rural communities where they could build solar projects. |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | Around that time is when we began to get approached by people wanting to develop solar. |
| Jonathan Jones: | One of those solar developers stood out, a young man named Gabe Wapner. Gabe had grown up in the area and the Rasweilers knew his parents. He told the Rasweilers he worked for one of the fastest growing solar developers in the nation, a company called Hecate that’s based in Chicago. |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | He approached us personally and said, “I’m from the area. I’ve looked at a variety of different alternate energy companies. I chose to work for Hecate. I feel really good about them. Would you be willing to look more seriously at them?” And so, that’s why Hecate rose to the top. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Gabe had been scouring maps of transmission lines across the Hudson River Valley. He learned that the Rasweilers owned hundreds of acres near an electrical substation, so he called them up and made his pitch. |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | I think we wanted the kids to have options down the road and, at the end of the day, our kids would still have control over the land and it could be then converted back to a full farm, or not. It just bought us time, and on the same time it was going to generate cleaner energy, and it just began to make sense. |
| Jonathan Jones: | They eventually came up with plans for a 60-megawatt solar project called Shepherd’s Run, producing enough clean energy to power 15,000 households every year, and it would require installing close to 200,000 solar panels, primarily on Bill and Nancy’s land. |
| The Rasweilers and Hecate made it official and signed a lease, and in April 2017, they presented their plan at a town hall meeting. Like many of Copake’s town halls, this one was recorded on cassette tape. | |
| Speaker 10: | Easter Egg Hunt is Saturday at the park at 11:00. Do not come at 11:01, 11:00 point 01 second or the eggs will all be gone. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Gabe gives a presentation explaining the logistics and benefits of bringing Shepherd’s Run to Copake. |
| Gabe Wapner: | I think there’s a selling point to being a green community and having renewable energy and being a host of it. I think that’s something that a lot of people are attracted to if it’s done in an appropriate way, |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | I would say that the atmosphere in the room was… No, it was hostile, but not in a… politely hostile. Well, I don’t know. It felt very negative. They had firemen that came and said that if we had a fire, they wouldn’t put it out. |
| Speaker 10: | Brush Fire starts and goes through that property, they won’t enter the property because of those live panels. That means they fight it from the outside. What do you do about that? |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | They referred to the motto behind the podium that Copake is the town of rural charm. |
| Speaker 12: | I think that our rural scenery is not a luxury. It’s something that scores of businesses monetized now for a rare bright spot in the rural economy from wedding destinations, agrotourism, weekend rentals, camps, scenic byways, hikes, biking, et cetera. |
| Jonathan Jones: | And then, after all that discussion, the meeting takes another negative turn for the Rasweilers. |
| Speaker 10: | Whereas the Town Board of the Town of Copake finds that it is in the best interest of the Town of Copake to enact Local Law Number 2-27-17 Town of Copake Solar Energy Law. All in favor? |
| Town Board Memb…: | Aye. |
| Jonathan Jones: | The Copake Town Board passes a new zoning law that bans any solar projects larger than 10 acres. The law was one of several that were being adopted by towns in the Hudson River Valley as solar developers descended on the region. It takes about 5 to 10 acres of land to generate a single megawatt of utility scale power. Shepherd’s Run was planned for hundreds of acres, so the new ordinance basically kills the solar project outright. |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | It was really traumatic. People on the board were people we knew. I was extremely disappointed because I didn’t expect them to say, “Oh, yay!” but I expected there to be a process, so it also felt like what a waste of our time. They didn’t even really listen to us, or want to hear our ideas, or trust Bill and me that maybe, maybe we would try to do this right. |
| Jeanne Mettler: | It’s easy to misunderstand our position or portray it inaccurately. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Jeanne Mettler is one of the Copake Town Board members who voted for the solar restrictions. She’s known the Rasweilers a long time. Her father was one of the original founders of the Copake Veterinary Clinic, where Bill works. |
| Jeanne Mettler: | I grew up in Copake, so growing up in Copake, you knew that the backbone of our economy and our life, our culture, was farming. |
| Jonathan Jones: | She says that everyone in Copake, especially the farmers, have seen the effects of climate change. |
| Jeanne Mettler: | So we really get it, and we understand our obligations as government leaders, but also as citizens in this country, to do something about it. So it’s not that we’re opposed to solar panels, and we tried to accommodate utility scale, but this is just way too big. |
