This article series is excerpted from two stories by Allen Best that first appeared on BigPivots.com on September 10, 2024.
Fourth in area among Colorado’s 64 counties, Mesa County has 158,000 residents, fewer than the city of Fort Collins. But 72% of the land is federal. Grand Junction, the county seat, veers slightly liberal. Unincorporated areas veer deeply conservative.
Private property rights vs. community concerns are central to the tensions about regulations governing renewable energy. Mesa County veers hard in one direction. “This is my property, don’t tell me what I can do,” is how Rhiannon Lawson summarizes the prevailing viewpoint. A county planner confirms that.
A strong community desire to maintain agriculture also rises high in Mesa County’s community concerns, as was reflected in a recently adopted master plan. In the county’s calculus, private property rights will triumph over ag preservation, but there are efforts to cater to both. In solar, the concept is called agrivoltaics, a relatively recent wrinkle in the solar story.
The inadequacy of Mesa County’s regulations quickly became apparent after the Lawsons and their neighbors made their unhappiness known about the project proposed for their exurban neighborhood.
Sean Norris, the county’s planning manager, was charged with managing the process. Public engagement was the given. Bringing community members, business interests and the solar industry to the table was required. In a May interview, Norris described — perhaps facetiously — his overarching goal once the regulations were adopted.
“If everyone was mad, then I must have found the right compromise in the middle, because no one got what they wanted,” he said. “That included the commissioners. It included the public. It included industry.”
Norris saw part of his work to cull emotional reactions, as real as they might be, and hew as much as possible to the concrete.
“You cannot codify emotional issues: ’I have lived here all my life and I don’t want to see that there, because it’s going to destroy the view of that rabbitbrush that I have right out my window, or this mountain range, or that elk herd,’” he said.
Some people wanted no solar projects within a five-mile radius of any residential structure.
“Well, that effectively would be a prohibition on solar in the county, on any private land,” Norris said. “If you stopped any development because it interfered with somebody’s pre-existing viewshed, nothing more would get built.”
Also important in drawing up regulations is discarding loose statements open to broad interpretation. His goal: “something that you can measure and write into a code that you can enforce.”
In overseeing this process of creating new rules, Norris saw need to examine the narratives. Was there factual basis for the stories that were told?
“If the public is opposed to something, they will easily find narrative on the internet from other people who were opposed to something, and they create their own narrative and back it up with facts by something that someone else wrote on the internet,” he said.
“It took a considerable amount of work to check sources back several layers deep, to try to find where some pertinent kernel of information may have come from originally.” Industry, he added, would do the same thing, if not to the same extent.
Industry most of all needed consistency and predictability. And Mesa County’s interest in preserving agriculture took Norris to a study of agrivoltaics. If somebody said they wanted to install solar while maintaining agricultural productivity, they had to show how that would be done.
In explaining Mesa County’s interest in agrivoltaics, Norris notes rising temperatures in western Colorado could endanger fruit production. Agrivoltaics are seen as a way to diminish the risk.
”Well, if you could have a peach crop with a solar apparatus and generate enough power off of that solar apparatus to run your packing plants and things like that, that’s awesome. Let’s not constrain them with setbacks from specific roads or building structures.”
In July, Talbott Farms, the biggest orchard operator in the area, announced it had received a $700,000 grant to defray the full cost of an agrivoltaic system it plans amid its peach orchards near Palisade.
The new energy code amendment to county regulations was written with the idea of equal applicability across the county, whether to the corn fields near Fruita, the alfalfa pastures near Mack, or the fruit orchards of Palisade.
“If you can demonstrate to the county that you are both maintaining productive agriculture and you’re generating electricity to be sold into the grid, you qualify for agrivoltaics,” he said.
Applicants who don’t convince Mesa County of their agricultural components don’t quality for agrivoltaics and must then go through the energy generation production and approval process.
While the emphasis in this new amendment is on solar, it would also apply to other forms of energy production: hydropower, wind energy, geothermal, coal, even nuclear. Oil and gas as a feedstock for power generation facilities are also covered.
“Obviously, (solar) is currently the biggest player on the block in terms of interest and demand,” Norris said. “But the code was written to manage all of that, so we had a skeleton to come back and put meat on later if we need.”
Reared in Golden, Norris was a geologist by training. He is comfortable on horseback. He chased cows in the Bijou Creek drainage of northeastern Colorado, but by 1984 was on Colorado’s Western Slope. There, he worked for Chevron for 20 years, mostly in the Piceance Basin. He was on a global team called Environmental, Social, Health Impact Assessment.
His work for Chevron included impacts to school districts.
“The word impact brings an automatic social picture to mind that says that’s a bad thing,” he points out. “The impact to a school district of hundreds of thousands of dollars or a $5 million grant to build a county road could be a very good impact,” he says.
“Having worked in the oil-and-gas industry for 20-some years, I know that those people care more about their environmental impacts than maybe the people that are watching out over them. They’re very careful about what they do. They’re passionate about what they do. And they’re passionate about where they work and live.”
It was through this work that he was persuaded to join the Mesa County planning staff. He never took a class from a professor of planning. He’s not embarrassed by the fact. He might even be proud.
The specifics of what Mesa County came up with sound like those of most planning documents: almost painfully dull. For example, solar projects must seek to be within a fire district, not that the PV installations are likely to produce fires. The stakeholders just agreed it was a good idea.
Visual intrusions, though, are a much more difficult beast. In the case of the solar farm to be built by Pivot Energy at the foot of the hill where the Lawsons have their 20-acre parcel cannot easily be concealed except by perhaps a row of 80-foot trees. And since the site has no water and 80-foot trees take a long time to grow, there’s relatively little that can be done.
As a practical matter, nearly every solar project will be built relatively close to a transmission line. Transmission can cost $1 million a mile to build. The county code makes no attempt to tell solar developers where to build.
“It would be poor form on my part to think that I am such a wealth of knowledge that I could tell industry where the best places to build are because of what I want, not what they need. So, when we produced this amendment, I made sure that we didn’t interject something into the code based on staff’s thought process vs. what industry actually knows and what the residents actually expect.”
Excerpted from BigPivots.com. Read the full article here.
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