Our Montgomery County government is facing an unprecedented number of weighty issues right now… how to protect residents and support local small businesses, when and how to safely get kids back to school, dealing with the much lower than planned amount of revenue the county will get this year, and more. One issue that’s getting a lot of attention is the Zoning Text Amendment (ZTA 20-01) that is being considered by the Montgomery County Council, which will allow a limited amount of land in our Agricultural Reserve to be used for small solar projects that will provide shared solar power to our community.
While Sierra Club didn’t initiate this proposal, we do support it. Why? We clearly understand that it’s a complicated and sometimes contentious issue. And as a conservation organization, Sierra Club has common cause with farmers: we respect and value the importance of agricultural land, and we appreciate the beauty of the Ag Reserve.
At the same time, we recognize the increasingly real impact of climate change on everyone in Maryland, including farmers.
The reality of climate change makes effective action urgent. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear that we have 10 years to make dramatic changes in the way we live. Every year we fail to act makes it harder to have any chance of averting the worst impacts. Montgomery County itself has set extremely ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals. Some of the changes we have to make - like replacing all our cars, buses, heavy duty vehicles, and public transportation with electric vehicles - will take a long time. Many of those changes will require actually increased amounts of electricity.
Electricity generation is the sector where we have the low cost, proven, and scalable technologies to get off fossil fuels. Moving to clean renewable electricity as fast as possible is the best way we have to quickly and effectively cut our greenhouse gas emissions. For Maryland, solar and offshore wind are the two great clean renewable energy resources we have. It’s pretty clear we won’t be building offshore wind in MoCo, and even all the potential offshore wind Maryland can build won’t meet all the needs of the whole state. We’ll also need solar, and that will need to be built in every county.
Right now, most of the solar in Maryland, and almost all of it in MoCo, is on rooftops. That’s great – we definitely support maxxing out building rooftop solar on as many roofs as possible, as fast as possible. But you might notice as you look around that most of the rooftops you see don’t have solar. There are several reasons for this. One is, of course, the cost to the individual property owner. The other is the fact that solar arrays have a lifetime of 20 years or more; so you don’t want to put solar on a roof that will need to be replaced in, say, 7 or 10 years – doing that would mean taking the array down, replacing the roof, and then rebuilding the array – not cost-effective. The take-away from this is that putting solar on all the roofs where it’s possible and that have adequate sunshine will likely take more than a decade, even if we start right now.
Another key point about rooftop solar is that even if we do build on all those possible roofs, we can’t get all the solar we need that way. A couple of years ago, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory did extensive evaluations of rooftop solar potential for every state, using LIDAR from drones or airplanes. When you focus down NREL’s Maryland data to Montgomery County, and apply their feasibility filters to their airborne estimates, it turns out that our total potential for rooftop solar comes out to be less than half of the total amount we’ll need.
While expanding rooftop solar will be great for taking demand for electricity off the grid, the reality is that it pretty much only serves the people living or working under the roof... and usually meets only part of their total electricity need. On a really great sunny day, a rooftop array can produce more than the occupants are using – even if they’re running the A/C. That extra goes onto the grid, which is also good at such times of high demand. However, that extra going onto the grid produces a credit on the owner’s bill, which gets used up later when the sun goes down or on a dull day in November.
In terms of solar on parking lots, the county does have a substantial amount of parking lot area. The main barrier to parking lot solar has been cost: the greater structural requirements along with electrical and physical safety factors make solar parking canopies more expensive. As a result, estimates were that only about 1,800 MW of parking canopy solar would be built by 2018 in the whole US. (That would be enough to power about 300,000 households… or 0.25% of the 120 million households in the US.) In more built up areas, parking is more likely to be in parking garages, which also have some potential for solar; parking garage solar, however, is subject to even more structural and cost limitations. And, like rooftop solar, parking lot/garage solar basically serves (part of) the requirements of the property owners themselves.
Cost is also an effectively insuperable barrier to building solar on commercial or industrial zoned land. In Montgomery County, as in the rest of Maryland, such land is generally priced ten to a hundred times more than land zoned agricultural. Solar projects that serve multiple customers are – like Pepco and other utilities – businesses, and they operate on a very small profit margin. The hugely greater cost of commercial and industrial land here makes the use of such land essentially impossible for solar development.
Finally, while it’s highly desirable to build solar on appropriately remediated old industrial or other “disturbed” lands - “brownfields” - and on landfills, detailed examination of potential sites finds that our county has no such “brownfield” that are suitable for solar; and while there are a few landfills, the County itself is already using, or planning to use, these as sites to provide low cost solar power to support county government services.
