Large-Scale Solar in Pennsylvania: 2024 General Update

- All right everybody.

Good afternoon.

It is 12:01 on February 15th.

Welcome to this installment of the Extension Energy Teams third Thursday webinars.

We are attempting to do these on the third Thursdays, but admittedly schedules change and we get confused.

And if you're our colleague, Tom, you text me two days ahead of time and ask me if we have a webinar coming up on Thursday that he's presenting on.

So he blames it on me for not sending a calendar invite.

But we do strive to do these third Thursdays, and then we intermingle some other webinars and presentations throughout the month in there as well.

But we're trying to keep this a staple for our own calendars so we don't confuse ourselves.

So this is the Large Scale Solar in Pennsylvania 2024 General Update.

We did do this last year.

We do have some updates.

We have simplified some things.

A few things have changed, and we will be getting into that today.

And what we're looking at here in the commonwealth.

The most popular question on any webinar is will this presentation be recorded?

And the answer is yes.

It will be recorded.

And we will also send you the recording if you registered, so you go to some webinars, you don't get sent the recording, you have to jump through 13 hoops to find the recording.

We will send it to you.

That's code for please don't email me, you'll get the recording in the next week or so.

All right, so this presentation will be recorded.

Registrants will receive the recording.

I'll repeat this again in a few minutes.

The three presenters today with our official university shots will be Thomas Beresnyak.

He is an extension educator with the energy team.

He borrowed that suit from his neighbor.

There's myself, Joseph Conklin, also an extension educator.

I don't know what's going on with my photo there.

And then we have Matthews Svetz.

He went to glamor shots and got this photo taken.

It appears, or he used an AI generated photo thing.

But Matt, you look great.

So your photo's nice, so I'll keep it on my computer.

(Joseph laughing)

All right, we do have an extension energy essentials newsletter and we would really love it if everybody who is on here subscribed to it, this is what we're calling the long form.

You might want to take a picture of this with your phone and also, take a pic, use it for that QR code.

But this is the long form.

Next month we'll have the short form.

We're excited for that, where it'll only be one or two steps instead of seven.

But in order to do this, to sign up for the newsletters and get all of our great updates for all of our workshops and webinars, you need to establish an account with Penn State Extension.

And I'm gonna tell you, use a valid email.

My dad, for instance, makes up 13 emails.

He never knows his passwords and he can never sign up for anything.

So just use the actual email that you would want to use for this to sign up for these updates, 'cause some of you are getting these updates 'cause you may have attended another webinar or you might've saw a press release.

But this way you'll actually get our upcoming updates and our newsletter updates sent directly to your email.

What are some of those upcoming updates?

This is the calendar for us for the next month for our webinars.

We have exploring today obviously.

And then we have exploring the policy landscape for livestock anaerobic digesters on February 20th.

We'll have the National Broadband Navigator on February 22nd.

Tom, is that in your calendar?

Yeah, okay, good.

All right, and on March 14th, produced water optimization on March 20th, sea change, minting digest date for crop production in the environment.

And then on March 21st, energy efficiency programs for farms and small businesses.

And while I was putting this on here today, I remembered to change my filter in my furnace.

So if you haven't done that in your three month thing, here's your reminder from the energy team to do that.

All right, with that, I will hand that hand this over to Tom Beresnyak, extension educator for Large Scale Solar in Pennsylvania, the general, general update part.

- Thanks Joe.

Again, I'm Tom Beresnyak with the Penn State Extension Energy team, and I'm gonna talk about the Large Scale Solar here in Pennsylvania.

So first slide, Joe, I'm gonna kick this off with something that my friends at Allegheny Energy came up with.

I had a conversation with them and we were talking about the future of energy in Pennsylvania and I really didn't expect to get an answer.

We were talking about, what is it, what's gonna happen?

And without missing a beat, they came up with this energy triangle and they said, all of the future of energy relies on either a push towards price, policy or technology.

And one of the examples of that would've been the drilling boom here in Pennsylvania was a technology change.

So they were able to go different type of drilling to access gas that they couldn't previously do.

So that technology shift created a much lower price point.

We're seeing some things happening now in the solar industry where we've seen a policy change.

So we're gonna talk a little bit about that today.

Some of the policy changes that have done this to reduce the price and have incentives to build more solar, more renewable energy.

And as that price goes on, as the technology changes, it's all within this energy triangle.

So if you remember one slide, I always think this is a good one to keep in the back of your mind when you think about energy in general.

Next slide.

I like this snapshot because maybe a lot of people don't just how much energy Pennsylvania produces.

We are really a powerhouse in the United States.

While Texas has ever doubled the energy production, we're right there.

A lot of people think of West Virginia as a huge energy state.

It is, but we're well above them in energy.

We're exporting about 25% or more of what we produce.

If you look over there on the right, we're a natural gas powerhouse here in Pennsylvania.

That's where the majority of the electric generation is sourced from.

We have quite a bit of stable nuclear here.

A lot of people maybe don't realize that.

And then while renewables are growing, it is a relatively small percentage currently of our generation.

Next slide.

This just gives you a nice snapshot of since 2001, where electric generation sources have gone and coal, a lot of that is policy driven.

There were a lot of penalties.

It was difficult to keep the coal plants going under new regulations.

So you see the coal dropping off quite a bit in Pennsylvania, but you see just a tremendous increase in natural gas in this state from very low in 2001 to dominant now in 2020 and beyond, nuclear's been very stable.

And while you see the trend in wind and solar they are small percentages increase, but it's trending upwards.

Next slide.

What are the different scales of solar?

You hear a lot of these mentioned when we talk about solar, people come around and knock on your door about residential and commercial.

Those might be a 10 kilowatt system.

They're relatively small.

Rooftop systems, community solar is something you might be hearing more about.

There have been some legislative updates on this in Pennsylvania.

We don't really have a cohesive community solar strategy here in the commonwealth that other states have, but there's more and more talk of of doing this.

This would be large net meter merchant generation, and this is something under five megawatts.

But a lot of what we're gonna talk about is the grid scale solar.

