Siting and Zoning Considerations for Large-Scale Solar

- All right, welcome to another third Thursday installment from the Penn State Extension Energy Team.

This month, well, let's first get started with this presentation, will be recorded and it will be shared.

So if you did register, you will receive the recording in the next couple of days, and it'll also appear on our website.

So with that being said, I know I've had requests in the past for an actual PDF of the PowerPoint.

If you would like one of those, you can feel free to email me at juc50@psu.edu and I will send you along a PDF of the PowerPoint as well.

This month's topic is citing and zoning considerations for large-scale solar.

And we are joined today, well, myself, my name is Joseph Conklin.

I'm a Penn State Extension educator.

And I will be presenting first with a general update on what's going on with large-scale solar here in Pennsylvania, followed by Matt Svetz, who is also an extension educator, and will be talking about citing considerations for large-scale solar based on the Penn State Municipal Solar Guide, which I believe will be put in the chat at some juncture for people to access.

And we do have a special guest today in Brook Duer.

He is a staff attorney with the Center for Agricultural and Shale Law.

Formally he was chief counsel for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

So we do look forward to hearing from him on some decommissioning and legislative updates and we will hopefully have time for some Q&A at the end, which we'll monitor throughout the presentation.

Please put those questions into the Q&A box as that's where we we'll be checking for the questions.

All right, with that being said, please put the questions in the Q&A box.

Let's connect, we do have a LinkedIn page.

We do update that frequently.

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You can visit our past webinar recordings.

So all of our webinars on energy related topics are there and you can just simply click on the button.

It doesn't require you to register or anything like that.

It's pretty much on demand and it will play.

And lastly, join us on Facebook.

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We do update it more frequently than anything else with some of our information.

So we would like some likes and some followers on that.

Upcoming webinars, on June 8th, from 09:00 to 11:45, we have the "Renewable Energy Academy: Photovoltaic Systems." That's actually gonna be an in-person slash webinar.

The in-person component is taking place at our Westmoreland County Extension office in Greensburg.

On June 15th at noon to 01:00, you'll have another webinar, "A Discussion of Issues Facing Large-Scale Solar Development" here in Pennsylvania.

We hope to have a few developers on there to discuss some of the issues and how those might be overcome or, you know, what might be blocking the path.

On June 27th from 12:00 to noon, another webinar entitled "The Fundamentals of Carbon Capture." And looking ahead to August, we are gonna have, on August 23rd, the Solar Law Symposium.

I'm not so sure on the time on that, that is not an hour there.

That is closer to four or five hours.

So the information will be coming out on all those here in the next couple weeks.

I think we just got the website for the June 15th webinar yesterday, so we'll be moving that forward.

All right, the general update from me, my name is Joseph Conklin.

I am an extension educator with the Penn State Extension Energy Team.

Energy production in Pennsylvania.

We all know Pennsylvania is a major producer of energy here in this country, and the world in fact.

In terms of value of production, we are number two in the country behind Texas.

But number one or two when it comes to natural gas production.

And as you can see in the chart to the right there, Pennsylvania Net Electricity Generation by Source, this is from October, 2022.

But it holds pretty true even today.

Natural gas is our major energy commodity, if you will.

Nuclear, I've been surprised to find that, I believe Pennsylvania's number two in nuclear power behind Illinois.

And then coal and we can see coal is really no longer king here in Pennsylvania, if you will.

But what we're here to talk about today is this non-hydro electric renewables.

And that's generally categorized as solar and wind.

Obviously today we're gonna be talking about about solar.

The reasons for large-scale growth of, the reasons for growth of large-scale solar here in Pennsylvania.

I apologize, my screen is a little, it's not how it usually is for me, so I'm looking back and forth, so I'm having an issue with that.

But reasons for growth of large-scale solar, we've sort of, number one, changed the terminology in our books from utility grade solar to large-scale solar for a couple of reasons.

Utility grade was, we were talking 20 megawatts or larger.

But as I'll get to here, we're seeing some smaller solar rays, but it's still two or three megawatts, which is encompassing sometimes dozens of acres.

So that's why we are calling it large scale as opposed to utility-scale.

There is enough sun here in Pennsylvania.

There is a large amount of generation currently of electricity.

And the infrastructure does exist.

In my neck of the woods, I live in Marysville, Westmoreland County in neighboring Indiana County.

Homer City Power Plant is about to be shut down here at the end of July.

And that has a huge amount of infrastructure for transmitting power across multiple states actually.

So that's just an example of some of the legacy power plants.

Their infrastructure does still exist for this venture.

There's policy reasons.

There's the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Act, which here in Pennsylvania, I believe that was enacted in 2004.

And that calls for 0.5% of all electricity in Pennsylvania should be made from Pennsylvania-derived solar.