The bottom line is that rooftop or parking lot solar is generally not the way to provide clean energy to people who can’t have solar on their own roof (or don’t own a roof) – that requires solar arrays that are larger than rooftops, and can only be built on the ground.
The proposed ZTA will allow building of solar that could serve about 50,000 households that can’t have solar themselves - apartment dwellers, homes with roofs not suitable for solar, low income families that can’t afford their own solar panels, and others. But right now, our county’s policies make it almost impossible to develop solar for its residents that serves anyone other than the property owner where it’s built. Any of us living in the Pepco service area who are signed up for a Community Solar project are getting our solar from Prince George’s County. Several years ago, Sierra Club provided input to Prince George’s as they developed their zoning and project review criteria for solar projects. That county’s rational and consultative approach has led not to a “gold rush,” but to a balanced process that has allowed them to implement their own progressive policies and plans for renewable energy... including the building of Community Solar projects on limited amounts of agricultural land. (In Maryland, Community Solar projects are limited to 2 megawatts in size, which means about 15 acres or less.)
In the interest of providing accurate information as discussion of the proposed ZTA moves forward, we think it’s important to provide fact-based responses to some of the major questions or concerns that have been raised by some who oppose the ZTA. For one thing, we actually agree with several of the points that have been raised in terms of strengthening or clarifying the ZTA; in fact, we’ve included formal recommendations on some of those key points.
Points of agreement
The ZTA should specify Community Solar - We included this point of clarification as a recommendation in our formal testimony of February. At its latest Council Committee worksession, the participating Councilmembers did agree to specify Community Solar, while also specifying “aggregate net metered” projects. For us, aggregate net metered solar is actually not only acceptable, but a very thoughtful addition. Under Maryland’s regulations, aggregate net metered solar projects can only serve agricultural producers, non-profit organizations, and municipal governments and their affiliated organizations… effectively a way to extend the community solar approach to agriculture and public service organizations that can’t build their own solar. Like Community Solar, aggregate net metered projects can only serve customers in the same utility service area.
Strengthen protection for trees, wetlands, streams, habitat, and other environmental resources – In our February testimony, we requested that “the ZTA be amended to incorporate by specific reference the county’s requirements for Erosion, Sediment Control, and Stormwater Management (Section 59.7.3.4, Chapter 19), Forest Conservation including Environmental Guidelines (Chapter 22A), and other requirements for protection of existing wooded areas, streams, stream buffers, major drainage courses, wetlands, wetland buffers, 100-year-flood-plain, environmentally sensitive areas, and existing improvements, as well as the identification of any rare, threatened, or endangered species, as “Necessary Findings” in the Site Plan review.” We believe, and the County’s planning staff confirmed, that all these protections will automatically apply to any solar project application, like any other project. However, in response to the concern voiced by us and others, at the latest Council Committee worksession it was agreed to make incorporation of these regulations and restrictions explicit – a “belt and suspenders" approach to assure certainty, as expressed by ZTA lead sponsor Councilmember Riemer.
Areas of disagreement -
There are also some important areas where there is substantive disagreement, but where information cited by others is incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading. For those areas, we want to provide the following additional or correct information, based on research and facts:
Why not build the solar we need on the Dickerson coal fired power plant site, instead of in the Ag Reserve? – We have explored this possibility with the county, which has now done initial GIS and administrative evaluation of the solar potential of the Dickerson site. The southernmost parcel of the site, owned by NRG, is largely coal ash deposit, so it wasn’t included in the GIS calculations. GIS determined that on the other three parcels, excluding forested land and other non-viable areas, there are up to 350 acres of potential availability for solar (GIS can’t determine actual conditions on the ground - parts of these other parcels also have coal ash, which could make them difficult, costly, or potentially impossible to develop for solar). However, if all the 350 acres were viable, they could allow up to about 60 MW of solar.
This 60 MW would be a relatively large array for Maryland, and we support pursuing this possibility. However, doing so will be complicated by the fact that there are three other property owners - GenOn, Pepco, and Montgomery County - and also by the substantial price that will be expected for the land.
Bottom line, however, is that while we should definitely work to make this happen - and there is some indication from property owners that they are exploring this idea - it would add only a small part of the 2,500 MW of solar our county will need at 100% clean renewable energy, and only one-fifth of the expected 300 MW that can be generated under the ZTA. So solar on the Dickerson site couldn’t be “instead of” solar in the Ag Reserve; it would be “in addition to.” Further, parts of the Dickerson Site are in the Ag Reserve (and zoned AR), so the county may need to change the zoning code anyway to allow a project there to move forward.