| Jonathan Jones: | The town board’s deputy supervisor, Richard Wolf, says it’s not only too big, it’s also in the wrong place. |
| Richard Wolf: | They’re making no significant effort to screen it to make it less unpalatable to people who are immediately across it. We’re not talking about people with a lot of money up on a hill somewhere with huge views who are going to have a little dot of this in their view, but rather people who are just, this is all they’re going to see and it’s in their face all the time. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Richard is the lead liaison in the town’s dealings with Hecate. He says The company doesn’t care about Copake. It’s only interested in profits. |
| Richard Wolf: | We are not climate deniers, nor are we NIMBYists. We believe in the need for renewable energy, and we just want to have a say in how it’s done so that it’s reasonable and it’s consonant with the kind of community that we have and what we want. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Opposition to renewable energy projects like Shepherd’s Run is growing across the country. In nearly every state, local governments have passed laws and regulations to block or restrict renewable energy. |
| A recent study by Columbia Law School found at least 228 local laws on the books across 35 states, hundreds of large-scale renewable energy projects are currently facing significant opposition from local communities. | |
| Doug Bessette: | I think it’s pretty clear opposition is increasing to renewable projects. |
| Jonathan Jones: | For the past five years, Doug Bessette has been researching what’s driving local support and opposition to these developments. He’s a professor of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. |
| Doug Bessette: | Eventually, we’re going to hit a point where you can’t build these projects anymore, and I fear we’re getting closer and closer to that point. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Doug analyzed seven successful large-scale projects; what made them work and what threatened their failure? The concerns in Copake are the same ones he’s hearing around the country. |
| Doug Bessette: | The arguments both for and against solar development are very similar across communities. A lot of the concerns about whether our community is appropriate for this, are there other places that make more sense? We see a lot of individuals that might have been friends before the development comes along, and now are at each other’s throats. |
| Jonathan Jones: | He says community buy-in is essential. Not only so projects don’t get caught up in lawsuits and other delays. |
| Doug Bessette: | It’s also just important philosophically. I mean, we don’t want to build projects in communities in which they’re not desired. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Because when a project isn’t desired, communities move to stop it, and states with the most renewable energy development are the same ones seeing the most local opposition, states like Michigan, Kansas, Texas, and the state where we started this story, New York. |
| Andrew Cuomo: | Speak the truth to what this is. It is a crisis for the planet. |
| Jonathan Jones: | That’s former New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, back in 2020. At the time, solar development had hit a standstill in the state. Large-scale projects were getting blocked, and virtually none had been built. And state officials like Governor Cuomo wanted to keep local governments from standing in the way of the state’s climate goals. |
| Andrew Cuomo: | And we are going to start the most ambitious climate change program that any state has ever undertaken. |
| Jonathan Jones: | In April 2020, the state passed a law to accelerate large-scale renewable energy projects. It created a brand new agency to help solar developers fast-track through the permitting process, and it would also allow developers to override local laws and restrictions like the one in Copake. |
| Andrew Cuomo: | It is a top priority because if you don’t save the planet, everything else is irrelevant. |
| Jonathan Jones: | And that’s when Hecate’s representatives return to Copake to meet with the town board. They tell them they’ve already finalized a lease with the Rasweillers to build on their land. The company had also secured Renewable Energy Credits, or RECs, from the state that they planned to sell once the project was up and running. Copake town supervisor, Jeanne Mettler, and deputy supervisor, Richard Wolf, are furious. |
| Jeanne Mettler: | The way the state has structured this law, the towns who will bear the burden of these very large installations are not given any say. Our voice is completely overlooked. |
| Richard Wolf: | The state has set up, in effect, what Jeanne and I refer to as the Wild West here because all that a developer needs to do is find some willing landowners who are willing to lease their land, neighbors be damned. |
| Jonathan Jones: | The town of Copake would eventually become the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state. The suit is funded by unnamed donors and asked the courts to throw out the new state regulations. They argue those regulations were made by and for the renewable energy industry with little consideration for local governments. |