So as time has gone on, it wasn't necessarily just from Pennsylvania before, but legislation changed to make it only produced from Pennsylvania Solar, if you will.

Business and government development and investor support.

Obviously I work for Penn State University.

The universities such as Penn State and Pitt, and some of the other universities and municipalities are getting into what we call purchase power agreements for renewable energy.

One of the major solar arrays here in Pennsylvania is in Franklin County and Penn State is the major offtaker of those, it's actually energy credits, but major offtaker of what's being produced there.

And then we have declining costs in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Up until recently, we did see a declining cost, and ironically, due to the Inflation Reduction Act, we're seeing an increase in costs because of the demand.

So although it's technically the Inflation Reduction Act, it's caused somewhat some price inflation for solar components before the American manufacturers here in the United States get online to produce.

There are some similarities and differences to Marcellus.

The big thing is it can be new income for large landowners and farmers, and it is creating community uncertainty.

And that's sort of why we're here today to talk about sighting and zoning.

There's definitely a larger footprint than natural gas.

And it is there for a longer period of time.

I wouldn't say it's permanent, but it could be 20 or 30 years as opposed to with natural gas, that disruption is months, and before it starts to go back to its natural state.

And last but not least is the Inflation Reduction Act.

Two slides here.

One is showing the investment tax credit.

The federal government, through the IRA, has extended tax credits until 2032, 2033, actually, they've extended it beyond that time period, just starts to decrease.

But the major tax credit here is if it's under one megawatt, the system's under one megawatt, it automatically is eligible for a 30% tax credit.

If it's over one megawatt, there's employment restrictions and prevailing wage, not restrictions, but prevailing wage qualifiers and things of that nature to get that initial 30%.

But what recently came out was energy communities, I believe this was about a month ago.

And those energy communities, you can see on the map I have here on the right, if it's dark orange, if it's dark orange, that is a community that likely had a coal plant shut down in the last 10, 15 years.

That light orange is the area they're considering to be the census track next to it.

And what is in blue is areas of the commonwealth that, there's a 0.17 employment factor there, in which if that community was impacted employment-wise, they also qualify.

So you can see on the map there's probably, I'm estimating 50% of the commonwealth now, will be eligible, that land will be eligible for an additional 10% on top of the 30%.

And there's also money in there for brownfields and things of that nature.

So that'll make Pennsylvania appealing to some investors for this venture.

There are different scales of solar.

This is a little bit of an older slide, but your residential and commercial, what might be on your roof or even your barn is one thing.

But then we're talking grid scale solar, and that's what those pictures are in the middle and on the right, those are your larger solar arrays, 20 megawatts likely.

And then we get into community solar and also what we're calling large net metering, which I believe is a few slides down, but those are gonna be your smaller arrays.

Those are gonna still be three to five megawatts.

So you figure five, six acres per megawatt, you're still talking 20, 30 acres.

Community solar is not allowed in Pennsylvania at this moment, but I think Brook might touch on that at a later point today in which there is legislation out there to have that moved forward.

What controls the movement, the development, not really the development, but what says, okay, these things can exist and be transmitted.

The electrons can be carried over hundreds of miles, is PJM.

And PJM is one of the largest transmission networks in the country.

You can see all this is PJM.

It goes over to Michigan, down to Virginia, and of course includes Pennsylvania.

PJM is having issues right now in that they are technically in a moratorium for at least the next year or two in accepting new applications.

And they're trying to get through a backlog of approvals, because they were inundated with hundreds of requests to establish these solar arrays across their area.

So they're at a pause at the moment to try to figure out which ones they can move forward and which ones are speculative in nature.

So that has led to this concept called large net metering.

And large net metering is power generated at the local level and put on what we call the distributed network.

So for instance, I live in West Penn Power's jurisdiction.

And what can happen is a developer or even a property owner who might have interest in this, can put forth a solar array between 500 kilowatts to three megawatts and have that pushed to the local distribution network.

And we've seen that as sort of a workaround PJM and you can see here the amount of projects that have increased in the past couple years.

If you look at the graph on the right, that 134,000 kilowatts is actually, it's 134 megawatts.

And what we have in Pennsylvania at the moment for utility-scale solar is 170 megawatts.

So it is pushing that envelope there.

And what we might end up seeing is instead of, we will, it's happening, as is given by this information, some smaller arrays of two or three megawatts popping up around the commonwealth as opposed to maybe dozens of larger arrays, if you will.

- [Moderator] Joe, your camera froze.

Maybe you could...

Okay, now you're good.

- Okay, of course I'm getting, my internet connection is unstable the first time in months. (chuckles)

- [Moderator] You could turn off your video and that might help.

- I will do that.

All right, so if 10% is the goal of electricity being produced in Pennsylvania by solar, that will take up about 80,000 acres of the commonwealth.