So you're looking at these large 10, 20, 30, 100 megawatt type systems that are coming online.

Next slide.

I like this snapshot because it just gives you a general overview of how the electricity gets to you.

So you have to have some sort of power plant, some sort of generation.

And then there'll be a transformer that is stepping up this voltage to push it through the massive transmission lines that carry your electricity long distances close to your neighborhood or business where it is once again stepped down by a transformer so that you can use it safely at your home or business.

This is important as you look to these new generation sources, because you have to get it from A to B and I'll give an example here.

If Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce get married, they're not gonna build their dream house near a plant or a high transmission line.

I can almost guarantee you that.

And so there you have to think about the policy involved here and the price of this.

Those transmission lines are probably somewhere between one and $4 million a mile.

And so when we're looking at bringing on new sources like solar there's a pretty large expense in connecting that.

And sometimes that is kind of holding up the development.

There's some more public money going into increasing the transmission lines or beefing up that part of the grid.

But this is an important thing.

And those transformers, they're very expensive and they're very hard to get right now ever since kind of COVID that that whole system of getting them here and getting them produced has been up in the air.

But I thought this was important to go over how it gets from A to B.

Next slide.

Distributed energy resources.

I wanted to talk about this a little bit.

You may have heard of smart metering.

This comes into play also with rural broadband because you really need to have really fast connectivity to a home or business to make this work.

What you're going to see in the future, and we're seeing this in some parts of the country right now, is that one the home is connected traditionally for ever since the advent of electricity, it's gone one way from that power plant through the transmission last to the home.

It's a one way that's changing.

So distributed energy allows us to pull energy from other resources.

In this particular example, you see an electric vehicle plugged in and there's an inverter there and a storage system.

So there's battery storage at this home and there is a vehicle that has battery storage.

This utility could pull the power out of both of those if they needed it to help in a small outage or something along their lines where they needed that power pulled out.

They can also go in and you'll see a demand response air conditioner during peak times, they can actually lower your temperature a little bit or the energy use of this individual home so that everybody is a little bit more stable and there's a less risk of a blackout or brown out type of situation.

But this is something that's coming sooner than later.

The distributed energy resources.

And I thought this was a nice graphic to kind of highlight the possibilities.

Next slide.

Just a snapshot here of the growth of all the solar since 2009, and the megawatt capacity, you're seeing, 2009, 10, 11, you see some commercial growth and residential's been pretty stable.

But when you get to 2020 and some of these incentives hit and then currently you start seeing the increase in these large grid scale installations.

And while they might be not that many of them, they're producing a lot of power compared to the other sources.

So I just thought this was a good visualization of that.

Next slide.

This is some of the grid scale solar citing statements from the DEP here in in the Commonwealth.

They're looking to prioritize their reuse or repurposing of lands that were impacted for hosting that, part of this goes back though to that previous slide on how energy gets to you.

While those areas make a lot of sense, they usually don't have the infrastructure in place to get that power from some of those areas to your home.

There's a lot of expense in that.

So that's a concern there.

Balancing the opportunities with the benefits of ag preservation and sustainable forest management, that issue comes up quite a lot.

They're supporting the sharing of environmental, social and health benefits.

We'll talk a little bit about some of the incentives around that later.

And then local decision making on these projects.

They're currently really in the hands of your local county, even township currently.

And to protect the landowner interest and safeguard the future use of of that land.

So these are some of the policy statements that came out of DEP.

Next slide.

Here's some of the current policy landscape.

I thought this was kind of an interesting way to look at this.

Currently we, we consider tier one renewables like wind and solar here in PA and we're looking at 18% by 2021.

There are some pending legislators as you'll see up there under the current proposals House Bill 1467, Senate bill 230 to expand that up into 30%.

And that would put us more in line with some of the neighboring states like Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey, that have increased what they're looking at at renewables.

So it'll be interesting to follow this legislation.

A lot of that legislation includes language around community solar, which we referenced earlier.

We don't currently have anything in place around that, but it'll be interesting to follow some of these bills to see where they end up and to see where Pennsylvania kind of fits in on their goals for renewable energy in the next 10, 20, 30 years.

Next slide.

This is just a, a reference to our response to this.

We've come up with a municipal official guide to Gridscale Solar.

I think we can put the link in the chat for everybody if you don't have this already.

We had multiple colleges and departments involved in creating this, collaborated with the state and local governments here in PA.

A lot of our webinars referenced this.

We've done a lot of in-person meetings across the commonwealth to kind of update folks on all the issues here around some municipal issues.

So take advantage of that.

It's a great resource.

Next slide.

What are the reasons for growth of large scale solar?

Well, contrary to popular belief, there's more than enough sun in Pennsylvania to do this.

The panels keep getting more and more efficient.

Each generation of them keep improving.

So it's actually a pretty good place to produce solar.

You actually don't want to it in a really, really hot, sunny place.

They can kind of overload it.

So Pennsylvania's kind of a good location to do some of this.

There's a large amount of generation and infrastructure that already exists that'll be very important in rolling this out.

There are some policy and public pressure from the legislature on requiring this and then business government and investor support looking for it.

And a big, big factor is the cost keeps going down mostly to the Incentives and Inflation Reduction Act, which we'll talk about a little later.

Next slide.

There are a little bit of similarities here quite a bit with natural gas, if your farm or business was approached with one of these, they have land agents that are going out trying to put leases in place that they can build the solar on.

This is new income for landowners or farmers.

There's usually 25, 30 year contracts that are pretty stable.

So it can be a pretty attractive and lucrative lease if it's available to you.

There is some community uncertainty that's a lot of our education goes around some of these things when we go out and talk about solar.

The the physical footprint of course is much larger than a natural gas pad, which isn't gonna take that much space up as opposed to hundreds or even thousands of acres in a solar array.

And again, we'll go back to the Inflation Reduction Act in kind of propelling some of this.

Next slide.

This is a nice snapshot of the investment tax credits that are coming.

And then the concept of energy communities.

