The first time Chris Dahl heard rumblings of a plan to build a large solar array among the corn fields and tobacco sheds of East Windsor, she said the project sounded like a good enough idea.
A portion of the land slated for development included a sand and gravel quarry that had become an attractive hangout for underage drinkers and ATV riders, much to the displeasure of local residents and town officials.
Plus, Dahl said, the project promised to produce gobs of clean, carbon-free electricity — the kind of mission that she and her wife, Robin Chesky, had supported by installing solar panels on the roof of their own home in town.
Dahl wasn’t alone in her initial feelings about the project, which even adopted a name highlighting its adaptive reuse of the old quarry: Gravel Pit Solar.
Local officials also threw their support behind it, citing the project’s benefits to the town as well as Connecticut’s broader effort to shift away from its reliance on older fuel-burning power plants. While testifying in favor of Gravel Pit Solar’s application before state regulators in 2020, East Windsor First Selectman Jason Bowsza said the community was “very supportive of renewable energy projects, especially when the projects make sense for us.”
“This is not going to be something that becomes an eyesore,” he added.
But by the time Gravel Pit Solar began to take shape in late 2021, Dahl and others were having second thoughts.
They grew alarmed as they watched construction spread beyond the gravel pit area onto hundreds of acres of surrounding farmland. Trees and shrubs were cleared to make way for solar panels, and workers erected a wire fence around the site, which Dahl said she feared would block the movement of local wildlife.
The first time she drove over a hill and witnessed the extent of the project, Dahl said she began to cry.
“It just overwhelmed me,” she said. “Gone was the farmland. Gone was the open space, now it was filled with panels … It was really unexpected for me, and I think other people have had similar experiences.”
With an output of up to 120 megawatts, Gravel Pit Solar is by far the largest solar array in Connecticut and one of the largest in New England. Its thousands of panels are enough to cover more than 350 football fields and are capable of producing roughly one-quarter of all the existing utility-scale solar power in the state. The site runs from Apothecaries Hall and Windsorville roads on the north side to Plantation Road on the south, according to the site plans.
Its construction has made East Windsor the forerunner in the state’s charge toward solar energy development. Surrounding towns, too, have joined in the bonanza with other large arrays sprouting up on former farm fields throughout the region.
After initially welcoming the Gravel Pit project, however, many residents and local officials now say they’ve soured on the town’s status as a hotbed for the solar industry. Critics have accused developers of snatching up farmland, altering the rural character of the town and ignoring local concerns about noise and safety.
And East Windsor isn’t the only Connecticut community where solar opposition is on the rise. Experts warn the growing pushback could threaten the state’s ability to meet its long-term commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by deploying new, cleaner forms of electricity generation.
Still, solar developers haven’t slowed down.
Roughly a month after commencing full operations in April, Gravel Pit’s developers, DESRI Holdings, filed a request with the Connecticut Siting Council to expand the existing facility by another 30 megawatts onto adjacent properties. The company has also revealed its plans to build a second 100-megawatt facility, Saltbox Solar, on farmland in the towns of East Windsor and Ellington.
“Connecticut needs additional power to meet future demand, and state law requires all electricity to come from renewable sources by 2040,” the company said in a statement.
“Regulators determine how to balance those needs with local concerns,” the statement continued. “DESRI is proud to help provide affordable, clean power to the state by developing projects that are consistent with state policy and is committed to engaging local communities throughout the process.”
In an effort to marshal the local opposition to solar expansion, Dahl and Chesky formed East Windsor Residents for Responsible Solar Development and have been collecting hundreds of signatures from people urging the Siting Council to reject the latest proposal.
Their efforts have attracted the support of state lawmakers — even some who strongly support the state’s clean-energy efforts — who are now pressing for systemic changes to the process of approving larger solar arrays and other renewable energy projects that would give cities and towns more of a say in determining whether those facilities get built.
“We don’t want any more of these,” East Windsor First Selectman Jason Bowsza said recently. “I want to be very clear — we don’t want any more of these.”
Who gives the go-ahead
That systemic change lawmakers are considering could begin with the Connecticut Siting Council. Established in 1971, the council regulates the placement of power plants and electric transmission lines, a process that was previously controlled largely by the use of eminent domain by utility companies.