And we do often get that argument that, well, that's only gonna impact agricultural land and, you know, we can't lose any more agricultural land.

And sometimes they say to this, the truth of the matter is from 2012 to 2017, the commonwealth did lose 6,000 farms.

And we would venture to say that none of them were lost to large-scale solar.

(mouse clicks)

Just a land use comparison.

That 80,000 acres here, that's about half of a percent, half of 1% of the total land area of Pennsylvania.

There's actually more area being taken up by golf courses at this point in time than what we project would be the land area for 10%.

And the good news is we are seeing that shift to smaller arrays.

So we might end up seeing more on abandoned mine lands or brownfields than we expected.

So that could help that agricultural situation.

And last but not least on my end, to cue this up for Matt, is solar ordinances in Pennsylvania.

We did have a study come out from the Dickinson Law School which cited a lack of solar ordinances here in Pennsylvania.

This is a few years old and we've probably got some more solar ordinances on the books by this point in time.

But if we look at this, only 8% of the ordinances that were reviewed clearly allowed for solar energy as a principle use, 15% is accessory use, and 85% really didn't mention it.

So zoning in Pennsylvania.

Zoning controls the land uses in a community and may be used to restrict uses depending on that area of land.

Most zoning is enacted at the municipal level.

So if we look at that, there's 2,500, there's actually a little bit more than that, 2,500 municipalities here in Pennsylvania that are enacting zoning or not.

I'm originally from Northwestern Pennsylvania and I believe I saw information recently, which half of that sector of the commonwealth has no on the books whatsoever.

We do get in the difference between use versus dimensional use, is whether or not that particular activity or business can take place in that zone.

And dimensional is some of the stuff that Matt will get into, setbacks, noise, things of that nature.

We have primary use permitted by right, which I believe that is what developers would like to see because that kinda defines things and what they need to do.

But what we're seeing more of is the special exception or conditional use in which there are certain stipulations put forth based on that one applicant.

So maybe Brook might clear that up when he gets on, 'cause I am not a zoning professional like Brook is.

So with that, I will hand that over to Matthew to discuss zoning considerations for large-scale solar.

Take it away, Matt.

- Yeah, thanks, Joe.

All right, so I'm gonna be talking about zoning.

Next slide if you would, Joe.

So zoning is usually the primary means of how solar is gonna be regulated in your municipality.

So the where it goes and how it's built is usually defined by that.

The PA DEP does have regulation on erosion and sediment control plans for any ground disturbance above one acre.

So that will have some regulation over a solar project's development and there's also national electric codes, building codes that solar development will follow.

So one of the biggest things that the PA municipality planning code requires is that you must allow for use somewhere.

Now when we're talking about exclusionary zoning, two terms that you wanna know is de jure, which would be expressly forbidding a use in an area or that it isn't allowed anywhere or de facto, that the land that you have provided for use is completely impractical.

The development just couldn't be done.

So those are two things you wanna look out for when creating your sole ordinance.

You might wanna seek legal advice to make sure you're not on the wrong side of those.

And if you're interested in learning more, we do have our Solar Law Symposium in the fall that will usually, yeah, talk about these more.

So municipalities can also share the burden of providing land uses.

We see an example in Centre County, PA, where the municipalities have a multi-municipality comprehensive plan and an implementation agreement that helps them share these land uses.

So that's always an option too if you have neighboring municipalities, next slide.

So one thing we were talking about is that we're seeing smaller scale solar developments kind of become more popular for various reasons.

And one of the biggest arguments for why solar developers wanted to build an agricultural land is that they needed larger sizes for larger projects.

Well, there might be an opportunity here if you wanna guide these more towards industrial sites to kind of use zoning to guide that development.

So yeah, so one thing you could definitely talk about is that developers are looking for certainty.

So we certainly see that in some cases municipalities will have industrial zoning for solar permitted by right, which adds certainty to the process.

I mean, at the end of the day, these projects have investors and investors, one thing they're definitely looking for is certainty.

So that helps sell a project.

And also it reduces soft costs, which again makes the project cheaper.

One other thing you might look at is incentive zoning.

So one of the biggest arguments we see with solar is that, or solar against putting it on farmland is that it's really not agricultural.

That might be a fair enough argument.

But at the same time it's not exactly industrial.

It does differ in a few key ways.

The first one would be impervious coverage.

So unlike an industrial building, you still have ground underneath that if handled properly, could be considered pervious and the panels could also be considered pervious in guiding the rainwater towards that ground.

So we usually see some municipalities define it define panels as pervious.

We see others put a few different requirements on what would allow panels to be considered pervious.

One great resource is PA DEPs has a FAQ for solar developers on ways in which they can create stormwater management best practices, which is related to solar.