So when you look at that orange on the map throughout Pennsylvania, a large part of our state was impacted by previous energy development, mostly coal and some other things.

But because of that, in addition to the base credits, which had gone down between 2006 and 2021, and then the Inflation Reduction Act comes in and brings it back up to a base credit of 30%, you'll see these additional credits on that column on the right.

And that can be pretty attractive to a developer.

So if you're in an energy community, you're getting a 2% bonus.

If there's domestic content produced, there's another 2%, energy community, another 10% there.

So a number of these incentives are gonna be very attractive here in Pennsylvania due to some of the new structure on the tax laws.

Next slide.

And with that I'm gonna hand a server to Dr. Conklin.

Thank you.

- All right, thank you Tom.

Just a little, little correction on that tax credit bonus.

So it's a 30% at this point, and then if it's an energy community, it's easily up another 10.

So 40% and it can get added up to 70% depending on where it's located and whether it's income driven.

So I don't know if you can see that on the slide there, Tom, but, all right, my name is Joseph Conklin.

I'm an educator with Penn State Extension, and I'm gonna talk about utility scale and net metering when it comes to Large Scale Solar.

If you've been following the news or, I mean if you're on this webinar, you are following things.

So you may have heard the term PJM and honestly, up until a few years ago, I gave no thought to PJM, but PJM is the Pennsylvania Jersey, Maryland, it's a regional transmission organization.

So an RTO, there's RTOs, there's ISOs, up here to the north, you're gonna have NYISO, NYISO, down in Pennsylvania, Texas is gonna be ERCOT, I think is how they say it.

But what that organization does, it coordinates the wholesale energy movement in this region.

And they look at it, they don't look at it necessarily as what is the source?

They look at it as whether or not the project is feasible, whether the substation or the transmission lines have the capacity to host and transfer those electrons and what that interconnection might look like.

And if they can sell those electrons.

So throughout the country, there's 10 of these organizations.

PJM is is the largest in the sense that I believe it serves the most population here in the United States with our concentrated population on this side of the country.

So PJM is a source of conversation for that reason.

What happened with PJM is, we can see this, this is the generation interconnection request by fuel type.

So this is over the last two or three years, I believe each of these AF-1, AF-2, AG-1, I believe those are different quarters.

But PJM became inundated with projects, not by the dozens but by the hundreds.

And in order for them to determine whether or not a project can come on board, they have to do a feasibility study with all the projects ahead of it, whether or not those projects occur or not.

So what we see here in the pink and the green and the dark green are renewable projects.

So your solar, your storage, your wind, and even with these, the hybrid where they at, the hybrids, the purple.

All right, 10 years ago, all these projects weren't entering the queue.

It was mainly just this blue, this light blue, this natural gas, sometimes cold.

They're actually, I believe I saw a nuclear in there somewhere at one point, but they were, they were geared for maybe dozens of projects per year, not 100 or hundreds.

So, they can only, the hamsters can only spin the wheel so fast.

So they had to come up with a new method, if you will, to get these projects through.

Or even if they could get 'em through.

What we were seeing is a lot of developers were doing this thing that were calling Q-squatting and they would put forth a project that they had no intention of ever putting forth, but were hoping to get a spot in the queue to maybe sell that spot to a legitimate developer down the road.

So it caused a lot of issues.

So what does this look like here in Pennsylvania?

This is the map on the left is a map I pulled the other day and it is the PJM system map for solar and storage.

And what is shown here are systems that are in operation, systems that are under construction, systems that have moved far along in the process to get put on the map.

Now I wouldn't put a lot of stock in this map.

I believe they're not updating it religiously and or they might have interns updating it, 'cause sometimes we find some inconsistency.

But what to take away from this map is, you'll notice all the lines on the screen.

The blue lines, the red lines, those are the backbone transmission lines.

And then we have the yellow lines, the green lines.

Those are the smaller transmission lines that you know are gonna carry anything from 69 kilovolts to maybe 200.

And you'll see that most of the development is occurring along the lines.

To Tom's point earlier, there is a cost for them to get those electrons to those lines so they don't want to be too far off of those lines or that cost will go up.

Now we are seeing an anomaly that I'll get to later with the net metering that might change some of this.

But the big projects, your 20 kilowatts, your 40, your 50, your 100 megawatts I should say projects are gonna be located along those lines.

So you might get some smaller ones in there, but you can see here in the state where some of that isn't occurring, what they currently have listed in their queue right now, if you look on the right is with storage and solar roughly 25,000 megawatts, which according to PJM's own testimony recently at a senate hearing here in Pennsylvania, they expect probably 10 to 15% of all those projects and all those megawatts to actually likely get developed.

And we're gonna, we'll show you that here in a second.

So what is the status of PJM?

PJM is the largest system operating in the United States as I stated, in terms of at least customers.

They had an inundation of projects which led to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERCS intervention, about a year and a half ago.

But they were already working on a process of improvement before that.

The process, which I'll show you here in a moment, does allow time for verifying projects and interconnection queue, projects have been delayed right now they're actually not taking projects.

So we'll see, probably about a year ago there was, I believe 19 and a half gigawatts of solar projects in the queue.

Now there's about 17 and a half, I think we have the number here.

So projects are coming off the queue 'cause they just aren't gonna be built, but they're not being added right now.

They will be sooner than later.

But this created opportunities for projects connected at the distribution level.

So what we're calling, I guess the local level for some smaller projects, which we'll get to here, this is our new anomaly, if you will, for the year that we discovered.

So here's the timeline.

What do you need to know about that timeline?

Not that much.

Okay.

But what you need to know about that timeline is in July they did start the transition date to the new system if you will, the new timeline and how they're gonna manage this.

And we can see just recently on January 22nd, they started transition cycle number one.

What does that mean?

Not that much until you get to this decision point right here.

So this decision point, which looks to be like may to me, we might see some of these projects that aren't gonna happen will start to fall off the queue because they're also putting these things called tariffs in place in which if you're, it's a fine right, there could be a fine if you're not ready to go at that point or you drop out.