The council’s jurisdiction has since grown to include cellphone towers, hazardous waste facilities and other types of vital infrastructure projects that often meet with heavy pushback from neighbors. For that reason, the council has the final say over siting such facilities, preempting local control.
“It was basically to end town-by-town regulation of these larger projects that impact interstate commerce,” said Melanie Bachman, who has served as the executive director of the Siting Council since 2013.
If each town had the authority to veto projects within its borders, she added, “the lights would go off and telecommunications would go out.”
Critics, however, say the Siting Council has gone too far in weighing the interests of developers over local opposition. They point to the fact that the council has, in recent years, approved more than 80% of its applications to build large solar arrays. (By statute, the council has jurisdiction over siting any electric-generating facility over 1 megawatt, though developers of smaller projects can waive their exclusion to avoid leaving the decision up to municipal officials.)
“We look at the state and say, ‘You need to do a better job, because these are being built in residential zones, and the impact on the community and the residents that have purchased property next to them is huge,’” Dahl said.
That sentiment has grown particularly powerful within a handful of towns along the eastern side of the Connecticut River, just south of the Massachusetts border. The area — also known as the “Tobacco Valley” — has become an attractive destination for solar developers due to an abundance of relatively cheap farmland and easy access to existing transmission lines.
Aside from Gravel Pit Solar, a few smaller facilities are either operating or under construction in East Windsor’s southeast corner, an area of town known as Windsorville. Nearly a dozen other arrays, ranging in size from a few acres to larger than Vatican City, have been built or are under construction in nearby towns such as Enfield, Ellington and Somers.
By contrast, the Siting Council has approved just a single solar project in all of Fairfield County: a 2-megawatt facility in Bridgeport.
Mike Trahan, the executive director of the Connecticut Solar and Energy Storage Association, said solar development is concentrated in places where substations connecting to the regional electric grid have the capacity to handle the power produced by larger arrays. In more densely populated parts of the state like Fairfield County, Trahan said, higher land values and a backlog of available interconnections serve as an impediment to solar development.
“The bottom line is these projects, all of them, have to interconnect with the existing infrastructure, and that’s where developers go,” Trahan said. “There’s just no way around it.”
While Bachman declined to comment specifically on the Gravel Pit project or its proposed expansion, she defended the council’s overall track record by noting that developers often go through years of careful planning and consultations with utilities and other state agencies, such as the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, before even submitting their applications to the Siting Council.
That process ends up weeding out many projects that could raise flags, she said.
Bachman said council members are limited to considering a specific set of criteria when reviewing a project application. That criteria requires the Siting Council to determine whether there is a public need for the proposed facility and whether its impact — either alone or cumulatively with other existing facilities in the area — would pose significant harm to the environment, wildlife, public health or scenic and recreational areas.
More local concerns, such as the impact on property values or municipal tax rolls, are not part of the council’s evaluation criteria, she said. “Anything related to an environmental effect, we can look at cumulatively,” Bachman said.
But Bowsza, the first selectman in East Windsor, accused the council of ignoring its own criteria to look at the cumulative impact of existing facilities, given the number of projects that have already been sited in his town.
“If I show you an aerial map of my town, or if I show you the chart that demonstrates the aggregate renewable energy in the state and how much East Windsor produces, how — with a straight face — has that not had a cumulative impact on the community?” Bowsza said. “It’s not fathomable that they’re considering that.”
Trahan, of the solar trade association, said he can understand some of the frustrations raised by people living next to large arrays, but he said developers have also worked with neighbors to minimize those concerns — by planting shrubs or other vegetation around a project, or locating them in areas where they’re less likely to draw attention, such as on top of old landfills.
He also defended the Siting Council’s scrutiny over solar projects. Often, he said, the council has required developers to undertake costly revisions to their plans that address concerns raised by neighbors or environmental advocates.
“The Siting Council is being asked to make decisions that make everybody happy, and that’s just not possible,” Trahan said.
Where there’s smoke
On a windy afternoon in March, Dana Van Steenburgh was in his front yard in East Windsor, fixing the mailbox with his son and a neighbor, when a loud noise startled the group.
The source of the noise, Van Steenburgh said, was an exploding transformer along power lines rising up from the nearly 30-acre solar array across the street. The perimeter of the array is surrounded by fencing, dry grass and a line of ornamental shrubs installed by the facility’s owners.