| As word spreads about Hecate moving forward with Shepherd’s Run, residents who are against the project start organizing. They form a group called Sensible Solar for Rural New York. Sara Traberman and Stephen Futrell help run the group. | |
| Sara Traberman: | It’s sprawling all over the place, and if you think about what is… It’s 267 acres. That’s equivalent to 202 football fields. |
| Stephen Futrell: | They also used Solar Farm, which believe me, it’s not a farm. It is a farm today. It would not be a farm the minute it became a solar field. It’s seven solar fields. It’s almost like an octopus with seven different fields going throughout the valley. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Then supporters of Shepherd’s Run form their own group; Friends of Columbia Solar. They say their goal is to highlight the benefits of the project and counter misinformation. |
| Dan Haas: | We would love to see this come out where the community could come together around it. |
| Jonathan Jones: | That’s Dan Haas, one of the founders. |
| Dan Haas: | It’s giving up 1%. I mean, it is only about 1% of the town’s land surface really that will be covered by this project. That’s always important to remember. |
| Jonathan Jones: | For the owners of the farm, Nancy and Bill Rasweiler, the pushback feels personal. They decide to stay out of the fray as much as possible. |
| Nancy Rasweile…: | People stopped and talked to me and said not nice things in the parking lot, in the grocery stores. They would say, “Shame on you,” and I’d say, “Well, that’s your opinion,” and then get in my car. It felt personal, and it got worse over time. People saying that Bill’s dad would roll over in his grave if he knew what he was doing. How dare we do that to the town? |
| Jonathan Jones: | Supporters and opponents start putting up competing lawn signs and set up dueling tables at the local farmer’s market. News reporters descend saying that the solar project has pitted neighbor against neighbor and divided the community. |
| Al Letson: | By the summer of 2021, the future of Shepherd’s Run was unclear until something unexpected happened. |
| Speaker 21: | We’ll try to bring together all the stakeholders and see if we can devise a list of changes to the project, or additions to the project, which would make it more acceptable to everybody. |
| Al Letson: | Residents start re-envisioning a solar project that Hecate and the community can be happy with. That’s next on Reveal. |
| From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. | |
| Jonathan Jones: | I’m standing right across from one of the proposed sites for the Shepherd’s Run Solar Farm. |
| Al Letson: | Last summer, Reveal’s Jonathan Jones went to Copake New York, the small town in the Hudson River Valley that’s been at odds over Shepherd’s Run, a proposed large-scale solar project. |
| Jonathan Jones: | And I see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, maybe 7 or 8 red lawn signs. They’re all red signs, “The Shepherd’s Run, no jobs plus tax breaks equals greed. The Shepherd’s Run violates local law. Shepherd’s Run removes farmland.” |
| Al Letson: | He talked to the neighbors who lived near the site like Bill Newcomb. Bill’s a fly fisherman whose been there since 1945 when his grandparents bought a small farm here. Shepherd’s Run is slated to be built in his backyard about 100 yards behind his house. |
| Bill Newcomb: | I have to get up in the morning and look across at 80 acres of glass. And the guy came and he was explaining it to me, “Well, we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna do that.” I can only compare it to the fact I’m gonna come in. I’m going to destroy everything you have, and there’s nothing you can do about it. |
| Al Letson: | Down the road lives Hannah Mandel, a retired school teacher from New York City. She calls this area Shangri-La, and said the thought of seeing solar panels instead of corn fields frightens her. |
| Hannah Mandel: | There are lots of people who say NIMBY, NIMBY, NIMBY, and the people who say NIMBY, NIMBY, NIMBY, they don’t live right next door to it. |
| Al Letson: | Hannah says she’s not a poet, but she’ll write a poem when the moment strikes, like when she found herself musing about the solar project and wrote, Thoughts on a Sunlit Winter Day. |
| Hannah Mandel: | The beauty of these winding roads riding through forests of tall evergreen and naked tree trunks standing like statues, will it all be destroyed in the search of energy that could save the world? |
| Al Letson: | Hannah says she supports renewable energy development in New York, just not this one. |
| Hannah Mandel: | I know all about climate change, and I know what people’s concerns are, but I think that this solar farm would destroy a community. |
| Bradley Pitts: | One of the things that gets my blood boiling fastest is folks that just say, “I don’t want to look at it.” |
| Al Letson: | Bradley Pitts lives just up the hill. He moved here with his family during the pandemic. He splits his time between Copake and Brooklyn. |
| Bradley Pitts: | It’s not my first choice of things to look at. I also think beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. I think of my kids. I think of sea level rise. Am I going to say, “You deal with these consequences because I don’t want to look at it.” To me, that’s trying to operate as if we’re in some sort of bucolic bubble here and ignore the global factors. But the whole point of climate change is there is no bubble. There is no escape. |