And also if you want to put a project in, they're charging, I forget what the dollar amount is, but on a per megawatt basis.

So the larger the project you want to put in the queue, you're gonna have to put some money up front for that feasibility study.

So in essence, they are trying to get, they're trying to put a stop to some of the speculation that may have been occurring over the last couple years.

So what's this look like here in Pennsylvania?

I do have to give credit here to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

You'll see there, some of their slides throughout here, our contact there, Robert Young has been gracious enough to provide us with some data and slides.

And this is one that he provided to us recently in that there's 17.2 gigawatts in the queue.

And again, that's down from the 19 gigawatts before.

And you could see here that Pennsylvania solar future plan calls for 9.9 or roughly 10 gigawatts to reach that 10% by 2030.

With that being said, you can see this timeline with, there's 450 projects total.

But of those 450 projects, how many of them will get developed, so again, according to PJM testimony, they're expecting 10 to 15% of those projects to get developed.

Now they can vary in size from, you could have your 20 megawatt or you could have your 100 megawatt.

So those projects that that cost more and the further they get in the study are more likely to occur than some of those smaller projects.

So you can see 255 are an initial review and then you go down the line and at the end of the day, right now there are 12 projects in service.

What I would like to highlight, there are 16 under construction and under construction I have found to be varying in terms, 'cause I've driven around and looked, tried to find some of these under construction sites and there's just nothing there.

Or they could be putting in posts at this point.

So there that in some regards somewhat of a subjective definition under construction.

But they have an interconnection agreement, they have likely an agreement with the townships in terms of zoning.

So they should move forward with that without being said, they need the materials to do that.

So what we're seeing is a shortage in things like transformers and things of that nature, which might stall the projects as well.

So this is another look at that map I had earlier and what are the potential number of projects.

And you could see on this map, and I can almost guarantee you that these number of projects are correlating with those transmission lines throughout Pennsylvania.

You can see here in some of the northern tier counties, there isn't or is none, no action going on in terms of PJM and utility scale solar, the infrastructure isn't there, so that gives you a snapshot, again, will there be 15?

Where do, I live in West Moreland County.

Will there be eight projects coming on in West Moreland County?

That's probably a bad example.

I bet you there will be, there'll be some, but will there be 20 in is this Crawford County?

What is this county, Matt?

What is this county?

Is that your county?

Whatever, Crawford County.

Will there be 20, probably not, so we're the project size distribution, there's utility scale, which we're calling anything over 20 megawatts, which is going to go on those transmission lines.

Ohio says it's 50 megawatts.

The federal government is using the term for large scale solar, anything over one megawatt.

There's a lot of different definitions here.

So this is a project size distribution of what our friends at DEP found was in the queue right now for the PJM for utility scale solar.

And you'll see that sweet spot is really along that 20 megawatts.

There are some lower ones in there, there are a lot of larger ones.

We were talking to a developer the other day that has their eye on a 500 megawatt solar array.

Now we don't know if that's gonna come in one chunk or if it's gonna be several different projects that are gonna make that one project, but they do vary in size.

And what we are seeing is some of these smaller ones, this surprises me here, this bottom number with this under five megawatts with any nine projects in the queue, trying to make it through PJM, I believe a lot of those will fall off for a reason.

I'll get here mo too momentarily.

Large net metering momentarily, here we are.

So large net metering, large net metering is anything that's over 500 kilowatts to three megawatts generally.

And large net metering isn't, for lack of a better term, managed or coordinated through PJM.

It's coordinated, if you will, through the local EDC.

So your local, mine is First Energy and across the county line is Decaying Light.

So they would do that initial approval onto that local substation, that local distribution line.

And it is recorded with PUC, the Public Utility Commission.

And the main reason for that is the alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Act that we have here in Pennsylvania.

So large net metering allows for net metering projects up to three megawatts.

There was a court case that that occurred at that Homrich I believe how you say it and it's what set the basis for this.

Anything over 500 kilowatts to three megawatts, they don't have to have an onsite load so they don't have to have a light bulb.

All right, so it could just be out in the field and have a meter on it with nothing else running to it.

And that's what we're calling the merchant requests.

The projects can be adjacent to one another with separate meters.

So you could have a developer essentially set up a 12 megawatt solar array, but it's actually four different projects, four different fences, four different meters likely four different LLCs.

And to separate that out.

So it could be looked at as one project, but it's actually four for this large net metering concept if you will.

We have seen a substantial increase in what we're calling these merchant requests.

PUC did supply us with some numbers last week, which I'll get to in the next slide.

And I was absolutely astounded at what they sent me for what is coming in the way of these merchant requests.

And again, it's reviewed by PUC and local utility, not PJM.

So in a way, this is how a lot of these developers are getting into the game, getting into the solar business here in Pennsylvania in large scale solar because PJM isn't moving, so this has become the avenue and what we're seeing here, if we look at this, I gotta look over here, look at this graph, is the merchant requests, the merchant requests are blue.

So you see from 2017 to 2021, there's no activity, in 2022 we see an uptick in projects and an uptick in the amount of this is registered in kilowatts, but easily we can put that in a megawatts.

So in 2022, 78 megawatts were requested in 2023, this is what made me about fall off my chair, 448 megawatts.

We were looking at this number back in August of last year and I think we were sitting at about 193 megawatts.

So in that span of September, October, November, December, that's how many requests came through PUC and we could see here at the first part of this year.

So this data is relatively up to date to last week, another 53 megawatts, so another 22 projects.

And those are hitting in that two and a half to three megawatt range.

So what we're seeing, instead of the need for hundreds of acres for a project, so a 20 megawatt project, just say six eight acres per megawatt is gonna come in at 150, 200 acres just quick math, for these smaller projects, if it is only three megawatts in the area, you're talking 20, 25 acres.

So we have seen, and I don't want to get take from our next presenter's fire, but we are seeing that a little better community acceptance if you will for some of these smaller projects.

But again, they can be essentially cobbled together.

So we have here an example of two-three megawatt projects being proposed adjacent to each other.