“I heard this loud explosion,” he said. “I saw the brightest green light you’ve ever seen, and then a spark fell to the ground and those [shrubs] went up like a Q-tip soaked in alcohol.”
Van Steenburgh said he called 911 and watched as the fire spread to within 100 feet of a nearby tobacco shed before firefighters arrived and doused the flames, narrowly averting an even bigger calamity.
The March fire was the latest in what neighbors say is a series of issues with the array and its developers, dating back to when the facility began construction in 2021. Located on Middle Road, roughly two miles from the much larger Gravel Pit Solar, the array was developed by West Hartford’s Verogy, which later sold the facility to a subsidiary of Florida-based NextEra Energy.
Among the most persistent complaints has to do with a high-pitched buzz, or “ringing” noise that neighbors say is produced by the facility’s power inverters during bright, sunny days. They say the noise can be heard throughout the tract of homes directly across the street from the array, which is otherwise located in a largely agricultural area, dotted with corn and tobacco fields.
“You’re trying to enjoy the outdoors, in the fresh air, and then you’re hearing ringing noise in your ears,” said Rich Levesque, one of the local residents who has raised complaints. “It’s just annoying, you know? It’s just not right.”
In response, attorneys for the project’s developers have submitted evidence to the Siting Council showing that the noise emitted by the facility is below the 55 decibel limit, or about the volume of a kitchen refrigerator.
NextEra has also attempted to mitigate the problem by installing a plywood fence and, later, a full sound barrier around the solar array.
“While our project was already in compliance with applicable noise requirements, we voluntarily installed a sound barrier, as a good neighbor, to further reduce noise levels from the inverters at the site,” NextEra spokesman Chris Curtland said in a statement. “A subsequent study confirmed that the sound barrier successfully reduced sound from the inverters. We continue to engage with a sound engineer, despite remaining in compliance with the law and observing significant noise improvement at the site.”
Curtland added that the March fire was caused by equipment owned by the local utility company, Eversource, and that it did not result in damage to the solar array.
In a statement, Eversource spokeswoman Tricia Modifica said that the fire was caused by equipment failure during high winds. “We quickly identified the issue and replaced the equipment within 24 hours,” Modifica said. “The incident is currently being reviewed by regulators.”
Both Van Steenburgh and Levesque said the fencing has reduced the noise somewhat, but the problem persists. They said NextEra officials stopped responding to their complaints and requests that the company invest in a costlier solution: relocating the inverters farther away from their homes.
Chesky, the co-founder of the East Windsor Residents for Responsible Solar Development, said she believes the issues surrounding the facility on Middle Road are the result of failures in the siting process that could have been avoided. She said the Siting Council could benefit from a more specific set of guidelines for considering solar projects and clearer rules for how close equipment can be to homes and businesses. (In 2024, state lawmakers voted to require that certain solar facilities locate inverters at least 200 feet from the nearest property line.)
“They need to know more about what is right and what is wrong in these situations, and what is best practices and what is not,” Chesky said. “And I think that the state probably could do a better job giving them the tools that they need to be making educated decisions.”
During a public hearing on Thursday, officials working on the Gravel Pit expansion project acknowledged that a small brush fire broke out at the original facility in September but said it did not damage any equipment.
Jon Gravel, DESRI’s Director of Development, said the fire was the result of a “tractor malfunction” and was safely extinguished by the local fire department.
‘Plants, not panels’
Meanwhile, plans to build even more solar panels in the vicinity of Middle Road have irked the small group of neighbors and local farmers, many of whom have placed yellow signs on their lawns urging “plants, not panels.”
Blueprints for Saltbox Solar, the latest project from DESRI Holdings, show fields of solar panels surrounding three sides of the small subdivision where Van Steenburgh and Levesque live.
“I don’t have an issue once they fix this,” Levesque said, referring to the noise emitted by the existing facility on Middle Road. “But I would have a real issue if they went and bought up the rest of the land and put solar all around us, because now we’re in a bowl.”
Seth Bahler, a dairy farmer, rents 310 acres of land slated for development by DESRI’s Saltbox project, where he currently grows corn and soybeans to feed his roughly 3,000 cows. He said developers can afford to lease the same land for three to five times the current rate, pricing farmers out of the market.