And a few of those are minimizing soil compaction during construction, making sure that there's perennial vegetative coverage that's above four inches, making sure there's proper spacing between panels so that you're not having a concentrated runoff come together.

But as long as proper measures are taken, there's no reason why panels can't be considered pervious.

And if there's also the option to rate panels as a percentage of impervious rather than fully impervious.

But that might help with, if you have impervious coverage limits, in that your industrial zoning, considering making solar panels pervious, might be a way to incentivize development.

So another thing you could look at is setbacks.

So some industrial sites have larger setbacks, because, you know, noise, odor, various things.

So when you're looking at solar, you might put laxer setbacks that allowed the developers to use more of the site since, again, solar development isn't that loud.

There's no odors involved.

And you might also consider relaxing screening requirements because if it's an industrial zone, I mean who cares if you're seeing solar?

So that might be another consideration to make development easier to make and also more practical.

Next slide, so another question is principle versus accessory use.

This is usually one of the ways in which these uses can be cut, where smaller scale uses and larger scale uses can kind of be differentiated.

So one of the biggest things we see in this language is energy primarily used on site.

So the primarily being the key term, it works, but it does beg some questions of how much is primarily?

I could see some people wanting to take advantage of net metering with an accessory use to make a little more money that might be curious on that question.

Some municipalities have kinda defined it.

Usually the most common number I've seen is 110%.

So of the onsite use that your energy system can produce.

So if you produce 10 megawatts or you require 10 megawatts for onsite in a year, you can have an energy system that would produce 11 and that would be acceptable as an accessory use.

So we also see that some municipalities separate solely based on nameplate capacity or footprint.

So nameplate is how much energy your system is producing and/or can produce, and footprint would be the area your system is taking up.

Sometimes we see these be fairly restrictive, but in those cases, I've seen rooftop solar limitations is exempted because it's not really having a land impact if it's on solar and of course if you have a rooftop, it's mostly being used on site most likely.

So we do see those exemptions, next slide.

Okay, so to kinda get into more of the dimensional ideas here, glint and glare is one concern.

So usually solar panels are made to absorb light, you know, it's inefficient for it to reflect it, so most of the time when we're looking at glint and glares analysis that look at how these panels might produce that, it's usually fairly minimal, maybe sometimes even non-existent on points of interest that you don't want glint or glare.

You might consider requiring developers to prove that their sites aren't producing unwanted glint and glare, using a glare analysis.

We have an example up top here where you have your various points of interest.

Green glare is usually minimal, it can be a bit of a nuisance.

The yellow glare there can impact sight and might be a little more of a danger, especially when you're talking about public roadways.

Red glare would be permanent eye damage, which you would never, you would probably never get from a solar array, given that you're getting into the territory of staring at the sun.

And even if light is reflected off a panel, it's still reducing that intensity.

So I don't think, at least with photovoltaics, you would never have to worry about permanent eye damage.

And usually developers, if it is causing unwanting glint and glare, developers can reduce that just by adjusting the position or angle, it depends, next slide.

Noise and lighting.

So usually it would come from the electrical equip, noise wouldn't usually come from the electrical equipment that's being used on site.

It's usually not that loud.

It doesn't take long from walking away from a solar site for the noise to kind of fade into the background.

You can set a decibel standard at the property line to help make sure that it isn't producing too much noise.

I've usually seen 40 to 60 decibels in most cases.

Some lighting is required for safety by national electric codes, so you can always require that the lighting is downcast or that it has motion sensors so you aren't causing unwanted white pollution to any neighbors of the site, next slide.

Some dimensional standards, so setback, watt size and height.

So setbacks can be adjusted based on the zoning district.

So usually the most common thing I see is that in cases where you're in a kind of mixed zone or rural, residential, agricultural where you might have some residential sites, you see requirements that if a site is neighboring a residential use, that there are additional setbacks or maybe from a public roadway, you'd have additional setbacks.

And of course as I talked about before, you might wanna consider changing the setbacks for underlying industrial zone.

Projects can also span multiple lots if we're talking about larger projects.

So usually you would see language in there, exempting things like screening or setbacks for adjacent lots that are part of the same solar energy development.

So that's something important to remember.

And usually as far as height goes, we usually see either, if it is specified, it's usually 10 to 20 height maximum.

But some will just say that solar development must follow the underlining zoning district's height requirements.

Next slide, traffic impact.

So under normal operation, you aren't gonna have, really any notice will traffic coming from a solar site.

The only time this would be the case would be during construction.

So for that construction period, it might be a good idea to require, you know, what roads are gonna be used and the amount of traffic you're expecting just so you can possibly plan and prepare for it and require any indication of offsite work that also might disrupt traffic or add traffic to it, next slide.

