Resource: ACP “Solar Energy & Farmland – FAQ”
Solar farming is a powerful ally to farm families and rural communities. In addition to helping all consumers enjoy lower electricity prices from a zero-emission energy source, solar power provides a prime opportunity for landowners to generate multi-generational income, creates a revenue backbone for rural communities and schools, and serves as a key economic development tool for states. Solar brings extraordinary investment to communities because it takes land on the tax rolls that is wholly or partially exempted from ad valorem (property) taxes and uses it for capital-intensive projects paying taxes that help fund schools and government services.
You can see the organized opposition in the common terms suddenly being used by clean energy opponents. From coast to coast, “prime farmland” has become the buzzword, and fears are being stoked that solar power projects are going to take all of America’s “prime farmland’, increasing the cost of the food and fiber we need, harming farmers.
It’s important to use accurate and factual data to discuss the growth of utility-scale solar power and its need for land, especially existing agricultural land.
Farmland is mostly being lost to other uses. Despite the heated rhetoric around solar, the vast majority of land being taken out of farm production is being lost to other uses like commercial, industrial, and residential development. Farmers facing rising costs, overregulation, and challenging commodity prices are choosing these options for financial survival. These uses are “forever uses”, meaning that – unlike a solar development – the land will never be returned to agricultural use.
Private property rights are sacred. First, in the United States, private land ownership and landowers’ rights have always been sacred. We don’t tell people what they should raise or farm, and we don’t force people to farm. A farmer who chooses to turn his cotton field to sorghum has that opportunity, even if his neighbors or his government think cotton would be a better choice. “My land, my choice.” is the slogan. Farm groups should defend these rights, but some are beginning to view their role as perpetuating and promoting farming, promoting the industries that support agribusiness, NOT defending Americans’ private property rights.
Number are exaggerated. Some of the intensity of the debate on land use is confusion that surrounds the number of projects that will actually be constructed. Opponents often incorrectly reference ‘interconnection queues” in our nation’s organized transmission markets, usually called RTOs or “regional transmission organizations.” To connect to the electric grid, solar projects need to secure a place in line, and projects aspiring to build seek those “queue positions” early.
Meanwhile, in a typical community, multiple developers – each potentially holding a queue position – begin seeking sites to build their solar project, knowing that because of transmission limitations very few of them, only the first to complete their work, will be able to build. For anti-trust reasons, they can’t coordinate these efforts so each operate independently. As they introduce themselves and talk to landowners about potential participation, neighbors talk, and the community talks. In a matter of time, based on these many projects talking to many neighbors, some become concerned that their entire community. will be converting to solar farms.
The reality is that only one or two projects will make it to construction for a variety of reasons including a lack of overall demand on the system, available transmission capacity on the regional power lines, available offtakers for the power, and competition from other project sites. In ERCOT, for example, only roughly 17% of the projects in the queue ever come online.
Land use per megawatt is limited. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL) found median land use values for power density of 2.8 acres/MW for fixed-tilt and 4.2 acres/MW for tracking systems. While site-specific variables may affect land use, these values are much more representative of likely land use for utility-scale solar. (Bolinger, M. and G. Bolinger. 2022. “Land Requirements for Utility-Scale PV: An Empirical Update on Power and Energy Density.” IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.)
Land is already being overused for energy production. Roughly 30–40% of America’s domestic corn production — about 30 million acres — is dedicated to ethanol. That same land area could support around 5,000 gigawatts of solar capacity, which is 3–4 times the total nameplate capacity of the entire US electric grid. We don’t have a land problem, we have an anti-renewables propaganda problem.
Lots of land being paid not to farm. According to a press release from the US Department of Agriculture on October 21, 2024, the Farm Service Agency “is issuing more than $1.7 billion in annual rental payments to agricultural producers and private landowners through the Conservation Reserve Program and CRP Transition Incentive Program. These annual rental payments are made to eligible farmers and ranchers throughout the country who establish long-term, resource-conserving plant species, such as approved grasses or trees, to control soil erosion, improve water quality and enhance wildlife habitat on cropland taken out of production. The duration of CRP contracts is between 10 and 15 years. FSA accepted offers for more than 2.2 million acres through this year’s Grassland, General, and Continuous CRP signups, bringing current enrollment to nearly 26 million acres.” This issue is address more fully below in the USA Today report.
Mandatory decommissioning requirements guarantees farmland to future generations. Solar projects, while long-term, are not permanent and are built with statutory decommissioning requirements that ensure that land will be returned to its original agricultural state at the end of a project’s life. This allows families to enjoy near-term economic opportunity while preventing permanent development, thereby protecting the land for future generations of farming. Because solar farms are low-impact and allow soil to rest, land can come back into production better than before.
Take Georgia as an example. According to the US Census Bureau, Georgia is 57,716.96 square miles, or approximately 36,938,854.4 acres (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/GA,US/LND110220), of which the Georgia Farm Bureau reports 9.939 million acres is farmland. (https://www.gfb.org/news/ag-news/post/2022-census-of-agriculture-the-numbers-are-in) The American Clean Power Association (ACP) reports that there are currently 4,136 megawatts of solar generation in Georgia. (https://cleanpower.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Georgia_clean_energy_factsheet.pdf)
Again, assuming a very conservative 7.5 acres per megawatt to capture total project area, falsely assuming that today’s solar fleet is exclusively built on farmland and assuming that all project land is taken out of agricultural production, we can calculate that today’s solar power generation fleet in Georgia only uses:
- 31,020 acres of “total area” (4,136 MW x 7.5 areas per MW of solar capacity)
- 0.0839% of the total acreage of the state (31,020 acres of solar / 36,938,854.4 acres total)
- 0.3121% of the farming acreage in Georgia (31,020 acres of solar / 9,939,000 acres farming)
According to the US Department of Agriculture, in 2022 there were 183,101.19 acres in Georgia enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a program that compensates farmers for taking land out of agricultural production and converting it to conservation uses. Solar use in the state is equivalent to 16% of the acreage enrolled in the CRP program.
Finally, USA Today Covered this issue well in their story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/02/04/green-energy-fact-checked/72390472007/
The issue: Will solar farms use up all our farmland?
Farmland is a popular place to build solar because it’s generally relatively flat and open. Not surprisingly, places where people grow crops tend to have good sunlight.
So an increasingly common argument for curtailing solar projects is to preserve farmland. Some counties now set limits on the amount of agricultural land that can be turned into a solar farm.
Opponents argue that too much farmland being turned into solar farms will affect the country’s ability to feed itself.
The answer: No, solar will not use up all the farmland we need.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that for the U.S. to move completely to carbon-neutral power, it will require about 10,000 square miles of land.
The Department of Agriculture already pays farmers to take about 24.8 million acres of less productive and environmentally sensitive land out of production. That’s 38,750 square miles – more than the entire amount of land that would be needed for green energy.
And in 2023, about 40% of the U.S. corn crop was used to produce ethanol. By some measures, an acre of solar power can make 70 times as much energy as an acre’s worth of corn turned into ethanol.