Virginia’s solar industry has taken off over the last decade, fueling statewide debates around rural land use and conservation. Much of the state’s rise in solar energy has been dominated by sizable, utility-scale arrays, which are much larger than rooftop projects and feed directly into the electrical transmission grid.

New research from Virginia Commonwealth University professor Damian Pitt, Ph.D., and colleagues calculates how much land has been devoted to those large solar installations since 2016, and projects how land development and solar power generation might change in the future.

Recent legislative debates have centered on the future of utility-scale solar installations, also called “solar farms,” in Virginia. While solar energy has many benefits, including lowered air pollution and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, some argue that those benefits are outweighed by the environmental costs of construction, as well as disruptions to local agriculture and forestry industries.

“This industry is growing rapidly,” said Pitt, an associate professor of urban planning in VCU’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs. “And the large-scale solar projects that we’re talking about are pretty much exclusively in rural areas.”

But how much have solar farms changed Virginia’s landscape?

Pitt's team used GIS to examine the 94 utility-scale arrays built in Virginia since 2016, when Virginia had none. This work was led by former graduate student Aaron Berryhill, now the solar program manager at the Virginia Department of Energy, and Jennifer Ciminelli, formerly an assistant professor at VCU’s Center for Environmental Studies and now the senior managing director of geospatial analytics at the Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The researchers found that a little over 30,000 acres have been developed into utility-scale solar fields in Virginia since 2016. That figure is significantly lower than the number of acres permitted for solar development, as the arrays often include buffer zones that are not developed.

Their analysis revealed that 50% of the arrays are built on former forest land, 28% on former cropland, 11% on former pasture and about 11% on miscellaneous land types. Those results are mostly proportionate to Virginia’s average land cover, as 54% of the state is covered by forests. However, the industry has disproportionately impacted cropland, which makes up just 5% of the state’s land cover overall.

The researchers also found that most of the forest land developed for utility-scale solar arrays had low-to-moderate conservation value, as estimated by the Virginia Department of Forestry, and that just a handful of solar projects were responsible for developing most of the high-conservation-value land in the study.

“That finding does point to the notion that better legislation could either prohibit or discourage the conversion of those high-quality forest lands. We could minimize those impacts with little functional impact on the potential to grow the solar industry.”
– Damien Pitt, Ph.D., associate professor

Virginia is currently seventh among all states in utility-scale solar power generation. That ranking has been powered by the construction of new data centers, as well the plummeting cost of solar energy and green energy incentives from the Virginia Clean Economy Act of 2020.

But utility-scale solar growth has stagnated in the state, partially because of stricter urban planning measures in some rural counties. An additional study by Pitt, Ciminelli and Wilder School graduate student Josie LaPrad used low, medium and high solar growth scenarios to estimate land cover changes in Virginia by 2035.

Under low-growth scenarios, solar energy would provide 8% of the state’s future electricity demand, only a 2-point increase from present day. Under medium- and high-growth scenarios, solar energy would meet 11.5% and 15% of the state’s electricity needs, respectively, providing up to approximately 46 million megawatt-hours of electricity annually.

Using those growth projections, the researchers found that the total number of acres devoted to solar construction could range from approximately 78,000 to 147,000, depending on the level of growth.

The rise or fall of utility-scale solar could dramatically change Virginia’s energy portfolio, as well as the percentage of the state’s cropland converted to solar farms — up to 3.1% under the researcher’s high-growth scenario.

But solar energy, Pitt said, still remains one of the cheapest and cleanest forms of electricity, which could help the state meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets.

“When it comes to actually generating electricity for the life of the project, solar is completely carbon-free.” 

This work was conducted in partnership with the Virginia Department of Energy and with funding from the Virginia Department of Energy and Advanced Energy United.

This story originally appeared on VCU News.