Fire safety, so solar arrays usually pose a minimal risk of fires.

Most of the panel material is inflammable, but it is electrical equipment, so there still is a chance.

The main problem, the major reason you'd want a fire safety plan is because it is a power plant.

You're dealing with high voltages and that can complicate the firefighting process.

So on your left here is an inverter box that has safety disconnect switches where that would be one of the biggest things you would want firefighters to know where the disconnects are to help de-energize the facility as much as possible if you do have a fire going on.

And also just to future-proof, or yeah, just to also know that battery storage is becoming more common, so that also may increase the risk of fire.

So requiring a fire safety plan, potentially putting a condition that it's submitted for review and comment from the fire department and that you have, yeah, proper collaboration between the fire department and developers is also a good idea, next slide.

Screening, so use of plants, earth berms, fencing to help hide development.

This is just one example of an early screening attempt where the plants are growing to block the view of the array.

We usually see a difference between prescriptive versus performance approaches.

So prescriptive would be taking the whole perimeter of the development and pretty much saying that you need this plant or a type of plant every certain amount of feet around the full development versus performance where you'd require that they put the burden on the developer to prove that they aren't causing undue viewshed impacts and put it on them to properly screen their array.

So this would usually be, they would usually use a viewshed analysis, which I'll show an example of later.

But you also might consider giving the zoning officer or planning commission leeway to modify requirements.

This would mainly be used if you have a site that, say, one site is facing just woods or an open field or maybe industrial uses.

And in the these cases, you might say that, well, we don't really need screening on this side of the array.

It's not visible to any kind of stakeholder who might be concerned.

So you might give officers the leeway to kinda reduce those requirements.

You also probably want a stipulation that requires replacement of any damaged plants in the screening.

And finally, some municipalities require pollinator-friendly plants to be a certain percentage of the screening and buffering of a site to help create community, you know, positive community impacts, next slide.

Oh yeah, and this would be an example.

This is Niagara in New York.

This is a solar development.

Outlined in red is the solar array development.

The green is potential places where you would see the array from and usually this is just part of the visual analysis.

In a visual analysis you usually see maps of the potential impacts that you might have such as on important parts, that would be the blue dots there.

Then you would see they would propose mitigation efforts and then show the impacts that those mitigation efforts would have to show that they're reducing the visual impact to an acceptable amount, next slide.

And finally, environmental assessment.

So a few studies you might wanna have conducted is a toxic and hazardous waste liability study.

So if the site does have any toxic, hazardous waste, do you wanna know about it and have mitigation efforts, wildlife and habitat and threatened endangered species study to make sure that you know what development might disturb and can require mitigation efforts to preserve habitat or make sure that threatened and endangered species aren't negatively impact wetland and waterway delineations.

So you might wanna specify minimum distance from those waterways and wetlands to make sure that erosion and sediment aren't making their way into them to make sure that, you know, those aren't being polluted.

And finally, if you are interested in more environmentally friendly practices, that solar arrays can take, that you can either encourage or require, I think Dana just linked it below, the link to the DNRC's guide to solar development that has a lot of good resources, that talk about certain ways you can have an environmentally friendly design.

And that's it.

That's all I wanna talk about zoning.

I'll pass it off to Brook Duer to talk about a few decommissioning and a few other legal concerns, yeah.

- All right, yeah, Brook.

Nope, you're good, perfect.

- Joe, I had a second there trying to find my audio.

Okay, so what we're gonna talk about here is some bills that are pending in the general assembly and then we're gonna talk about the decommissioning issue 'cause that's become the one area where legislative involvement in this future legislative session, meaning this year's legislative session, 2023, looks to be imminent, perhaps.

And then some of these other bills are less imminent.

But this is just a rundown of what is pending in the PA legislature right now and where it is.

Joe had already mentioned that, well, I should say, before I go to community, I'll just say that, okay, across the top there, there's House Bill 925, and then if you jump down to the third one on my list there, Senate Bill 211, excuse me, are both dealing with solar facility decommissioning.

And they are both at this point in the House, excuse me, they are both in the Senate.

No, they're both in the House?

Hold on, I'm gonna go to my next screen to make sure that I remember.

Yes, okay, yeah, they're both in the House right now, sorry.

And they're both in the House, you know, Environmental and Energy Committee.

And they're nearly identical.

They have some very, very small differences in those two bills.

Senate Bill 211 has already passed the Senate, which I'll go to in the next slide, but, excuse me, Senate Bill 211.

And that is Senator Yaw's bill on decommissioning.

And he has been the one who has, as he is the Senate chair of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee.

And in that position, he, you know, wields a lot of authority in this area.

And I do think that the version that may get passed by the Pennsylvania General Assembly will probably be his Senate Bill 211.