| Al Letson: | The tensions over solar and Copake are playing out across the country. What’s different about Copake is what some residents decided to do about it. Jonathan picks up the story where things started to change. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Meredith Kane was sick of the fighting over Shepherd’s Run. |
| Meredith Kane: | My view was always where’s the balance? |
| Jonathan Jones: | Meredith is a Copake resident, real estate attorney, and a member of Sensible Solar for Rural New York, the group that opposed the project, but she thought it’s wrong to just say no. |
| Meredith Kane: | We have no principled way to say, “No, don’t do it here. Do it elsewhere,” unless the site is completely inappropriate. But if there’s a way to make the site workable, and a way that the energy can be developed here, everybody’s got to take their fair share. Everybody’s gotta do their part. |
| Jonathan Jones: | It was the fall of 2021, almost five years since Hecate first presented the idea of Shepherd’s Run to the town board. The company’s developers were back in Copake. They told town officials they were getting ready to apply for a state permit to begin work on the project. The company had spent months reworking the design. The project area would be cut in half down to 220 acres. There would be more wildlife-friendly fencing, no battery storage, and more trees and shrubs. The developers said the project would bring in around 5 to $7 million in taxes and create roughly 120 construction jobs. They hoped the changes would be enough to win the community’s support, but the Copake Town Board was not impressed. |
| Jeanne Mettler: | Copake’s position today is as it was two years ago. The town opposes the project as it is currently proposed. |
| Jonathan Jones: | That’s Supervisor Jeanne Mettler on WAMC, the local public radio station. |
| Jeanne Mettler: | Now, Hecate touts that they have reduced the area, but they have not compromised a single megawatt. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Meredith reached out to supporters and opponents of the solar project to try to bring them together. One person who got an invite was Dan Haas. He helped organize the local group backing the project. |
| Dan Haas: | Meredith Kane, she’s an old friend, and she began to advocate for this idea of a working group, bring together all the stakeholders and see if we can devise a list of changes to the project or additions to the project, which would make it more acceptable to everybody. |
| Jonathan Jones: | One of the first meetings of what would become the Copake Working Group was in Meredith’s living room. It started with a simple question. |
| Dan Haas: | What brought you to Copake? What do you love about Copake? It’s a softball question that everybody can answer and emphasizes the commonalities that we have. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Over the next three months, the working group brought in conservation groups and experts from the area. Together, they mapped out their main concerns and brainstormed solutions. |
| Meredith Kane: | Thank you everybody for taking time tonight and joining us. |
| Jonathan Jones: | In February 2022, the working group presented its plan in an online meeting with local residents, the town board and Hecate’s new project manager, Alex Campbell. Meredith and the working group hoped Hecate would incorporate some of their suggestions before formally filing its application with the state. |
| Meredith Kane: | Tonight’s forum is actually sponsored by four different groups who have all been working collaboratively to talk about and really try to focus on what would it take to make the Shepherd’s Run project one that could actually be a win-win for Copake and the whole Copake community. |
| Jonathan Jones: | The working group proposed four general areas for improvement. First, they wanted Hecate to do more to protect the environment. The new plan called for hiking trails and community green spaces on the land. They also wanted guarantees that Hecate would not clear-cut any trees. |
| Here’s Bradley Pitts, a neighbor of the proposed site, presenting that part of the plan. | |
| Bradley Pitts: | What if there’s a loop where you can go from the school along the rail trail into the wetlands, but bringing you up close to the panels so that you’re really experiencing the richness of this site, which is a great little microcosm of Copake at large. |
| Jonathan Jones: | The second thing the working group wanted was for Hecate to integrate farming among the solar panels and invest in educational programs where local students could learn about these techniques. |
| Third, they wanted Hecate to do more for the nearby homeowners. They proposed offering compensation and creating a more robust landscaping plan. | |
| Speaker 26: | Especially in the southern part of the project where we talked about how to protect the neighbors who are most exposed by not cutting down a big patch of trees that’s directly in their view. |
| Jonathan Jones: | And finally, the working group wanted more benefits for the whole community, like lower electricity bills, solar panels for the high school, and for Hecate to pay full property taxes to the town, county, and school district. |
| Immediately after the presentation, everyone seemed enthusiastic, including Alex Campbell from Hecate. | |
