MOULTRIE — “Solar farms” in Georgia was a topic of discussion at a meeting of the Senate Study Committee on the Preservation of Georgia’s Farmlands, held at Spence Field last week.

The committee, chaired by Sen. Billy Hickman (R–Statesboro), held its third meeting at the Sunbelt Agricultural Exposition Sept. 25. The committee consists of Sen. Jason Anavitarte, Sen. Brandon Beach, Sen. Jason Esteves, Sen. Russ Goodman, Sen. Freddie Powell Sims and Sen. Sam Watson.

Jim Cooley, director of district operations for the Environmental Protection Division of the Department of Natural Resources, made a presentation about some alternatives to traditional construction for solar siting.

“I want to start this off by saying that this is just intended to introduce you to options other than traditional large scale solar. EPD doesn’t have a position on these but this is more of a ‘food for thought’ presentation,” he said.

He said that the EPD has worked a lot with the construction industry and with the solar industry and they have come out with new guidance for large scale development in general, which can be found on the EPD website.

In May of this year, the EPD and Wildlife Resources Division released a document that provided voluntary guidance to support consideration of natural resources during the development of solar projects in Georgia. In the document, it stated that relevant, regulatory requirements were also provided.

During the meeting, Cooley also told the senate committee, “We’ve made a couple of changes to our construction permit to account for large scale development and solar, in particular.”

Within the guidance document, agricultural lands, in relation to solar sites, were addressed, “Agricultural lands are often chosen as solar sites and there are potential benefits to utilizing idle or lower-production agricultural lands for solar rather than active and productive agricultural sites. However, the removal of prime farmland from agricultural production is a concern.”

The EPD and Wildlife Resources Division guidance document also stated that the American Farmland Trust reported that as much as 83% of the new solar facilities will be built on agricultural lands and nearly half of those will be constructed on the most productive farmlands.

Cooley referenced an earlier comment in the meeting made by Sen. Russ Goodman (R-Cogdell) that rooftops were the biggest challenge to ag moving forward.

“But I want you to look at it in a little bit different way now,” he added.

He showed a photo slide illustrating solar panels mounted on the rooftops of homes and noted that Georgia has $4.5 million housing units, according to a 2023 survey.

He gave pros for rooftop solar including off-setting homeowner power cost and that some people claim the solar panels extend the life of the roof. He also offered cons including some insurance companies won’t cover homes with solar panels on them and some houses aren’t positioned for adequate sun exposure on the roof.

Cooley then presented the idea of putting solar panels in parking lots and on parking decks. From a canopy perspective, he said, the solar roofs could provide shade for the vehicles in the parking lot while producing energy, giving a grocery store parking lot, as an example.

Cooley moved on to the idea of solar and industrial parks, showing a slide of an aerial photo of an industrial park outside of Bainbridge that had solar arrays on both sides of it. He pointed out that there was still a lot of agricultural land around it.

The next idea that he presented to the committed was using “brownfields,” which are areas of land that are otherwise unusable as they sit. He said they could have solar panels constructed on them and there were extra incentives for brownfields built into the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which addressed clean energy, among other things.

“It’s an extra incentive on top of the incentives that are already given to solar to utilize brownfield sites,” Cooley said.

During his presentation, he also spoke about using closed landfills, reclaimed surface mines and closed or converted coal power plants as solar sites. He said that Georgia Power was currently installing solar panels at one plant and were looking at others around the state.

The last alternative solar idea that he presented was agrovoltaics, also known as dual-use solar. “It’s a way of potentially combining solar and ag into one practice.”

He then showed some examples that included shade structures for livestock and the rooftops of ag buildings like poultry houses. He said that there were, according to the UGA Cooperative Extension Service, were more than 4,000 family owned poultry farms in Georgia.

“The poultry houses use a lot of power. What if you could off-set that cost with solar panels? Maybe, just a little bit different way to look at farming, in general, and solar as a symbiotic relationship,” Cooley said.

He said that if someone was looking at getting into solar farms, they could look at doing large scale agrovoltaics and he added, “Instead of losing farmland, potentially, you could be gaining farmland.”

After his presentation, a couple of the senators had questions, including Watson, who asked, “Is everyone required to get a permit from EPD on all types of solar?”

Cooley responded that, for EPD, the permit they require for solar projects was a construction permit, which all construction sites have to get.

Then, Watson wanted to know if the EPD went on the sites and inspected them.

“Yes sir, that’s primarily my job. I oversee district operations,” said Cooley. “The staff in the district offices, we do compliance inspections on these permitted construction sites, which includes solar facilities.”

In August of 2023, Cooley made a slide presentation to the Georgia House of Representatives House Rural Development Council that stated that one of the challenges for moving forward with solar farm development was that the “EPD doesn’t currently have enough staff to keep up with the projected increased workload to ensure compliance at the sites.”

Also in August of 2023, The Current, an independent news organization, reported that newly named EPD director at the time, Jeff Cown, said that recruiting and retaining good staff would be the biggest challenge of his job. The news organization also reported that the EPD had nearly the same number of staff in 2023 as it did in 2018, citing an email from EPD spokeswoman Sara Lips.

“EPD’s staffing levels are regularly examined and compared to the workload put upon the agency to ensure that we have an adequate workforce in order to meet the necessary demand,” Lips stated in an email when asked this week if more staff had been hired to accommodate the growth in the past couple of years.

Watson raised another question that, when answered by Cooley, seemed to draw a surprised response from the committee. He wanted to know if the EPD had the total number of solar acres in the state and the number that were yet to be installed.

Cooley responded that he tried but it was difficult to pull the numbers out of the data the EPD has because provisions weren’t made for differentiating between solar construction and other construction in the application process.

“We’ve been asked for that metric more than once but it’s really hard for us to pull the data out and have accurate data,” he said and added that his department wasn’t really notified about the solar projects until they were ready to start building.

“If we can help with that, I think it’s very important,” said Watson, going on to say that he felt like he got different numbers every time someone spoke on the subject of total solar acres.

Goodman asked in disbelief, “There really is no agency within our state that knows how many acres are solar, that we currently have?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Cooley replied.

“Do we know if there’s an independent group that’s tracking this?” Goodman asked next and Cooley responded that there were a couple of different groups that were looking at how to track the solar acres.

“You know, you can go look up and see how many acres of cotton there is, how many acres of peanuts, how many acres of corn, soybeans. Yet, we can’t … A little surprising to me to be honest with you,” said Goodman.

He went on to say that they really needed to know the number of solar acres as they tried to go about implementing policy.

“We got to get a handle on it. Land usage, in terms of solar and everything. I’m not against solar. I just think that how it’s used is important and it’s hard to make policy if you don’t have accurate information,” Goodman said.