“I don’t blame the landowners either, because they’re getting a better price than what we can offer,” Bahler said. “The challenge is these solar developing companies don’t care about the future, and there’s a limited amount of land that all of us farmers use.”
On the website for Saltbox Solar, DESRI states that the noise emitted by its facilities is “minimal” and that it will use “best management practices” to preserve topsoil so that the land can be returned to an agricultural use after the solar panels are eventually decommissioned and removed. In addition, the company says that solar arrays are expected to cover less than 0.03% of farmland nationally by 2030.
The project has yet to be submitted to the Siting Council for approval.
Opposition could slow solar’s faster, cheaper path to clean energy goals
Even with large projects like Gravel Pit Solar, Connecticut is lagging behind neighboring states when it comes to the deployment of utility-scale solar.
According to a database published by the U.S. Geological Survey, Massachusetts is home to nearly 500 arrays with a combined capacity of 1,344 megawatts. Connecticut, by comparison, has just 69 projects with a capacity of around 294 megawatts. (The data was published in April as Gravel Pit was nearing completion and reflects only a fraction of the project’s full 120 megawatt capacity.) Rhode Island, with its much smaller geographic size and population, has 65 arrays with a capacity of 397 megawatts.
All three states have made commitments to slash greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century as part of their efforts to address climate change. But over the next decade, the New England region is expected to see demand for power grow sharply due to the electrification of cars, home heating systems and the development of AI data centers.
Other sources of power that could be tapped to meet that demand — including nuclear, offshore wind or even new gas-fired power plants — generally face longer construction timelines and added costs when compared to solar, according to Erik Katovich, a professor of energy and resource economics at the University of Connecticut.
“Thee quickest thing to scale up right now for Connecticut would be the utility-scale solar,” Katovich said. “Relative to other options, it’s pretty quick to build, and it is very cheap.”
And as more communities resist large solar arrays, state lawmakers in Hartford are joining in.
Earlier this year, a group of lawmakers representing East Windsor proposed legislation that would have allowed town leaders to veto proposed solar arrays within a five mile radius of any existing array with an output of over 100 megawatts — a threshold that would have applied only to Gravel Pit Solar.
“This isn’t anti-solar, this is about one town being disproportionately impacted,” said state Rep. Jaime Foster, D-Ellington, one of the co-sponsors of the bill, during a press conference earlier this year. “The Siting Council has jokingly called East Windsor the solar capital of the Northeast. We don’t want to be.”
While the legislation failed to gain traction, Foster said she’s hoping to keep attention on the issue by renting a bus and inviting fellow lawmakers and Gov. Ned Lamont on a tour of her district before next year’s General Assembly session, when she plans to file legislation to impose a moratorium on new solar development in the area around East Windsor.
Foster said the tour will showcase the number of existing arrays in the region while giving officials a chance to meet with neighbors opposed to further development.
Other ideas put forward by lawmakers this year included granting municipalities and local zoning boards more authority to weigh in on Siting Council decisions, as well as requiring developers of large solar projects to provide upfront bonds to cover the restoration of forests or farmland after the project is decommissioned. The first two bills failed, but Lamont signed the decommissioning legislation into law.
Even state Rep. Mary Mushinsky, D-Wallingford, a former co-chair of the Environment Committee and longtime solar advocate, put forward legislation that would have prohibited the clearing of forested land for the purpose of building utility-scale solar. The bill was unsuccessful.
Mushinsky said that while solar developers had offered the state the “sales pitch” of building on top of existing buildings and parking lot canopies, many have instead opted for the more economical path of building on plots of rural undeveloped land.
“It’s just because it’s cheaper,” Mushinsky said. “That’s the only reason they go there. It’s cheaper to buy a tract of forest and clear-cut it and sell the wood, and then put in a solar farm.”
Trahan, with the Energy and Storage Association, said such claims are overblown. He said existing solar arrays cover less than one quarter of 1% of the state’s forests and farmland, and he said the Siting Council already considers impacts to farmland and core forests — a designation that refers to large, unbroken tracts of forest — when considering project applications.
“Developers were recruited here to come to the state of Connecticut to help the state meet its clean energy goals,” Trahan said. “They didn’t just invite themselves here and say, ‘Here we are. Suck it up.’”