We'll see whether the House makes any revisions and then if they do, since it's already passed the Senate, it'll just go to a conference committee to try to resolve any differences between the House and Senate version.

House Bill 925, the one that started in the House and has just been sitting in the House Energy Environment Committee will probably fall by the wayside here, but it's a pretty common practice in the General Assembly that they have a version, you know, of everything as a House Bill and as a Senate Bill, depending on strategy and when they're coming dow n to the wire.

So anyway, the bottom line is, so we have solar decommissioning bills, okay?

Two of them, put those to the side for a second, we'll talk about those in more detail in just a second.

Now we have this community solar bill, which Joe mentioned, Senate Bill 550.

And right now it is pending in the Senate Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee, which is a little bit of an odd place for it to be.

For whatever reason, at the beginnings of the House, this legislative term, there was a little bit of disorganization, as you may know, with regard to the election of the speaker, and then the rules for conduct of the House's business, et cetera.

Somehow in that process, actually these solar decommissioning bills as well as the committee's solar bill, were all assigned, for some reason, to Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure in the House.

And then you can see here, this one even that happened at the Senate, well, that's because they saw what the House was doing.

Anyway, the bottom line is I don't know whether it's gonna get re-referred to another committee, the solar bill, or not.

If it stays there, you know, they can always, if it comes out of the committee, the Senate Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee, back to the floor of the Senate in some form out of that committee, it can still get re-referred to some other committee.

So I'll just say this.

Right now there isn't any movement on the community Solar Bill that I'm aware of.

And so as of right now, community solar is not something that exists in Pennsylvania or could exist in Pennsylvania in the future.

So we'll just have to watch that one.

And that's about all I'm gonna say about community solar, just because it's always a lot of wasted breath to talk about a bill that is this far from ever becoming a reality right now.

Maybe in the budget discussions this summer, we'll see something where a community solar bill may be put at the top of the stack to be part of the budget negotiations or the budget related negotiations.

So we'll see and we'll see what committees end up being involved.

So anyway, that's where the community solar is right now.

It's just not something that is gaining any interest in the Pennsylvania General Assembly right now.

A couple other bills, there's a solar bill that has to do with homeowners associations and, you know, how they need to deal with it in terms of owner-operated, you know, rooftop type systems.

There's also several bills that have to do with sales tax for, you know, solar hardware that's purchased and the services to install.

That's a used tax.

And so there's versions of that in both the Senate and the House Finance Committees.

We'll see if those move.

I have not been a party to any discussions of those bills in any detail or their contents at this point in time.

There's also a property tax exemption bill that is in the House, this House Bill 520, which essentially says something along the lines of a reassessment shall not increase the value strictly on the basis of the installation of a solar facility.

And so in other words, property taxes won't go up on a privately-owned operated system.

And then there is the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Bill in the Senate.

This shows you where that is presently, again, in this Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee.

I guess that's where the Senate thinks these things should be, I suppose.

And so that one's, that's where it is.

And then there's a Solar for Schools, which is a bill about school districts, you know, installing solar facilities on their buildings, et cetera, or on their ground.

And I don't know exactly what that deals with.

I'm sure it has provisions that probably amend procurement issues with regard to, you know, the installation of solar facilities, et cetera.

So in any event, that's just sort of a rundown of what's been introduced here since January.

And again, the only ones that have seen any action whatsoever is the decommissioning bill.

So we will go to that.

The, hit myself, there we go.

So okay, again, of the two decommissioning bills, 211 is the one that's movin'.

The House Bill down below on this slide isn't likely to be a vehicle for anything.

And again, Senate Bill 211, Senator Yaw's bill did pass the Senate 36 to 13 vote.

And that was in March.

And now it is over in the House in the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee after a short stop at the Consumer Protection Committee where it was booted out and said, send it over to the Energy and Environment.

Okay, so it's been there since April 25th.

Hasn't been on the agenda for discussion by that committee yet, to my knowledge, although that could've changed in the last day or so.

Okay, so now we'll go to talk about what's in it.

If you're not aware of the basic concept of decommissioning and what all this means, this is a situation where there was concern about landowners leasing their ground to a third party to build a solar array for the purpose of generating electrical power for the grid.

And that the alteration of the surface of the property, you know, it's only a lease.

So the landowner who may be a fairly unsophisticated, you know, party is not accustomed to dealing with, you know, multi-million dollar installations on their property and acting as a landlord for something like that.

And we are talking multi-million because, you know, it's quite an interesting dynamic that is going on with the leasing of land for the installation of the large-scale solar operations for providing energy to the grid in the sense that you have single landowners who are becoming the landlords of very, very sophisticated scientifically advanced and technologically, you know, complex operations on the surface of their property being put there by parties who are investing tens of millions of dollars in putting those things there.