So to the naked eye, it's one big project, but for the the sake of paperwork it's two projects separated by two different meters, two different fences.

So that is the big thing we found coming here in '24.

And at the end of last year, that was our significant change once PJM started to to go through its phase of recoordinating if you will.

So with that, that is large scale solar when it comes to utility scale in that metering.

And I'll pass it on to Matt.

- Thanks Joe.

So I'll be talking about some siting and zoning considerations for large scale solar.

Next slide.

Oh, next slide.

Yeah, so when we talk about the impact on land, that large scale solar has, usually we're looking about five to eight megawatt or acres per megawatt.

That depends on the type of land being used.

Negotiations with the landowner.

When we talk about the utility scale, that is 20 megawatts and above.

So if you do the math, at least 100 acres, maybe more, when we look at net metering about 0.5 to three megawatts and community solar, which isn't yet legal in PA, but there is talk about it is anywhere between 0.5 to 10, but usually around that five megawatt range.

Now one interesting thing that we've been seeing with this distributed scale project.

So net metering and I believe developers interested in community solar have also talked about it, is this idea of allowing the farmer to choose which parts of their land they lease.

So we're talking about anywhere between 10, 15, 30 megawatts, 40 at or 40 acres at max.

So not the full extent of what a usual farmer has as far as land goes.

So these farmers can choose to site this project on their most marginal land and keep their most productive land in use and at the same time diversify their income and make their farms more sustainable.

So an interesting win-win that's come up recently.

Next slide.

Also, when we talk about utility scale, a lot of us have this idea of just a thousand acres filled with panels all in a row.

But oftentimes what we're also kind of seeing is these more dispersed projects.

And this is example with Shorebird Solar by white source BP, where we see various projects kind of spread out through multiple areas, but still consisting of a total of 156 megawatts.

Next slide.

So when we were talking about what developers are interested in as far as developing a site, the number one most important thing is access to electrical transmission.

So for utility scale this is usually zero to three miles away from high voltage transmission and a substation with capacity.

So without that it's not really economical.

As Tom said, the cost can be pretty extraordinary.

When we were talking about the distributed scale, it is about a mile max from three phase transmission or distribution lines and a substation.

Also, when we talk about where developers want to site, oftentimes there's this current concern about farmland.

And when we talk about it, well solar developers want to develop on farmland, the same reason any other type of developer wants to develop on farmland.

And that's because it has good drainage, it's relatively flat, there's a decent amount of space to work with.

And this is kind of why solar developers have been looking at farmland mostly.

We've also seen when developers are thinking about where they want to develop is this greater emphasis on the community they're looking at.

So we've seen more delays on projects because of problems with community opposition and developers are looking more at the community looking at their zoning ordinance, whether they have a solar mentioned in it.

So they have a clearer path to getting the project developed as well as working on their community outreach to address issues early on in the process.

So those are some of the concerns that developers have when they're looking at where they want to develop.

Next slide.

And just a study from NREL kind of did a lot a survey of developers on a lot of different issues including the project delays.

And this is an interesting chart here that kind of covers what are the community most concerned about?

And this matches up pretty well with what we've been seeing on the ground, the concerns we've been hearing from stakeholders.

For this presentation, I'm gonna focus on the top two, which are the top two yellow bars for solar.

And that would be the visual impact of these sites and the loss of ag land.

So first talking about the loss of ag land.

Next slide.

I want to kind of put the issue in perspective by talking about the highest amount, the development that's causing the highest amount of loss of ag land.

And that would be low density residential and urban high development.

These pictures are just a few examples of farms that have been converted to other uses.

Next slide.

And taking a look at some of the data we have our American Farmland Trust data, their predictions for how many acres will be converted for each use by 2040.

You see a wide disparity across the board.

These numbers are just estimates, so they might not be completely accurate, but to kind of show you the difference in scales, so for PA we have 11,800 acres versus over 500,000.

And to get into a little bit more of the data with the census of agriculture, we see data on the number of farms lost in total from 2002 to 2022.

So we obviously see this decline in farms and this decline in acreage over that time.

It's definitely an issue.

But when we look say 2017 to 2022, we've lost over 200,000 acres of farmland over that course.

And when we're talking about solar, we're still pretty well into the infancy.

We only have 12 gridscale projects up.

So it definitely is a concern, but it is a small percentage of that 200,000.

And to put that in a little bit more perspective, next slide, our goal, if we were to trying to reach 10% of deployment of gridscale solar, it would take about 80,000 acres.

So this kind of puts that a little bit more into perspective both from the 2000 or 200,000 we lost between 2017 and 2022 and a few comparisons of other land uses.

One interesting one to note is about 95,000 K of golf courses out there.

All right, and next slide.

So it is an issue but not the biggest issue, but there are still considerations of how we can kind of still keep agriculture under use and reduce solar's impact.

So one idea is agricul ticks, which is the combination of both solar and agriculture.

We've seen from one recent study that about 82% of people look more favorably on a solar project if it includes agricul ticks.

So developers have kind of taken notice and have kind of taken interest in it.

So one thing we've seen is developers are interested in cheap grazing and pollinator gardens.

Those are usually the two biggest ones because they require no real changes to the site and minimal cost associated with them.

When we start to get into other types of agrl takes it either requires more spacing of the panels or raising the panels to some extent when we talk about other growing crops or other livestock.

So that does raise some complications and if we look at state support for these programs, not much from the state, we have seen House Resolution 224, which is setting up a committee to look at the feasibility of agrl takes and how it can support it.

And when we look at local governments as far as their zoning ordinances are concerned, we see very little mention of agrl takes.

Next slide.

And the other idea is brownfield, which we've touched on before, but this is from the EPA Repower Map, which maps out a few sites that have the potential to be used for renewable energy, in this case solar.

And it might not be a complete list, but it just to give you an idea of where these are.

So the first thing you'll mention notice is the distribution not, this might be a viable thing to do for some areas versus others might not have as many options for it.

And the other big thing you can look at is the amount of abandoned mines, which is the primary kind of place we're seeing for NPA at the very least to site these projects.