There is no stipulation for the co-location of agriculture in this bill – This is an incorrect statement, as is the statement that “the idea that you can grow food/pollinator plants in the drought and shade of a solar array is rather ridiculous.” The original ZTA draft itself specified as “Necessary Findings” in project review that a project be either “pollinator-friendly” as defined by Maryland’s standard or be managed to allow grazing. It’s ironic that one organization’s publication in which it criticized the possibility of solar in the Ag Reserve contained in the same issue a story noting how “local farmers rely on dwindling pollinators.” Pollinator-friendly solar has been implemented at full operational scale in midwestern states for several years, and more recently in Maryland. In multi-year use, it has demonstrated the ability to actually increase pollinator density and associated productivity on neighboring farms.
Also, at the latest Council Committee worksession, there was extensive discussion of the emerging area of “agrivoltaics”- the systematic co-development of solar and productive agriculture. This is already happening in other parts of the country, and the Committee received the recommendation that the county can and should be pioneering in helping to adapt and implement this co-productive approach. This would be a service to the whole state, since virtually every county is facing the requirement to build some of its solar capacity on agricultural land. It would also be a positive way to engage progressive farmers in this new and necessary frontier of clean energy-agriculture interaction. We recommend that the Council should seek ways to incentivize this agrivoltaic learning process when the ZTA becomes effective.
Why not restrict solar from all productive soil types? – The ZTA as proposed by its sponsors sought to limit the amount of agricultural land used for solar by establishing a quite small fraction of Agricultural Reserve land that would be included (1,800 acres is 1.9% of the Reserve’s 93,000 acres… just as the 3 square mile figure being circulated by some organizations is the same 1.9% of the Reserve’s 145 square miles of area). It is correct that in our original testimony, while not recommending an absolute restriction, we suggested a requirement that proposed projects should “demonstrate efforts to avoid or minimize” use of USDA soil Classes 1 to 3; this was based on the low level resolution soil maps available online (we actually attached copies of those soil maps to our written testimony).
However, the county has higher resolution GIS capacity that allows both detailed mapping of soil types and their relation to the actual legal parcels of land that exist. That GIS analysis revealed that soil types are substantially intermixed. Exclusion of Class 1 - “prime” - soil is feasible, and the Committee did agree to prohibit solar on Class 1 soil. However, exclusion of Classes 2 and 3, or even Class 2 alone, left a very small number of parcels that could potentially accept solar. That limitation, combined with the additional requirements for interconnection of any project to electricity distribution lines (not high voltage transmission lines or sub-stations) would make it virtually impossible to have any meaningful amount of solar development.
Having a ZTA that can’t do what it means to do would be a lose-lose: folks who are opposed to the ZTA would be unhappy that it passed, and folks concerned about climate change who accept the need to build solar on open land would be unhappy that the ZTA doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Therefore, we now accept the sponsors’ original premise, that the best and most feasible way to limit impact on farmland is to restrict the total area to a very small fraction of the total.
(We also note that, with the increasing interest in agrivoltaic farming as a potentially important and exciting area of agriculture, limiting participation by soil type would leave out most farmers who might want to be included.)
“Farmers in the Ag Reserve are unanimously opposed to the ZTA” – While this statement has been made in public forums several times, it’s patently not true. We’ve spoken with folks in the Ag Reserve who are clearly supportive; some have testified in favor of the ZTA. Some are supportive because they are concerned about climate change and understand that expanding clean renewable energy is an essential response. Others are supportive because they know that the economics of farming – especially on smaller farms – are challenging and that leasing a small part of their land for solar can provide reliable income to offset the unpredictability of weather and crop values.
If you look at the most recent USDA Agricultural Census, which has tremendous detail about agriculture in Montgomery County – the vast majority of which is in the Ag Reserve – our agriculture picture is more complex than it is often pictured. For one thing, while the Census identified 558 farms in the county, almost 60% of the total 65,537 acres of “land in farms” is owned by just 30 farms that are 500 acres or larger; there are 13 farms of 1,000 acres or more. On the other hand, the average farm size is just 117 acres, and half of the farms are 25 acres or less.
Of the county’s total farmland, 68% was being farmed to develop commodity crops – mostly corn, soy, wheat, and hay and other silage. These crops are mostly used for industrial food production or animal feed. Only a total of 870 acres - 1.3% of total farmland - was being used for the kind of table crops that are sold and consumed locally, including vegetables, orchard fruit, berries, and others.
