Connecticut’s solar energy sector is entering its next phase, marked by ever-larger projects and greater scrutiny by regulators and farming advocates on the long-term impact ground-mounted panel arrays have on the state’s limited stock of agricultural land.
One upstart solar developer working to become a player in that evolving landscape is Hartford-based Verogy, and the strategies it’s employing to ward off opposition are unique, to say the least.
Since last summer, the three-year-old company has helped convince regulators to approve several of its utility-scale projects on Connecticut farms by allowing sheep to live and graze under and around its solar panels.
Sheep grazing will occur at its recently approved East Windsor and Bristol solar farms, and potentially at a Southington project it has pending before the Connecticut Siting Council, which has purview over energy generation projects of 2 megawatts or greater. Verogy has also pledged to create native pollinator habitats at those three sites, as well as others, by planting specific seed mixes.
It will also store, for potential later use, 2 acres of prime soils that will be excavated during construction of its 3.3-megawatt Bristol project.
Those are several emerging strategies Verogy and other solar developers are using to satisfy state regulators, who are asking for greater farmland mitigation commitments following a 2017 state law that makes it tougher to win approval to build on certain agricultural and forest lands.
For projects on so-called “prime” farmland, the idea is to maintain some agricultural activity when renewable energy generation takes over.
“This has been a wild learning process for us, as solar developers,” said Verogy CEO William Herchel. “If you had told me 12 or 18 months ago that we were going to be contracting with sheep farmers and shepherds, I would have said you’re crazy, but that’s the way it’s going and it’s a really good thing.”
Herchel, a licensed attorney and UConn Law alum, co-founded Verogy with a team of fellow former Greenskies Renewable Energy executives who decided to strike out on their own when the Middletown-based solar firm was acquired in 2017.
Verogy, which today has 16 employees, launched with the help of a $5 million pre-seed equity round from Texas-based Stonehenge Growth Capital.
The company is pursuing developments in several states and has a Connecticut pipeline of six pending and approved projects totaling more than 20 megawatts. By 2024, Verogy is hoping to develop nearly triple that amount of capacity annually. The company anticipates reaching profitability this year.
Herchel said he has observed the frictions that have cropped up over the past decade between agricultural and preservation advocates worried about the shrinking supply of farmland in the state, and solar developers whose projects require large swaths of open, sun-soaked land that’s close to utility infrastructure.
Agricultural land often fits the bill, especially because many farmers are under financial pressure and could use the new revenue stream.
“It’s a tough one,” Herchel said. “I get it when people are concerned about areas near their homes or farmland they’ve seen their whole lives.”
But more clean energy is needed if the world is going to avert some of the potentially disastrous impacts of climate change for future generations, and Connecticut has committed to ambitious carbon dioxide reductions in the coming decades, meaning solar development will likely continue.
“[Solar] is going to overtake some areas,” Herchel said. “Is that acceptable for the greater good and can you get comfortable with that moving forward?”
Agrivoltaics
Co-locating solar energy and agricultural activity is an emerging practice known as “agrivoltaics” and there are techniques beyond what’s been happening in Connecticut of late.
For example, solar developers in other states have accommodated the cultivation of vegetables, hay and other crops under and around their panel arrays. That, in some instances, requires taller solar panels, potentially increasing project costs.
Agrivoltaics has drawn federal research funding that aims to better understand implications for crop performance and yields, soil quality and stormwater management.
Roughly two dozen solar sites around the country — including some in New York and Massachusetts, but none in Connecticut — have received grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to collect and study such data.
“In fairness, it’s newish for everybody,” said Pullman & Comley attorney Lee Hoffman, who has represented numerous utility-scale solar developers, including Verogy, before the Siting Council. “We didn’t have commercial-scale solar [in the country] 20 years ago in any great numbers.”
Not everyone is convinced agrivoltaics solves the core problem.
Peter Hearn, executive director of the state Council on Environmental Quality, said the idea behind such measures is based on an assumption that a solar development could one day revert back to farming use 20 to 30 years down the road. In his view, those prospects are dim.
“There’s no reason to believe that a solar farm that’s viable in 2021 is going to be less viable in 2051,” Hearn said. “If anything, it’s expected that photovoltaics will become more efficient. Once the infrastructure is there and the transmission lines are there, by what rationale would it become obsolete?”
Coming to the table
Agrivoltaics can add complications and costs to solar projects, but Verogy and other developers must weigh the potential implications of refusing to try it.
One potential upside for developers willing to accommodate some agricultural activity is it could lead to a faster and less costly review process before the Siting Council.
That cost-benefit analysis is a newer wrinkle for Connecticut solar developers. It stems from the 2017 state law passed in response to rising concerns about solar projects growing ever larger and occupying more farmland.
The law does not block solar development on prime farmland, but makes the approval process more difficult by giving the Department of Agriculture power to effectively block a project from winning approval through the Siting Council’s simpler and much cheaper petition process.
Agriculture Commissioner Bryan Hurlburt, who has the final say on whether or not a project will impact prime farmland, said he’s been meeting with new project applicants over the past year to discuss what sorts of measures they might be willing to take to reduce their projects’ farming impacts.
“I’m not setting hard and fast guidelines or rules,” Hurlburt said. “We get this is a whole new world for both parties.”
Hurlburt said developers who appear committed to sufficient mitigation measures could help sway his final decision on a project.
“I’m open to revising letters and comments with the certainty and guarantee that efforts to protect prime soils are true,” he said.
Hoffman, the lawyer, said solar developers are watching to determine which mitigation measures might be most convincing to the department.
“What we’re seeing now are really the first commercial-scale solar projects that have to go through the entire process,” he said. “I think everyone is still feeling their way through it.”
From the decisions Hurlburt has made about farmland impacts so far, it’s clear that measures he deems to be satisfactory for one project may not be for another.
For example, Verogy’s proposed 4.7-megawatt Southington project has drawn opposition from a farming business, Karabin Farms, which currently leases the land and would be displaced if the solar project is built.
It’s a relatively rare scenario, but it could change the project’s fate.
Hurlburt wrote to the Siting Council in September that Verogy’s grazing and pollinator proposals, which were key to his approval of several other projects, were insufficient to address the removal of an established farming operation.
If Verogy can’t convince Hurlburt to change his mind, it could make the project’s approval path longer and more expensive.
“We are still working with [the department] cooperatively to find the best solution for the Southington project,” Herchel said.