Now there it does come with some issues.

So when we talk to developers about this, oftentimes we see that when we ask if they're interested in developing on these sites, they'll say, well it depends on the site because when it comes to these sites, brownfield have possible contaminants or do have contaminants.

And part of the issue is making sure that the runoff, extra runoff created by construction doesn't increase the pollution to the environment.

And also that the sites themselves are safe enough.

Now some sites work and some sites that remediation and the ensuring runoff doesn't happen requires cost and time and some, and a lot of the time it's gonna be too many, too much cost and too much time.

So with that it is an interesting idea and there are projects that are being proposed and projects that are have been built, but we've also seen some issues.

One example would be the project in Rush Township right now, which is trying to work through the process but has raised concerns about that construction and the extra runoff it might create.

Something that can be managed but is something to look at.

Next slide.

So the other issue is visual impacts and how this would usually be addressed is by zoning, which we've talked a little bit about.

But pretty much the idea of zoning is that you're protecting community wellbeing, safety health through restricting certain development.

So most zoning is that enacted on the municipal level and that is about, we have about 2,560 municipalities in the commonwealth.

One of the biggest things we see with zoning is that you must allow the use for in somewhere, otherwise you could be a municipality, could be subject to being considered having exclusionary zoning ordinance.

And that can bring up legal challenges.

And also we see this debate over permitted use or permitted by right versus special exception conditional, permitted by right would be just if the developer provides X, Y, and Z documentation and it checks out, then they would receive their permit versus the special and conditional uses which have public meetings.

So the public can have their input and they would meet with a either zoning hearing board or a planning commission to receive conditions on if their project can be approved or not.

Next slide.

And when we look at how many solar ordinances there are in PA, about two thirds of municipalities have zoning in general.

And when we look at how many mentioned solar, we only see 8% per principal use.

So you're distributed utility scale and 15% for your accessory use more on the residential commercial side.

Next slide.

So when we talk about reducing these visual impacts through zoning, one thing is setback.

So setting the project, any kind of development further back from the property line.

So oftentimes we'll see that it's the same setbacks as you would see for any other kind of development in the zoning district.

Or you might also see special exceptions set for solar that's set it further back.

Usually this has been anywhere for 20 to 300 feet, it can be more, but that's the general idea.

And sometimes we'll even see special exceptions just for if it's to set it further away from say a public roadway or a residential use.

Next slide.

And then screening is the other big one.

So the use of plants, earth firms and fencing to kind of also mitigate the view impacts that a solar array has.

It's never gonna be perfect and completely block the solar array, but it can help reduce how noticeable it is, and for this we usually see a prescriptive versus performance approach.

Prescriptives is generally the one mostly used in ordinances.

And this is the idea that you'll set a screening so that you have a tree every six feet or so you'll have, shrubs in between maybe.

But setting that screening as this is exactly what you need to do versus a performance approach where developers will dictate or where they'll put the onus on developers to dictate, okay, how are you gonna mitigate this view shed or view shed impacts of the solar array.

And you might also consider given the zoning offers some leeway given the how projects are and the kind of variability there can be, if one side of the project is facing woods, do you really need to screen for that?

The woods already function as screening so it also can help reduce the burden on developers and increase flexibility of your olds, next slide.

And finally, glinting glare is one we see often when we talk about visual impacts.

So it's something that can happen but oftentimes solar panels are made to absorb light, not reflect it.

If they're reflecting light, the developer is losing money.

And that kind of follows from and glare analysis kind of show this most of the time when they're done we see little to no glare emitted from the panels.

And usually if there is significant glare found, the kind that can kind of make you squint your eyes and have to look away panels can be adjusted to reduce that glare by varying the position of the panels or changing their angle.

So that's kind of the general idea of visuals and how that's also accounted for.

And if you want to know more about kind of more zoning considerations, you can check out our zoning webinar that we did last May and that also goes further into some of the more issues that you saw on the NREL slides.

And with that I think we'll go to questions.

- All right, thank you Matt and Tom.

And I'd be remiss to mention that Dana, our program assistant and it's, wow, what is the name of our boss?

Dan Brockett, our boss is also on here today.

So for some Q and A and helping us out in the background before we get to that, we do have our civil rights statement here.

And last but not least, you can connect with us at extension.psu.edu to sign up and then those customer accounts.

So for instance, if you are interested, in anything energy but solar related here with these large scale solar, each of these tidbits we did today could have been a presentation, coming up in April, we plan on doing one through a municipal perspective and I believe in June we're looking at landowner leasing for large scale solar.

So it really would behoove any of you who are interested in this topic to get signed up so that you can see these updates.

'Cause we are offering these at what we're calling free of charge and we do need the the audience to keep that going.

So with that being said, I do see some Q and A in here.

Some of these were answered already, so I'm gonna pick one.

Someone asked the question, if a request is for 50 megawatts to PJM, is it all or nothing due to the infrastructure limitations or can PJM say no you can only build a 30 megawatt for example.

They will likely tell them what it can handle and if they want to build, if they still want to build the 50 megawatt, then they're gonna have to upgrade the lines, they're gonna have to upgrade the substations, they're gonna have to upgrade the transformer by they, I mean the developer, so that's part of the cost of some of these projects.

Another question on here that I can get to.

How is distribution of solar projects across PA, especially gray Western Pennsylvania?

I think I had two or three on that, so I'm gonna say that was answered live.

You can refer to the presentation at a later date.

Somebody in the chat also asked if this was gonna be the size we're gonna be sent to them.

Yes, this is recorded and the recording will be sent to you.

Does anybody else have a question they want to hit up right now?

- Yeah, so this question was what does Penn State think will happen at large array sites once the array has reached its end?

So these contracts often go on 25, 30 years, but there is an option to extend these leases past that.

And oftentimes what I kind of see happening with a lot of these projects is unless there's a huge change to the energy where energy is, maybe a new revolutionary technology, these projects already have the zoning permit, they already have the internet connection agreement, I think it's pretty likely that these projects will be continued further on after the 25, 30 years and they'll just replace the panels, as far as what happens if they don't, then that would go into decommissioning, which most zoning ordinances do address in setting up a bond or account as requiring the developer to set up a bond that will cover it if they can't cover it at the end of the life of the solar array.