The USDA Census also identified a highly variable - and challenging - economic picture for Montgomery County’s farmers. Of the 558 farmers, 395 (71%) had farm income less than $10,000/year; over half had income less than $2,500/year. Across all farms, 407 had net losses after expenses, and the average net income (income minus production expenses) was negative: negative $6,430 (in the previous [2012] Ag Census, the average was not huge, but better: positive $2,590). (There’s a saying in the midwest that “behind every successful farmer there’s a spouse with a job in town.”) On the other hand, the 40 richest farms had positive incomes totaling $41,034,000 – an average of over $1 million per farm.
Finally, the farming demographics determined by the USDA Census have important implications: of the 1,026 male and female farmers on the 558 farms, 637 (62%) were age 55 or above. Fully one-third were age 65 or older. The average age across all farmers was 58 years.
Together this complex picture suggests that - as in other parts of the country - the economic opportunity offered by small-scale solar projects renting land from county farmers could provide an important income source… for example, for an older farmer who wants to retire, or family whose kids are getting ready for college. (We are sensitive to the reality that some farmers farm on rented and, and if that land is instead rented to solar, they could actually lose income. That’s why our testimony also suggested that the “Necessary Findings” in project permit review should include consideration of whether land being proposed for a solar development project is being used by the farmer who owns the land, or by a separate farmer who is renting it, with preference being given to land owned and used by the same farmer.)
“You can’t change the laws of physics… building solar in the ZTA will prevent low-cost electricity from coming into our state, and will raise the cost of electricity” – Our initial understanding was that both these statements (except for not changing the laws of physics) were wrong; but because the electricity sector involves both technical and regulatory complexities, we sent the full text accompanying these comments to experts who are actually engaged in the renewable energy industry in the mid-Atlantic region and nationally. Their unanimous response: the author of these points is wrong. Here, boiled down, are the reasons -
- The author’s points included that having new electrons generated by solar on our side of a relative choke point in the interstate electricity grid (the Mouth of Monocacy Rd. sub-station) would stop lower cost electricity from coming in. Maryland does import about 40% of our electricity from outside the state, through the multi-state PJM grid we belong to, which includes 13 states plus D.C. (Much of that imported power is generated by coal, gas, or nuclear.) The electricity load that would be generated by solar on our side of this choke point is not large enough to have the effect the author is worried about. As one expert explained, “at PJM’s generally accepted 15% grid penetration model,” the Mouth of Monocacy Rd. substation has a maximum capacity (302MW) greater than the amount of solar that would be generated in the Ag Reserve: “solar power generation is a fraction of full capacity (limited to the number of hours of daylight); so at best, solar generation will only meet about 50% of the 302MW.” This would be true even if all the solar were in the Potomac Edison part of the Ag Reserve. However, it’s virtually certain that some of the solar capacity would be developed in that part of the reserve that’s in Pepco territory, given the large demand for power for the residents served by Pepco.
- Moreover, these experts stated, the effect of having solar energy on our side of the choke point would be the opposite; it would actually lead to lower costs on our side. That’s because it’s not just a question of physics, it’s a question of how the PJM electricity market works. PJM sets a required amount of electricity generating capacity that is projected to be needed. It then gets bids, and fills up that capacity requirement with the amounts bid by different producers, starting with the lowest “marginal cost of dispatch” sources. Wind and solar have very low marginal cost compared to coal and even gas (and definitely nuclear), because they have very low operating expenses and zero fuel costs (they’re powered by sun or wind); the unpredictability of fuel costs is one of the biggest marginal cost factors for fossil fuel plants.
- So, if we reduce our need on one side of the choke point, that reduced demand won’t keep out low cost energy; what will be shaved down will be higher cost electricity (much of the electricity generated in other PJM states is still coming from coal, gas, and nuclear). So the net cost on our side goes down, not up.
For anyone who wants to deep dive into this area - which is important for us as a country, not just as a state - here’s a great article on the phenomenon; as complex as it is, this is really the best answer to the technical concerns raised. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/11/06/renewables-reduced-wholesale-power-costs-by-5-7-billion-in-texas/ . The article documents this effect at scale in the Texas grid; but our PJM grid has effectively the same market structure, and the effect is the same.