He also took issue with critics who say Connecticut has too much solar development.
“I think that concern is misplaced if you look at the facts in terms of how many projects have been developed, compared to how much forest and farmland is out there right now.”
Foster and her allies had more success with a proposal to apply a tax of $10,000 per megawatt on large solar arrays. The proposal, known as a uniform capacity tax, was included within a much larger energy bill that Lamont signed on July 1.
The tax was intended to address disputes between local officials and solar developers over facilities that qualified for various property tax exemptions, along with difficulties assessors face in determining the appropriate value of solar panels and other associated equipment.
While the new tax does not go into effect until next year, Foster said she hopes the deadline will bring developers to the negotiating table to settle for long-term tax stabilization agreements.
“My hope is that the existence of this [law] helps them negotiate for a better rate in the meantime,” she said. “The previous examples in the town are they’re sued and they lose litigation money, and then they get no taxes, or they settle for something that’s sort of de minimis.”
In early 2020, East Windsor officials entered into a tax stabilization agreement with Gravel Pit Solar, making the project the town’s biggest taxpayer. Bowsza said it was that promise of revenue that led to his initial support for the project.
It was only after the full scope of the project became apparent, he said, that he began to have regrets. “If we had done a full stabilization agreement later, I don’t know that we would have made a deal.”
According to meeting minutes posted on the town’s website, Gravel Pit’s proposed size was “approximately 75 megawatts” at the time the agreement was signed in May. However, Bowsza acknowledged during that meeting that the developers had the option to increase the size of the project to up to 125 megawatts.
By the time Bowsza indicated his approval before the Siting Council that November, the project had reached its final size of 120 megawatts.
‘A mad dash’
As part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” signed into law by President Donald Trump in July, Republicans axed federal tax credits that were put in place under the Biden administration to spur the development of large solar projects.
In order to qualify for the remaining credits, projects must begin construction next year or enter service no later than the end of 2027. As a result, developers are rushing to gain approval from state regulators to begin work while their opponents are hoping to delay until the deadline passes.
“There’s a mad dash going on right now” said Trahan. “It’s all hands on deck, not just on the residential but on the commercial side.”
A spokesperson for DESRI Holdings, the developer of the Gravel Pit project, declined to comment about whether the impending loss of federal tax credits might affect the company’s plans in and around East Windsor.
Late last month, the developer requested and received approval from the Siting Council for additional time to respond to hundreds of written questions from local residents in East Windsor. On Friday, the Siting Council moved to extend its deadline for a final decision from November to May 10.
DESRI Holdings is based in New York City and operates two other solar arrays in Connecticut — Tobacco Valley Solar in Simsbury and Fusion Solar in Sprague.
Katovich, the UConn economics professor, said that while the loss of federal subsidies may doom projects that are on the margin of profitability, they are unlikely to freeze the industry entirely. That’s because the long-term decline in the price and efficiency of solar panels has made them more competitive against traditional forms of power such as oil and natural gas, he said.
“Honestly, a big part of the cost is being driven not by the panels themselves but by the permitting, the planning, the installation, the labor and the electricity hook-up to the grid,” Katovich said. “So those have become the really big cost drivers, much more than the actual materials of the solar panels.”
In addition, while Katovich said that solar arrays have historically been subject to less local opposition than more visible forms of renewable energy such as wind turbines, they are beginning to face similar headwinds in places like California’s central valley, where developers have been accused of covering up farmland and pricing out farmers who lease the land.
In August, the Trump administration announced it would no longer subsidize the installation of solar panels on “productive” farmland through the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program.
“It has been disheartening to see our beautiful farmland displaced by solar projects, especially in rural areas that have strong agricultural heritage,” Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
The program had previously funded over a dozen solar projects in Connecticut farms, vineyards and stables, according to the USDA.
Foster, the state lawmaker representing East Windsor, said she was unsure whether the changes in federal policy would come quick enough to affect projects that are already well-along in the planning stages, such as proposed Gravel Pit expansion.
However, Foster said that slowing down a decision from the Siting Council would likely benefit the town and the project’s critics.
“Delaying has two benefits,” she said. “It has the benefit of them running out the clock on the extensions possible under the Trump administration for tax credits. But the delay is also beneficial, because it’ll guarantee that the [uniform capacity tax] applies.”