| Alex Campbell: | Hey, I want to stress that myself, Hecate generally, we’re very excited to continue our work with the working group and make this a project we can all be proud of. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Meredith Kane said if Hecate formally committed to the working group’s recommendations, the project could win over the community and it could be a roadmap for solar developers trying to build in other rural areas. |
| But that’s not how things played out. Meredith says when Hecate filed its application with the state, the company ignored almost all of the working group’s recommendations. | |
| Meredith Kane: | We rushed to get all of this done before they filed their first application in the hopes that we would see some of these ideas reflected in the application. Then we saw what the application consisted of, and nothing was in there. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Alex agrees that Hecate’s original plan didn’t reflect the working group’s recommendations, but he says the company spent the next several months trying to incorporate as many of their suggestions as it could. |
| Alex Campbell: | We went through each point and we figured out what we could do at that time while maintaining our permitting schedule. Not every one of the recommendations were included in our overall plan, but we did a pretty darn good job getting as close as we could. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Meredith says Hecate paid lip service to the working group’s recommendations, but the company stopped short of putting them into any legally binding agreement. |
| Meredith Kane: | They’re basically saying that’ll be an afterthought. First, we’re just going to design the solar project, and then if we can fit something in after that, we’ll think about it. But you can’t. You’ve got to design them together. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Alex says some of what the working group was asking for was simply out of Hecate’s control. |
| Alex Campbell: | I can’t tell a landowner to put a trail through all of his property and tie it into the solar project. That’s his land and her land, and they can do with it what they want, right? And so, we had always said for the things that were completely outside of our control, we’d say we’ll enable a conversation and everybody has to give a little, take a little, right? Hopefully, at the end of a negotiation, everybody feels like they’re a little slighted, right? Nobody won outright. |
| Jonathan Jones: | After failing to come to terms on an agreement, Alex left Hecate, and the working group splintered. Sara Traberman of Sensible Solar for Rural New York said by that time, most people were fed up with the whole process anyway. |
| Sara Traberman: | During the time of the working group, the community was taken as well by that whole process. But I will say that overwhelmingly, at this point, most people in this community just want this thing to go away. |
| Doug Bessette: | We could do this differently and we should. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Doug Bessette, the community sustainability professor from Michigan State University says for solar projects to succeed, everybody needs to compromise. |
| Doug Bessette: | I think there is an expectation that every project should be built and that the community is simply a roadblock to be overcome, and I think that’s the way our policy is developed. I think that’s the way developers treat communities. I think that’s the way often local officials are required to engage with developers, and I don’t think that leads us to where we want to be. |
| Jonathan Jones: | In his research, Doug found local communities were more supportive if they felt they had influence over the project and if developers directly engaged with them. |
| Doug Bessette: | They really liked it when a developer came to their house, and even if they didn’t have necessarily a friendly engagement with that developer, they really liked having an opportunity to influence what the project would look like. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Doug found that some of the opposition to these projects is driven by local concerns, things like impacts on the environment and the loss of farmland, but it’s also driven by something else; misinformation. |
| Doug says there are well-funded opposition groups out there claiming things like solar panels cause cancer and solar panels generate heat that makes climate change worse. | |
| Doug Bessette: | If you go online, I mean, you can see a lot of what we call organized opposition that uses a lot of fear-based tactics and misinformation to promote opposition to those projects. I mean, that has really increased in the last couple of years. |
| Jonathan Jones: | He says it’s tricky to tell how much of a community’s opposition is fueled by misinformation, but for a developer, the real question to keep in mind is… |
| Doug Bessette: | Are they identifying concerns that are addressable? If these are just concerns meant to either stall development or basically create so much fear around a project that it’s going to kill the project, well, that’s not really worth addressing, basically, ’cause it’s unaddressable. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Despite growing resistance to renewables in farm country, solar development is showing no signs of slowing down, and there are a lot of incentives to get into the business. |