- The other technical point raised is about cost of interconnection. Interconnection is a cost to potential developers, and our grid is in serious need of modernization to increase our ability to build geographically distributed energy like wind and solar. If interconnection is too remote or technically difficult, the project can become too costly to build. The process is worked out between the developer and the utility (generally Pepco or Potomac Edison; there’s also a small fraction that is BGE territory). The complexities of interconnection are the other major factor that, along with a soil type restriction, would make the practicality of the ZTA non-feasible. In regard to cost, to be competitive in the market, any Community Solar project will need to offer power to consumers at least 5%-10% below the utility’s standard service rate.
- Finally, at the big picture level, the Maryland Public Services Commission supported a study on whether solar would add cost or add value to our electricity grid. That study ( https://cleantechnica.com/files/2018/11/MDVoSReportFinal11-2-2018.pdf) demonstrated that solar actually adds value to the grid and thus can lower overall electricity cost. These positive direct effects are increased by the job and business income resulting from solar development, and even further by the positive health and climate-related effects.
“…it is frankly upsetting that the very real energy needs of low income people are being used as a selling point for this flawed ZTA” – The implication that low income people’s needs are being manipulated to win support of solar in the Ag Reserve is both wrong and, frankly, insulting. It’s wrong because one important and intentional aspect of Maryland’s Community Solar program is addressing the exclusion of low and moderate income families from access to solar energy. The program as a whole responds to the fact that over half of Maryland’s households can’t have solar on their own roof – their roof is unsuitable or too shaded, they live in a condo or apartment and don’t own the roof, or they can’t afford to invest in rooftop solar. But a disproportionate part of those who can’t have rooftop solar are lower income households, especially in communities of color. If the covid and economic crisis has taught us anything, it’s about the degree of inequity that exists in our country, and our state. Sadly, access to solar has become extremely inequitable, largely because of the cost of rooftop solar. If you look around low income neighborhoods, you’re unlikely to see solar panels on roofs.
As designed, the Maryland Community Solar program creates solar access by allowing the development of arrays that are small by solar project standards (no more than 2 MW), but that can provide solar power to hundreds of households at costs below utility standard service – and well below the even higher rates that many low income families have been duped into paying for electricity. In establishing the program, our state legislature mandated that 30% of the program’s total capacity would be dedicated to projects that in which at least 30% of participating households are low or moderate income. The need to build these shared solar arrays on the ground is what has made the Community Solar program the first encounter with ground-based solar siting issues for most Maryland counties and municipalities...including Montgomery County.
The statement above implies that non-profit organizations supporting the ZTA, in order that ground-based multi-household solar can finally be built in our county, are just using low income participation as a sales gimmick. The statement actually indicates not just non-involvement by other organizations in the work to achieve energy justice, but also ignorance of the important role that some non-profits are playing in working to make low income participation in Community Solar a reality. The lead author of this blog, along with representatives of a number of other non-profits, have participated for almost five years now in the PSC-led Working Group that has developed the regulations and implementation procedures for the Community Solar program.
Other Working Group members – state government agencies, utilities, solar developers – are generally focused on issues like project approval and interconnection application processes. The non-profit members have been the leaders in issues affecting the ability of low and moderate income families to participate, such as not applying standard credit requirements to low income households, and getting PSC approval of documentation other than participation in the state’s energy assistance program (which has very limited participation availability compared with need) to confirm income status of households applying for Community Solar. One non-profit Working Group member has created a new organization to work with financing and philanthropic groups, raising capital and developing mechanisms that allow solar projects and their financers to take on the risk of some households’ potential future inability to pay. The unique Montgomery County Green Bank is a partner in developing these financing arrangements. These innovative financing approaches allow greater low income household participation, and in some cases provide even deeper cost savings to low income participants.
So… the emphasis on low income participation in Community Solar isn’t a sales gimmick – it’s a genuine commitment. But to be a reality for Montgomery County, we have to be able to build solar on the ground.
Some bottom line conclusions
Being for solar doesn’t mean being against agriculture. People are talking about developing more young farmers, about broadening the practice of regenerative agriculture, about a greater focus on growing local food for the county – we are totally in support of these things. But there’s no way that building solar on 1.9% of the Ag Reserve will stop these other good things from happening. We need to do everything we can that will move us toward the balanced and sustainable world we need.
This is 2020, the year in which we are clearly on notice that if we don’t take real dramatic action to reduce greenhouse gases within this decade, we – mostly our children and their children – will live in a far more difficult world.
It’s always easy to find some reason to say “No” to any change – “Let’s wait for next year, for more information, for somebody to invent something new that will make the problem go away.” That indecision is how we got to where we are with climate change. While there are additional approaches to be developed and additional plans to be debated, it’s clear that Montgomery County will need to build some solar on its agricultural land. There’s no reason to wait.