And usually if they to save themselves from having to pay the bond, they would take care of the project and restore it to its as close to its former condition that it was before the project as they can.

- All right, thank you Matthew.

Here's another one.

What are options for farmer owner to develop their own project?

This is where PSU Extension can help us tune in to the next webinar in March and we talk about REAP and some of the programs that go on there, but those programs are generally for farm use in which that's all figured out with the federal government on what the energy usage would be to kind of not allow the sell back of too much of that.

If a farmer wants to get into this on their own, what are we quoting this at?

One and a half million dollars per megawatt.

Probably not something we would suggest for a large scale solar, but if it's for on-farm use or small business use for that matter, we will be addressing that actually next month.

So we'll talk about that.

And I see Dan, Dan you have unmuted.

Do you have a question in there you want to hit up?

- No, that's all right because I did see some intriguing questions here.

Typical life of a panel.

I know this has been mentioned 25 years, I was gonna chime in on Matt's answer but he just did a great job on that.

I'd like to expand on that a little bit.

For those landowners who are getting a solar lease offer, we need to really make sure that that decommissioning phase is well answered for you and future generations to make sure that those performance bonds or whatever your attorney recommends to get there at the end is there.

So true of townships as well, any bond we put out now probably isn't gonna pay the bills in 30 years.

So we need to make sure we account for that.

Okay, thanks.

- All right, great Dan, thank you.

This question was in here twice.

Does net metering require connection to a high tension power line or can the regular power lines such as those used between homes also be used?

So that is going on a local distribution network?

Actually maybe maybe our colleague Tom could comment on that a little bit more.

That's more his area.

- Yeah, I think the question was do you have to have that infrastructure in place now, if you were doing, if someone's approaching your property for a major project above three megawatt, you're definitely gonna have a need access to the high power lines to get to that transmission line in some way.

But at a minimum you'd have to have three phase power running up to your property to connect that.

And even three phase proper lines per mile would be approaching, 200,000, a million, that price has gone up incredibly post-COVID to produce and get the parts needed to do that.

So if your property doesn't have the three phase there at a bare minimum or if you don't have the transmission lines crossing through, it would be very expensive to connect it.

So I think in the case, I think what Joe maybe was mentioning, depending on where you're at in PA, so if you're in an area with a high power transmission line, that's one of the investor-owned utilities that first probably first energy or one of their companies is running through.

And that's usually what these big projects are connecting to.

Now if you're a member of an electric cooperative, they don't do generation or transmission.

And so in some of the remote areas, we're seeing those small projects Joe was mentioning under three megawatts where they can take some of that behind the meter within their substation and they could take some of that power on, but the larger projects are gonna need like a road out and it's either gonna be three phase or more likely a big transmission line.

- Thank you Tom.

See that's why we keep you around.

Thank you for that.

So, we'll do a few more minutes here on some of these questions.

Some of them that it's not in our wheelhouse, let me just put it that way.

So I have one here.

Can a solar farm be built near an airport?

Actually Pittsburgh Airport just made a microgrid.

I actually drove by their solar array the other day on the highway up to my dad's in Beaver County.

So the answer is yes.

Is there another question you saw in there, Matt?

Or were you?

- Joe, I gathered something from that question and that was a concern maybe about glare.

Do you want to talk about that?

'Cause I think that's why somebody might be asking can they be near airport as in, is there a glare issue there?

Do you want to talk about that?

- Yeah, I think there's more glare coming off the cars in the parking lot than would come off the solar panel if memory serves me correctly, 'cause they're again, built to absorb the sunlight.

Now, in the terms of the Pittsburgh Airport, they're not built right next to the runway.

They're actually next to the highway, but so they're built off the side of those airports.

A lot of airports have vast amounts of land, for the runways and for future runways if they need them.

But our understanding is a lot of those glint and glare issues, either of those panels would likely be turned at such an angle at that part of the day where there might be a glare glint issue.

But I'm sure there'd be study after study after study done to ensure that there's no danger to the passengers in the aircraft coming in.

That would be my answer, Dan.

- Great answer, and I would assume that, the airport would require glare study.

And if you're in a township representing a township today, you could do the same, require a glare study from the developer.

- True.

A question hey, a question here from Joe, what is the expected return in years of these larger projects?

Again, these projects we expect to be on the ground for 25, 30 years, depending on the life.

Now we're not gonna sit here and say it won't extend beyond that because those leases can be extended.

More equipment, newer equipment can be, can be put on those racks, if you will.

But the original life of those is at this point, the life of the lease.

25, 30.

Are we seeing 35 year leases at this point, or are we capping out at 30 ish?

- No, no.

- So Joe, again, I interpret that a little different.

I think somebody might've been asking for what's the difference on return investment between a utility scale, maybe a merchant generated project and six panels on the roof?

So that's gonna be highly variable, depending on the project and so forth.

But as you can imagine, the bigger the project that the less it costs on a per megawatt basis, so we're estimating about 50% more, for a merchant generated project over a utility scale and maybe 300% more or even higher for those panels that are on the roof that are completely net metered.

Am I getting those numbers about right?

- They sound good to me, but again, those numbers as we know change, so, but all right, do what, I feel like I'm gonna start getting myself in trouble with some questions here.

So does anybody else see a question that they might want to hit up?

I see one is PA close to approving solar.

Tom had mentioned some of the legislation that's in place, what was it, House Bill 1470 or 1740 or something that effect?

There are a couple, there are a couple bills in the legislature approving might be talking community solar here or upping the alternative energy portfolio standards.

But those are in subcommittee, but we can't forecast whether or not that'll happen or not.

So I'm gonna be, I'm gonna cut myself off on questions if anybody else would like to answer a question.

You go right ahead.

