🔒A CT solar farm has sheep grazing under its photovoltaic panels; Here’s why it could become more common

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“Good girl! Get back!” Natalie Cohen whistles to her dog Jill, an 18-month-old Australian Kelpie, as the animal rounds behind a small flock of 15 sheep, bringing them running back under the long solar panel arrays in this 25-acre Enfield site owned by solar developer Verogy.

“This is the part the sheep excel at,” she said, “grazing under the panels.”

Cohen owns Hillview Farm in Ellington, and she just trucked these sheep from the farm to begin the process of grazing this newly operational site. This is the business of agrivoltaics — colocating agriculture with solar panel fields that are now popping up around Connecticut and across the country.

Cohen says, particularly in densely settled states like Connecticut, it’s an innovation that’s beneficial to farms.

“With the squeeze in development, we’ve lost that access to pasture for livestock purposes,” she said. “You don’t see that much agricultural production — between that, expenses and other inputs. So, this actually allows us to have a foot in the market with having sheep in New England.”

Cohen gets access to prime pastureland and is paid by Verogy to graze her sheep. What does the solar company get? The answer — mowing.

“Five years ago, you’d just have big landscape mowers running through here, maintaining the grass,” said Bryan Fitzgerald, Verogy’s development director.

“They actually do a very good job,” he says of his hairy coworkers. “They get in all the little areas, all the little tight spots where you’d have to have specialized equipment, or somebody would have to go and do it by hand.”

Managing controversy

This is Cohen’s second project with Verogy. Her sheep have been grazing one of the company’s sites in East Windsor since 2021. And she’s committed to expand her flock into four more Verogy projects in Connecticut as they get permissions and are developed.

Verogy’s promotion of colocating farming and solar is a direct challenge to the criticisms that have been leveled at renewable energy companies. Several solar sites in East Windsor have caused a lot of controversy among neighbors who complain of noise pollution, and last year, in testimony to the Connecticut Siting Council, East Windsor First Selectman Jason Bowsza accused solar companies of “gobbling up prime farmland.”

And the grazing projects do not dispel Bowsza’s concerns.

“The notion of putting a flock of sheep on a solar power plant and saying that’s in some way an agricultural use is pretty disingenuous,” he said. “The vast majority of the use of the land is for a commercial activity, which is the generation of electricity for sale.”

Grid-scale solar that uses any agricultural land is governed by a 2017 law that says the state Department of Agriculture must “represent in writing that the project will not materially affect the land’s status as prime farmland.”

“Generally, what we’ve seen in terms of the agriculture piece is that the Department of Agriculture is encouraging co-use of the solar facility site with an agricultural activity,” said Melanie Bachman, executive director of the Connecticut Siting Council, which regulates grid-scale solar projects. “And therein lies your sheep grazing.”

But Bowsza calls the Connecticut Siting Council’s approach “tone-deaf.”

“I feel, 100 percent, the Siting Council should be required to consider concerns raised by municipal officials in the siting of these projects, because they don’t do that at all now,” he said.

Bachman disagrees. “The municipalities have rights to request party status,” she said. “They can submit comments on the project itself, and we’ll ask interrogatories of the project developer. Everything we do with the Siting Council is a balance.”

Verogy’s Enfield project replaced a former golf driving range, not farmland. However, in Southington, a Verogy solar array did displace active agriculture land, which an established farmer had been leasing. In that case, the company also put a grazing project on-site.

There have been concerns about the loss of farmland in Connecticut, but not just from solar developments. From 2012 to 2022, Connecticut lost nearly 15.38% of its farms and 14.8% of its farmland, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

As of 2022, the state had just over 5,000 farms and 372,014 acres of farmland, according to the DOA.

Community solar

The 5.96-megawatt Enfield site is, to date, Connecticut’s largest shared clean energy facility, or SCEF, which facilitates solar energy for people who cannot put panels on their own roofs — particularly renters and low-income communities.

Eversource, which buys power from the site, has signed up 655 low- to moderate-income customers in environmental justice communities for the power discounts. Enfield High School and 24 small businesses are also subscribers.

Fitzgerald says the symbiosis with agriculture makes sense from a business perspective, but it also appeals to him as someone who is motivated to promote sustainability.

“You are either keeping agricultural productivity on the land, or in this case (the Enfield project), we’re adding it, because it was formerly used as a recreation site,” he said. “So, we’ve added agriculture in that sense, to this land.”

“We’re just really excited to be doing it with a Connecticut farmer who was a sheep farmer first,” Fitzgerald said. “And now she has the ability to continue to grow and expand, having access to the land that these projects are on.”

Before she partnered with Verogy to develop the solar grazing business, Cohen had just 20 sheep, which she kept mostly for showing and training herding dogs. But the agrivoltaics option has allowed her to expand her flock to currently more than 85 animals. She believes she could expand to up to 250 within the next five years.

She says eventually she would like to get her flock to the point where it is viable to bring them to market as lamb.

“Most of the consumption of lamb, sheep and goats happens on the East and West Coast, and thousands of animals are imported each month for consumption because we cannot produce those locally,” she said. “So, I’m hoping this will be a nice outlet of producing locally raised animals.”

Her 13-year-old daughter Julia, who has helped her mother with the sheep for several years, is eyeing the site for a potential beehive project that she would like to develop throughout high school.

Piece of the puzzle

The former driving range site in Enfield is remarkably flat, according to Verogy’s Director of Design and Permitting Brad Parsons, and that made it just right for a project where the solar panels are not fixed, facing due south, but are actually mounted on racks that allow them to tilt and follow the sun.

While they’re more expensive to install and have to be spaced a little wider apart, when the math works, they’re the best option.

“You produce more energy at the end of the day, providing a greater benefit in the same footprint,” Parsons said.

The company has so far been awarded projects in Connecticut with a total energy capacity of 100.5 MW.

Parsons says after the success of the grazing partnership in East Windsor, Verogy started thinking about the Enfield site as one for agrivoltaics early on.

“It is one of the options that we significantly look at when we’re in the permitting process, mainly because we’ve got to work with the Department of Agriculture on some of their requirements,” Parsons said.

Those include secure perimeter fencing to keep the animals contained, and easy access to water, he said.

“Running machinery to cut the grass, just to keep it at a certain height, doesn’t really make the most sense,” Parsons said, “when we can provide another piece of the puzzle to an industry that maybe doesn’t have as much access to land.”