As demand for and development of solar energy rapidly grows, opposition to large-scale solar projects from host community residents and non-energy stakeholders can hinder the solar permitting processes. This opposition is frequently rooted in stakeholders’ concern for natural resources, agricultural practices, local economic base, and rural character.
Yet solar projects can provide many community benefits, from economic to environmental, and be designed to align with community goals. By engaging communities in planning and decision-making around large-scale solar development, we can move projects forward that deliver these benefits to the host community.
The PhotoVoltaics Supporting Cultural and Community EcoSystem Services (PV-SuCCESS) project will help local and state decision makers address stakeholder concerns. PV-SuCCESS is developing a decision-making framework and science-based best practices to help developers, host communities, and state regulators incorporate community ecosystem benefits into large-scale solar deployment.
The scope of the PV-SuCCESS project
While solar developers often do effectively address some community benefits of large-scale solar, such as increased tax revenue, land use and natural resource benefits commonly are not understood and not addressed in project siting and design, nor in the state or local permitting processes.
An increasing body of research suggests that solar projects can provide community ecosystem benefits beyond just energy production, including habitat creation, improvement in water quality and soil health, support for local agriculture, and carbon sequestration. PV-SuCCESS will develop tools to support this approach.
“With this project, we aim to show that large-scale solar can be designed to use the undeveloped land between, around, and even under solar panels in a way that is beneficial to communities,” said Brian Ross, vice president of Renewable Energy at GPI.
PV-SuCCESS will conduct field research and modeling of ecosystem benefits at large-scale solar facilities and use the results to create a decision-making framework for connecting those benefits to siting and site design decisions. The project will also examine the cultural ecosystem services, such as rural character and local agricultural activity, that can be affected by solar development.
“The scope of the project is to, first, fill a scientific gap about how large-scale solar development affects ecosystem services at the community level,” said Ross. “And, to then develop best practices and a decision tool that can be made publicly available to not only developers but also to communities, state agencies, tribal nations, and others—any stakeholder who is concerned with how solar development is affecting community priorities and natural and economic systems.”
The project will do the following:
- Explore solar-specific opportunities and risks to ecosystem services
- Directly engage potential decision-making framework users in shaping the research, the form of the tool, and implementation pathways
- Examine community land use and natural resource priorities
- Recognize the critical role of providing cultural services that overcome permitting barriers
- Explore mitigation opportunities that allow projects to proceed
The importance of PV-SuCCESS
Solar development is different from other kinds of land development. In a finished solar facility, about two-thirds of the site is vacant land (to ensure the solar arrays are not shading one another and leave buffer areas around the project), creating an often-overlooked opportunity for using that land in other ways.
“There is a misconception that a solar farm is just an endless sea of solar panels. In reality, between each one of those solar arrays is a space as big as the array itself that can be used for creating habitat or improving water quality,” said Ross.
It is common for any new land use to be met with a certain level of skepticism from the host communities, even if it’s proven to be safe and effective.
“We need to accelerate the deployment of large-scale solar in our country to meet our climate goals,” said Ross. “And right now, there is a lot of uncertainty among decision makers about how solar development affects host communities.”
That is why PV-SuCCESS will directly engage stakeholders—state and local governments, solar developers, utilities, landowners, tribal nations, and host communities, particularly disadvantaged communities—in shaping the decision-making framework and its supporting tools based on the identified priorities.
“One of the important things about this project and the way we have run similar projects is that we don’t want to wait till the end of the project to engage the communities we’re working with,” said Ross. “We will collaborate with people along the way, taking interim results and findings to a community, decision makers, or state regulators for feedback.”
GPI’s role and the participants of PV-SuCCESS
Funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE), PV-SuCCESS is currently underway and is expected to run for three years. Alongside its partners—University of Minnesota, Argonne National Laboratory, the Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, and the Minnesota Clean Energy Resources Teams, as well as several Minnesota state agencies, tribal nations, the Center for Watershed Protection, and Xcel Energy—GPI will be facilitating and managing the project.
Moreover, GPI will be directly involved in several other facets of the work, including the development of best practices and field research, conducting some of the social research that’s going to inform the development of the tool, and facilitating the stakeholder committees.
In terms of participants, PV-SuCCESS will reflect different priorities identified by local host communities, state agencies, and tribal communities that are increasingly hosts for, partners in, or developers of solar energy projects.
“The tool we’re developing is going to deliberately incorporate these three different perspectives,” said Ross. “Tribal communities are especially important constituents to understand how to deploy solar in a way that’s going to benefit the community, not just put more power on the grid.”
Other participating communities are in an energy transition (e.g., communities that are in the process of closing a power plant). There is also an emphasis on working with disadvantaged communities to ensure their perspectives are broadly reflected in the project outcomes.
“The communities that have agreed to participate are enthusiastic about the project,” said Ross. “There are a few that are a bit more skeptical about solar but still see value in participating and the importance of the project in their own decision-making process.”
The expected outcomes of PV-SuCCESS
Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) is an existing suite of models developed by the University of Minnesota and will serve as one of the tools to build the initial decision-making framework. InVEST evaluates ecosystem service models designed for terrestrial, freshwater, marine, and coastal ecosystems, as well as includes a number of tools to assist with locating and processing input data and with understanding and visualizing outputs.
Existing tools from the PV-SMaRT project, including a best practices guide and a stormwater runoff calculator, will also be used to develop a new model incorporating habitat restoration, carbon sequestration, and other opportunities for land use benefits. When developing the scope of the project, the tool was not defined completely to allow room for change along the way.
“The end product will be shaped by the midstream feedback provided by the stakeholders about what would be the most useful for their communities,” said Ross. “For instance, local governments may find a best practice guide to zoning ordinances for solar and ecosystem services to be the most useful. State agencies may have a need for a modeling tool. Tribal nations may want to have a tool that evaluates the cultural opportunities for integrating solar.”
After the end of the three-year project, GPI, alongside its partners, intends to continue to educate stakeholders on a forward-going basis and carry on the work beyond the initial grant.
“As technical assistance providers and educators, our goal is to continue to have the opportunity to engage communities and make sure they’re aware of these tools and actively using them,” said Ross. “We want to keep going and make sure this has a life after the end of the project.”
To learn more about PV-SuCCESS, visit the project’s web page.