Yet that party doesn't own the land.

Somebody, you know, it could be somebody's, you know, grandparents who own this land and, you know, they're not used to being a landlord of something like this.

It's essentially, you know, in some sense, a power plant.

And so the fear was that landowners might get disadvantaged in this process by, let's say, that these solar developers build something and then go belly up.

Or if for some reason after, you know, a couple of decades, they abandoned the project, there was this fear that, you know, somehow they would be stuck with a field full of solar panels and that the owner who was the tenant there would somehow abandon them and just leave them there.

I don't know how likely all of that is, but it's a legitimate concern that at least these individual landowners who aren't used to being landlords in this capacity be protected.

Now the first level of protection, or maybe I should say, be protected from such a development, like all of a sudden being stuck with, you know, 30 acres full of solar panels that have been there for, you know, whatever amount of time.

And now they're stuck having to get rid of them somehow.

And don't know that that's really gonna happen, but in any event, so the idea is that, well, at least the law from, you know, the state legislature has not chosen to become involved in any way with the process of approving sites or anything about the approval or operation or construction or of solar facilities.

You know, what is on the books that applies such as electrical codes, you know, zoning, et cetera, is the regulatory scheme.

There has been nothing added by the state legislature for this particular new technology and this particular form of energy generation.

So the only place, again, that the Pennsylvania legislature has seen fit to begin to say perhaps we'll get involved here to, in this particular case, just to protect our landowners from being taken advantage of or disadvantaged by a project that has, you know, gone dormant, belly up, whatever might happen, that the party who entered into the agreement and built the panels and was operating them somehow abandons the project.

So that's where the state legislature has chosen to get involved and that's the only place that the state legislature has chosen to get involved at this point.

And they haven't done it yet, but at least there have been bills and there were bills in the last legislative session.

So that's what decommissioning is all about, returning the land back to its prior state at no cost to the landlord, the landowner, in a leased situation.

And so the bill is basically broken down.

It's a very simple bill.

It's, you know, not very long.

In fact, I have all of it included in these slides.

A little bit of fine print there, but we'll go over that and hopefully your eyes can take it.

Before we go over what the bill is requiring and where the legislature has chosen to get involved here, let's talk about this idea of, you know, is decommissioning something that would realistically be necessary to be governed by, you know, a state law?

First layer of protection for a landlord against any type of abandonment of a project is the lease agreement itself.

And these landowners should never be signing these agreements without, you know, good review by council on their behalf.

And I'll say that over and over again as many times as you want me to, they should never sign these things without attorney's reviews.

All of the paperwork that's being used has never been tested in the real world yet.

You know, the leases that are being used have no track record at all of being utilized.

This is all a brand new industry.

These documents are not battle tested, and they are, at times, depending on whose version and what developer's involved and, you know, landowners have brought agreements in that I've seen that are just awful and are just sloppy and, you know, have things in there that clearly cannot work depending on, you know, whether the person's, you know, and it's not just because they may be farming, and many other reasons that they're not workable as drafted originally and offered by the solar developer.

So there is just no other, there is no possibility that a person without legal counsel can enter into one of these lease agreements safely.

And part of that is the decommissioning obligation.

First lever of protection, apart from any state law that might come into existence is negotiating that lease to obligate, by contract, all of this decommissioning to be covered, including by third parties who are paid for by the developer or a bond that is posted by the developer so that there is money available to pay someone to remediate the site.

And the idea being of course, if the developer is belly up truly, and there's no resources, you know, you can't get blood from a stone, so you wanna, as a landowner, get some type of financial instrument in place that will pay for all of this site remediation should that become necessary.

Now site remediation, should it become necessary or will it ever become necessary because of an abandonment?

That is a very good question, because I'll just say one thing about these projects.

Once a project is up and running and is connected to the electrical grid, that is the goose that laid the golden egg.

And I do not see anyone turning their back on that and walking away from it.

It always has economic value, a connection to the grid to supply electricity to it is a hard fought and, you know, intensively financed operation to have put in place.

Once it's put in place, it has economic value.

If a company has gone bankrupt, they're going to be able to sell that in bankruptcy.

Those will be the assets that bankruptcy judges and trustees, I should say, will be licking their chops over and so I do not see the risk that great of abandonment of projects and leading landowners stuck with a field full of solar panels.

If the connection is there and it's been operational, that means that all of the regulatory hoops to make that happen have already been leaped or, you know, overcome.

And that is going to have value.

There will be white knights who will come in and buy these projects and continue on with them in one form or another.

But in the outside chance that a abandonment occurs and that a landowner is stuck with a field full of panels, there is your decommissioning necessity.

Now- - Hey, Brook.

- Yes?

- We are running low on time and I see that most of the questions have been answered in here, but this is a question that I think would be good for you to answer. All right.