- I kind of already addressed this, but would it be legal to require fees for decommissioning so you can set up a bond account or some other kind of a financial instrument for if the developer doesn't decommission the land and or, and return it to its original state within, I think usually the timeframe is 12 to 18 months after they've stopped generating power, then you would have a bond or escrow account or something set up with a solar developer to go into effect to be able to use, to clean up, have the solar site decommissioned yourself.

So yeah, that's usually the financial instrument which people kind of used to ensure that these projects get cleaned up.

- I will put another plugin for our March webinar because somebody did mention incentives to put on rooftops of businesses and warehouses.

So I would suggest, the incentive is in many instances REAP, which would cover depending on the size of the project, up to half of that project in the grant if approved.

- Yeah.

Joe, there's an interesting question here, and I don't know if any of us know the complete answer, but we can all speculate for these under three megawatt net metered projects that are adjacent to each other as you described.

Is there, are we assuming there's gonna be a power purchase agreement or something similar to utility scale?

- So in some instances, we know there is an arrangement.

'cause in some of these instances, those are taking place on school district grounds, for instance, so a school district might have some on the roof and some on an adjacent property and in some instances they might be located there.

I know for a fact there's one located near a pretzel factory and the pretzel factory has an agreement and then the rest of that power is being transferred back to the distributed network.

So in some instances, I would say there, there is a plan, in other instances we might be seeing these requests in anticipation of possible policy changes for community solar.

I know our friends at PUC are looking to turn back around and ask these EDCs whether or not these projects are going through or not, or are they happening or should we just get 'em off our docket?

So does that answer that question or does that not, does it leave me more vague than if I started?

- No, I think you answered that well, our friend Brooke Doer ask a question, have we seen a solar lease converted to a purchase where the developer purchases that?

And Brooke, we have seen quite a number of not quite a number, maybe 5% of these are solar purchase options, not lease options.

But I am not aware of any of those being exercised yet.

So the answer is not yet, but maybe, and there may be some we're not aware of too.

- All right.

I think if you were done with that question, Dan, I don't know if you would, let's fit in two or three more and be, we are respectful of others' time plus.

I actually have a meeting shortly, so.

- Well I saw a recurring question on safety.

What's happening about ransomware, hacking or disruptions?

And I said, once these are built, there's physical security on the site, they're fenced in so that you don't have animals or people roaming through there, there's an inverter, there would be some switching involved so that if there is an a power outage, you don't want this power being back fed into the transmission line, especially if there needs to be work done on it.

So that would be with any kind of connection to a transmission line or any power line, there'd be safety protocols and switching in place to shut that off, the hacking that's more likely to come from the utility side.

So unfortunately if someone gets that email that, you've won a million dollars and they click on the link and someone's getting into the billing system of the utility company.

And so the utilities spend a lot of effort and time stopping this from occurring.

They, they have some of the highest burden on security of their email system and anybody that works in there, they're constantly reminding their employees to be very, very careful with any kind of inbound emails or connectivity because that's where that ransomware is normally occurring.

But it's a pretty simple process.

Once the solar farm is operational, there's not a lot going on and the switching is more mechanical there, like I said, there might be some smart grid stuff, but the fear of hacking is really at the utility operation center primarily.

But I thought that was a good question.

- Perfect.

I was hoping you'd picked that one up Tom, I see one in here on can there be more done to improve challenges in the use of brown fields for these projects rather than farmland?

So a few things with the IRA there, there were those tax incentives and I do know that DEP has a study right now, I don't know if that's ready for release on brownfields here in Pennsylvania for the development of large scale solar.

And I think another thing it would be, with this large net metering and the possibility of community solar in that it's encompassing a smaller amount of space, so 20, 30 acres as opposed when they were looking at 200 acres or something of that nature, they just, they couldn't put it there.

It just wasn't possible, so I would hope to see that as well in using some of that brownfield space.

But again, Matt had some comments on that with sometimes there's environmental concerns and that makes the cost of the project, it could double it in some respects so.

- I think one thing more thing to mention is liability is a big issue.

So whenever you take on a brownfield site, you have the liability of making sure it's safe.

There's multiple federal agencies that have their different standards.

So that's another thing is finding ways to reduce that liability might also be or trying to shift that liability or insure against that liability might also be needed in order to better incentivize these companies to build there.

- Tom, I'd like to see if you'd take a crack at this question, 'cause it's really a safety question.

Can a solar farm safely sustain flood waters without creating a safety issue?

Or is there an automatic shutdown?

- Well they, they would've automatic shutdowns in place on this.

With any kind of connectivity to the grid, you have to have that in place.

Even your small solar panel on your home would have safety mechanisms there to stop feeding in a power outage or any kind of shortage in the system that would register, that switching would be automatic.

I saw that a question, I mean I guess if the township approved, I would scratch my head if they would maybe probably wouldn't approve it in a flood zone but that would be a zoning type thing to see if it would even be an option to do that.

But there's a lot of safety protocols in anything that connects in any way to the electrical grid.

- Thank you.

- Do you want to answer one more?

- Sure, yes Matt, if you have one that is tickling your fancy.

- So one more question I saw is what are the responsibilities/obligations of a planning commission for a township?

So normally the biggest thing you'd come into would be if the seller project is conditional use then you would, planning commission would host a meeting, a public meeting, they'd need to advertise it about the project, receive community input and then from that and from that meeting kind of put conditions on the use of the solar array or using the land for a solar project.

So adding extra conditions that kind of take into account the public interest and what you would maybe want to see beyond what the zoning ordinance itself requires.

So that would be the main thing that planning commission would be responsible for.

- Perfect.

Thank you Matt.

And actually we are, I believe we are meeting with the Pennsylvania Planning Chapter, Pennsylvania American Planning Association in April, I believe is when we're on docket for that group.

So, all right with that I think it is 1:15 and as I mentioned before this is a continuing series of ours so keep an eye out and be sure to sign up and if we didn't get to your question, maybe we'll answer it in the next webinar or you can email us directly, once you get that recording, 'cause this was recording, you will receive the recording.

Our emails are on that as well.

So with that, I think we can end it for the day and thank you very much and have a good day.