| Doug Bessette: | I would love to believe that the only reason we’re building wind and solar is because we want to decarbonize the grid. I would love to believe that that’s the only reason we’re doing it, but that is not the only reason we are doing it. These projects are being built because they make money, and the folks that get into this work do it ’cause they think they can make money, and they can make money. |
| Jonathan Jones: | In late spring of 2023, the Shepherd’s Run Solar Project in Copake got yet another new project manager, Matt Levine. I recently sat down with him to talk about where Shepherd’s Run is headed. |
| Matt Levine: | Well, I think there’s maybe a lot of misunderstanding about the project. A lot of it is fear of change, and they might be latching onto information that either the project has changed or addressed or is incorrect. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Matt says Hecate is making every effort to set the record straight, though it’s been slow-going. |
| Have you met with anyone from Copake who believe they will be most adversely infected by having tens of thousands of solar panels sitting directly across from their home? | |
| Matt Levine: | I haven’t met with the neighbors across the street. We have both a mailer and an adjoining letter in the works. |
| Jonathan Jones: | At the end of October 2023, the state issued Hecate Energy, a conditional permit to finally begin construction on Shepherd’s Run. The project is moving forward, even though a lot of people in Copake still don’t want it. Many of the people I spoke to, even those who support Shepherd’s Run, believe that if Hecate had signed onto the working group’s recommendations, the community would’ve gotten behind the project. |
| In light of that, I wanted to know if Hecate was reconsidering any of those recommendations. I went through the four main proposals with Matt, starting with their suggestion for new hiking trails and green space through the property. Would the latest Shepherd’s Run plan include any of that? | |
| Matt Levine: | I think Hecate has always been reticent to commit to that, in part because it’s not entirely our choice. A green space that the working group originally recommended would require a lot of ongoing effort and maintenance, and someone that would truly need to take responsibility to take that on. |
| Jonathan Jones: | I asked about compensating nearby homeowners. |
| Matt Levine: | There are no plans to compensate neighboring landowners at this time. |
| Jonathan Jones: | What about farming and grazing under the solar panels? Matt says Hecate has sheep grazing under another solar project in New York, but at this time, for Shepherd’s Run, they can only commit to looking into the feasibility of it. |
| Finally, I asked him about the proposals for improving community benefits, things like lowering the local electricity bills and paying full property taxes. He said, Hecate has no control over Copake’s electricity bills. As for the property taxes, Matt says they’re still working it out. | |
| Does the more commitments Hecate makes make it harder to sell to someone because they’re then obligated to then follow through on these commitments? | |
| Matt Levine: | Yeah. Inevitably, someone wanting to purchase a project will have to underwrite the economics of the deal, and so Hecate has a duty to make the project attractive and investible while also trying to do the best they can to appease requests of constituents. |
| Jonathan Jones: | At the end of the day, it’s a business. Solar developers need to see a return on their investment. The more they spend to meet the needs of a community, the less profit they make and the harder it may be to sell that project to an operator once it’s completed. |
| One of the conditions of Hecate’s permit is holding public hearings, which were scheduled for this month. But days before, a slice of the proposed project area was unexpectedly sold off. The future of Shepherd’s Run remains as unclear as ever. | |
| Matt Levine: | We have adjusted this project to appease various stakeholders. Inevitably, you can’t make everybody happy. I’ve never worked on a project where 100% of the constituents were for the project. But our hope is, is that we can continue to work to make this the best project it can be. |
| Al Letson: | Solar energy development raised red flags for people in Copake, but experts say it doesn’t have to be that way. |
| Dan Reicher: | If we find the right land, if we engage communities correctly, I think solar can be a very big contributor to fighting climate change in this country and around the world. |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. |
| From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. | |
| Dan Reicher has been thinking about the environment almost his entire life. | |
| Dan Reicher: | I got started actually in junior high school with the first Earth Day. I ran the Earth Day celebration back in 1970. |
| Al Letson: | He grew up about three hours from Copake in Syracuse, New York, near one of the most polluted lakes in America. Now, as an adult, he’s a national expert on renewable energy. |
| Under President Clinton, Dan oversaw renewables for the Department of Energy and went on to lead Google’s climate initiatives. Today, he’s a senior energy scholar at Stanford University focusing on solar power in the US. | |
| Dan Reicher: | It is an important moment, thanks to Congress and the White House, but it’s not going to last forever. |
| Al Letson: | Dan thinks the influx of federal funding available right now is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. |