- If Senate Bill 211 is ever signed in a law, will existing contracts be grandfathered in with whatever was in the lease that was signed originally?

- Not grandfathered in.

So this is only for, 'cause that is a sort of a constitutional principle actually that, that you can't alter a contract after it's been entered into by legislation.

And then there are certain exceptions to that, but in this, it's a private contract.

So no, they will not be grandfathered in with the protections of this law.

This is for only solar agreements and leases that are entered into after the date of this law if it does ever become effective.

- And do we know, there's another one in chat.

It says, I don't see how a decommission agreement of today can possibly predict how much it will decommission, that's the escalator, right?

- That is exactly, and let's do that.

Is that the only question you got?

- Those are the two big ones. - All right.

- Let's go to it, let me just, okay, so let me work through these pages real quick.

I'll just go through, okay, so the basics of the beginning of this bill are simply that the solar operator has 18 months after the cessation of producing electricity on site to essentially complete the decommissioning and restoration of the site.

That would be by law if this were to become the law.

And that's something that you can negotiate for, but 18 months is a pretty tight timeframe.

The things that have to happen is there has to be, in any lease, there has to be a decommissioning plan when you sign the lease.

There has to be proof of financial assurance that is filed with the county's recorder of deeds, an interesting choice of where to put that.

Since there's no requirement, although there is, you know, a functional or there are reasons to file these leases at the recorder of deeds office, that is technically not required yet.

And in any event, that's where an actual public filing of a financial assurance instrument, like a bond or a letter of credit, and we'll get to that in a second, at the county recorder of deeds, okay.

Then the financial assurance, the bond, has to be equal to the estimated cost of decommissioning, updated every five years by a professional engineer.

Then there is an entire schedule that deals with this proof of financial assurance being updated in terms of how much it has to cover of the decommissioning costs.

It's an escalating percentage.

And you see there's, in this slide, you see 30 days, it has to cover just 10% of the decommissioning costs.

At five years, again, another 10%.

At 10 years, it's gotta cover up to 40%.

At 15 years, 60%, at 20 years, 80%, at 25 years, 100% of the decommissioning costs.

Now there is a little twist in here, which is these are numbers that you would say, okay, so you have a pot of money out there for some third party to come in and fix up this site.

However, the landowner is going to be able to realize something in this decommissioning process, because somebody left behind all these solar panels and they have value as scrap or as, you know, parts to this industry, and that's a whole nother discussion.

But the bottom line is these percentages are allowed to be reduced by the salvage value of the panels that are sitting there, except then they've woven into this a maximum percentage that you can reduce the cost of decommissioning for or, you know, you can reduce the amount of the bond for.

It's commensurate with, you know, the decommission, excuse me, the salvage value, but it can't be over a certain limit.

So for example- - So the bottom line is, they are putting in provisions to try to address what's two or three decades down the road?

- Correct, correct. - Yeah.

- So. - And then- - All right, we are at the end of our time, but with that being said, I do have one more question for you, Brook, but what I did wanna say, you know, thank you for joining us.

We do realize we're at our time.

We are gonna have another webinar here June 15th.

Those of you that signed up for this webinar will likely receive an email for that once that's ready to come out with developers.

So we will have one more question here for Brook, and this is one we've heard in the past is, has there been any conversation about legislation that would enable the clean and green program to allow for agrivoltaic development?

- No, I don't think anybody is interested in doing that.

You know, right now the law is that in order to have the generation or in order for, you know, land enrolled in clean and green to be used for the generation of electrical power for the grid, not for yourself, for the grid, you must be using at least 70, excuse me, at least 50% of what is generated on that land for yourself.

In other words, the landowner has to be using 50% of that and then they can net meter off the rest.

And I think that's about as much as anyone's gonna be able to tolerate, the idea that somebody could, you know, essentially construct, in a solar array, on clean and green-enrolled property where 100% of the power is going to the grid, that's not something that I think anyone who's close to the clean and green program has any appetite for.

I mean, that's straight up commercial development.

You know, there's not really any retaining of a clean and green permitted use there, so.

- All right, perfect.

So that does pretty much wrap up, I believe, the questions.

Anybody else have any closing thoughts?

You can always email us.

My email's juc50@psu.edu if you have further questions and we can get those routed to whoever we might be able to get to answer those questions.

Any closing thoughts from anybody, Brook, anybody?

- If anybody wants to email me and talk about it more, my email is on our website, just go to aglaw.psu.edu.

- All right, I should have a closing slide here, but I'm afraid to bring up my PowerPoint 'cause apparently today is not my day with computers.

So with that, I think we can end the webinar.

Thank you all for attending, and I think the video's over.

No, thank you all for attending.

And have a good day. (chuckles)