Photo courtesy of Jean Christoffels

Community-driven decision-making on land use is critical to the continued buildout of large-scale renewable energy. GPI recently piloted a process and design tool for communities to identify local solar development sites with multiple benefits. The pilot project involved residents of Murray County in southwest Minnesota who used community-informed geospatial analysis to help plan for solar development in the area. The project united community values like clean drinking water and agricultural preservation with future solar development.

Key takeaways from the pilot project:

  • The process and tool enable community-driven identification of potential solar development sites.
  • The model developed in Murray County is accessible to other communities considering how to thoughtfully and strategically integrate solar onto the landscape.
  • Solar projects can have numerous community benefits (additional to the renewable energy installation itself) through intentional, strategic siting and design processes.
  • Solar arrays with pollinator habitat around and under are one way to stack multiple land use value streams (i.e., co-locate with other practices like native pollinator vegetation or strategically site in proximity to other land uses or potential energy off-takers to capitalize on multiple community benefits).

Solar development is increasingly ubiquitous across the US. Current trends and local, state, and national goals for renewable energy deployment all point to continued growth for the Midwest. More specific growth trends in Minnesota indicate tremendous additions of ground-mounted solar energy systems over the next decade.

Community planning for multiple benefits from solar projects

Solar development has numerous potential benefits. However, widespread adoption of solar can also have significant land use implications. As with other land use development, there can be local community tensions around siting solar projects. Such tensions will only increase as land allocated to solar development increases.

To mitigate tensions, communities can proactively plan for solar development. They can identify multiple, “stacked” development benefits that prioritize other outcomes important to community members happening at the same site. For example, solar with pollinator habitat around and under it is one way to stack multiple land use value streams (i.e., co-locate with other practices or strategically site in proximity to other land uses).

Stacking land use value can capitalize on multiple environmental and economic benefits, including local water quality improvements. It can also increase the public acceptance of solar as a land use development option. Another incentive for development is to site solar projects next to potential energy off-takers like large commercial or industrial facilities. In this way, solar can provide a fantastic enabling mechanism for many types of conservation by creating a revenue stream for the development through lease payments that may not otherwise be available for more conventional conservation efforts.

Once a community has decided where they would like to see development and where they would like to prevent development, the next step is to identify optimal community development sites.

Murray County Solar Siting Project

In 2020, the Great Plains Institute partnered with a stakeholder collaborative on a novel process for identifying potential solar development sites using community-informed geospatial analysis. The collaborative included Murray County, Minnesota, the Rural Minnesota Energy Board, the Southwest Regional Development Commission, the Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) at the University of Minnesota, the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, and the Southwest Regional Sustainable Development Partnership at the University of Minnesota. The project partners built a tool to help local community stakeholders and decision makers in Murray County identify areas where the benefits of mid-scale solar can be stacked to make the best use of the development.

Figure 1. Location of Murray County, Minnesota

With a population of just over 8,000 people, Murray County in southwest Minnesota is dominated by agriculture and tight-knit rural communities. The county had already experienced some interest from solar developers but had a longer history of utility-scale wind projects that co-existed peacefully with agricultural land uses in the area. The discourse around siting larger solar projects was well underway at the onset of the project.

The project and process are summarized visually in the Murray County Solar Siting Story Map.

In addition to the story map, creation of a GIS land-use mapping tool allowed community members to identify opportunities for solar development that could result in multiple community benefits. The tool overlays numerous conventional solar siting criteria, including grid interconnection feasibility areas, with ecologically sensitive areas such as Drinking Water Supply Management Areas, Well-head Protection Zones, Habitat Corridors, Crop Productivity Index, and other criteria identified through public engagement with community members and county staff.

In many rural communities, prairie restoration or other conservation is an important conservation tool for wildlife and pollinator habitat, water quality protection, soil health, and more. This new tool provides an exciting opportunity for communities to identify areas with potential for solar development that capitalizes on these benefits.

By integrating land use and environmental data layers with solar siting opportunities, the tool makes it easy to find places where solar with native, perennial ground cover can provide significant benefit. In this way, producing clean electricity can provide a market-based mechanism to help finance environmental conservation and landscape restoration.

The story map and mapping tool were presented to a cohort of Murray County community members, including county commissioners, in Spring 2021. The recording from that presentation is available online.

Next steps

The model developed in Murray County is accessible to other communities considering how they can thoughtfully and strategically plan for solar on the landscape.

Depending on how a development site is designed, solar can achieve numerous community benefits: native pollinator habitat, water quality improvement, a revenue stream for different types of conservation, improvements to soil quality and soil carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, equitable renewable energy access, and more. These benefits are all in addition to the benefits of renewable, carbon-free energy that enables greenhouse gas emissions reductions and air quality improvements.

While much of the data used for Murray County was state-level, communities can also obtain and incorporate local level data to enable a more granular view of their community’s opportunities. This requires establishing and maintaining relationships with the community partners and potentially conducting a local stakeholder workshop to explore the tool and the opportunities in each locale.

Communities will need to determine for themselves which benefits of solar are most important to them and work cooperatively to translate those benefits onto the landscape. Through thoughtful and proactive design and siting conversations, communities can prioritize solar development in optimal areas and minimize development in sub-optimal areas, all informed by community priorities.

With questions on solar siting in your community or additional information on the community-driven siting design process, please reach out to Jessi Wyatt at [email protected].

Check out additional GPI publications on siting considerations for local governments and benefits of renewable energy siting:

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