| Dan Reicher: | We have billions and billions of dollars available to really get solar deployed at massive scale, finally to the scale where it really will have some impact on the climate crisis. Now the question is, how do we build these solar projects with the least amount of controversy, with the strongest public support, and really get to a point where solar is weaning us off of fossil fuels? |
| Al Letson: | In 2021, Dan was speaking with a friend of his who heads up the main lobbying group for the solar industry. She told him that building large-scale projects was becoming increasingly difficult. She wondered if it would be possible to bring stakeholders together at the national level to figure out how to address the concerns. |
| Dan Reicher: | If you were to sit the solar developers down with the environmental and land conservation community, what kind of real world impacts could it have? So I said, “Well, let’s explore it.” |
| Al Letson: | That conversation let Dan to create the first of its kind coalition. It includes solar companies, agricultural organizations, and environmental groups. He’s been leading discussions between them for almost two years, and a part of their goal is to collectively agree on how to make the most of this moment. |
| Dan Reicher: | To literally find common ground. The stakes are extraordinarily high. The climate crisis looms large. The timeframe in which we can really address it is relatively brief. We’ve got to get on top of this in years, not decades or centuries. |
| Al Letson: | Dan and his coalition are a part of a larger effort that’s spreading. From academics to researchers, to farmers and landowners, people are trying to improve the ways we do solar development. |
| Reveal’s Jonathan Jones looks at some of those efforts. | |
| Jonathan Jones: | When I spoke with Dan, he told me that the US needs around 10 million acres of solar to reach its climate goals. More than 80% of that future solar development is expected to be built on farmland. |
| Dan Reicher: | Ten million acres is a lot of land. It’s the entire acreage of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined, but all the agriculture land in the US is just under a billion, billion with a B, acres and we need roughly 10 million acres, so it’s both a lot of land and it’s not very much land at all depending upon what you’re comparing it with. |
| Jonathan Jones: | The trick is to avoid situations like Copake where the community put up a fight because they felt like the solar developer wasn’t paying attention. |
| Didi Barrett: | We need to have everybody with us because every lawsuit and every challenge is going to slow things down and make it more and more difficult to reach our goals. |
| Jonathan Jones: | That’s New York State Assembly member Didi Barrett. After seeing the fight in Copake and other towns in upstate New York, she authored a bill to help local communities identify land for large-scale solar development. It passed the New York State Legislature in June 2023 and was signed into law later in the year. |
| Didi Barrett: | We have very ambitious goals in New York State, and the way we’re going to reach them is to have everyone, as much as possible, rowing in the same direction. |
| Jonathan Jones: | And across the state in the country, farmers are coming up with creative ideas to make solar work. In another part of New York, in Ithaca, the American Solar Grazing Association is teaching farmers how to raise and graze sheep under solar panels. |
| Lexi Hain: | Most of us who have to move our sheep and rotationally graze them around, you’re constantly trying to find shade for them, and wind breaks. The solar, so much better. They’re so much less stress. |
| Jonathan Jones: | One of the founders, Lexi Hain, says this means farmers who raise sheep can get the benefits of solar while still producing milk, meat, and wool. |
| Just outside Boulder, Colorado, farmers have found a way to marry crops and solar panels. | |
| Speaker 32: | The sun nourishes us. It gives us energy. At Jack’s Solar Garden, our dream is to harvest that energy, not just once, but twice. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Jack’s Solar Garden grows organic herbs, berries, and vegetables under 3200 solar panels. |
| Speaker 32: | Our solar panels function just like a tree canopy, protecting the vegetation underneath them from hail and damaging winds. |
| Jonathan Jones: | This is called agrivoltaics, pairing agricultural production with solar energy generation. And in the Midwest, there’s another idea taking root, installing large-scale solar projects on farmland that’s already being used for energy production, but in a much less efficient way. Millions of acres of farmland in the Midwest are used to grow corn for ethanol, a biofuel that’s blended with gasoline. |
| Speaker 33: | A new hero is rising, saving our future, protecting our environment, defending America’s independence. |
| Jonathan Jones: | During the energy crisis of the 1970s, ethanol was promoted as a way to reduce America’s reliance on fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions from cars. |
| Speaker 33: | You can be a hero too. Ethanol, renewable energy for your car. Ethanol, fuel the change. |
| Jonathan Jones: | It’s now being touted as the best solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from planes. The problem is that there’s growing evidence that ethanol, at least as is produced now, may not reduce emissions, and it hasn’t weaned the country off fossil fuels. |
| Paul Matheson: | The more we learn about ethanol, the more we see it’s not the solution that it was touted and initially thought to be. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Paul Matheson is an analyst with the environmental group, Clean Wisconsin. He says that, just like in Copake, he’s seen a lot of resistance to large-scale solar development in his home state and across the Corn Belt, so he decided to do some math. |
| Paul Matheson: | We wanted to push back on the narrative that we need too much land for solar and show that we’re already using a ton of land in Wisconsin for energy production. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Wisconsin uses more than a million acres of farmland for ethanol production. Recently, Paul led a study that asked the question, which is more efficient, growing corn for ethanol or solar? It wasn’t even close. Solar blew ethanol out of the water. Paul’s analysis found one acre of solar panels can provide 70 to 100 times more energy than one acre of corn grown for ethanol. And Paul says Wisconsin would only have to convert a fraction of the ethanol land to solar to meet the state’s clean energy goals. |
| Paul Matheson: | There is a huge opportunity to use land that we’re already using to generate energy very inefficiently, relatively inefficiently, and replace it with solar panels that will generate a lot more with a lot less of associated other environmental problems. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Paul’s study in Wisconsin could apply to other Corn Belt states too. Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska, Minnesota, they could all use this idea to help reach their own clean energy goals, and the economics also make sense for the corn farmers. Paul says farmers can make about 200 to $300 of profit per acre every year to grow corn for ethanol. If the land is leased for solar, the yearly profit can be anywhere from 750 to $2,000 an acre. |
| All these ideas, while promising, are happening on too small a scale to make a big dent in the nation’s climate goals, and they will almost certainly require additional incentives to be widely implemented across the country. | |
| But back at Stanford, Dan Reicher says the key players are one step closer to finding common ground on designing large-scale solar projects. | |
| In October, after 20 months of discussions, the coalition he put together of solar stakeholders reached an agreement on shared principles. | |
| Dan Reicher: | The key element of our agreement is what we call the three Cs, Climate, Conservation, and Community. Those are the three key issues we’ve got to address in every large-scale project. |
| Jonathan Jones: | The coalition hopes their agreement will lead to better public policies that will improve how and where solar developers put their projects. Their suggestions could end up in a lot of places, in legislation on Capitol Hill, with the Department of Energy, and on tribal lands. In many cases, the stakeholders making those decisions will already be involved. |
| And next, the group will be meeting to craft specific guidelines and policy recommendations. One example is incentivizing solar developers to build in areas besides farmland like previously disturbed or marginal land, brownfields, trash dumps, and former mines. | |
| Dan Reicher: | There are millions of acres of those kinds of lands that, in some cases, will cause less controversy. You’re not building them next to people’s homes. |
| Jonathan Jones: | Dan expects the coalition’s agreements will end up leading to specific best practices that ensure solar development is done with an eye towards conservation and community. Maybe even in the coming months. He says we need to move quickly. The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record, and what scientists say is the primary driver of that, carbon emissions, continue to rise. Dan says that’s where the sun comes in. |
| Dan Reicher: | It’s our largest source of energy on the planet, and unlike a decade or two or three ago, it’s really gotten to be quite cost-competitive. I’m relatively optimistic because we’re putting smarter and smarter policies in place, and vast amounts of money are flowing in the direction of addressing climate change, both public and private money. |
| I think these problems are quite solvable. We’ve got plenty of land in the United States. If we find the right land, if we engage communities correctly, I think solar can be a very big contributor to fighting climate change in this country and around the world. | |
| Al Letson: | Our producers for this week’s show are Jonathan Jones and Boen Wang. They had help from Steven Rascon, Jim Briggs, Zoe Sullivan, Mara Lazer, and Najib Aminy. Jenny Casas edited the show. Nikki Frick is our fact checker. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. |
| Our production managers are the Wonder Twins, Zulema Cobb, and Steven Rascon. Score and Sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando Ma-Man-Yo-Arruda. Our post-production team includes Claire C-Note Mullen. | |
| Our CEO is Robert Rosenthal. Our COO is Maria Feldman. Our interim executive producers are Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Comerado Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. | |
| Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. | |
| I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story. |
