Pennsylvania's mine-scarred land presents challenges for solar development despite financial incentives

Although many solar developers aim to build utility-scale solar arrays in Pennsylvania that would add clean energy to the state’s grid, achieving it on acreage where coal was king carries a higher cost to companies than farmland.

There are about 170,000 surface acres of abandoned mine land in Pennsylvania that are reclaimed or unreclaimed with general site characteristics to be suitable for solar production, according to a May assessment by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Using only 5% of that acreage with general site characteristics suitable for solar development would result in 9,000 acres that can be repurposed.

It could mean the potential deployment of 1.5 gigawatts of solar capacity, according to the DEP.

However, solar developers have to invest more in reclaimed surface mine area than in a farmer’s field usually because of unstable ground and lack of transmission lines, industry experts and farmers said.

A solar company has approached Ray Schilling with lease offers for 80 acres of his 200-acre farmland in Somerset County operated by his son who lives there and raises beef cattle.

Schilling’s response: “Hell no,” he said.

“I’m trying to protect the farmers and the next generation to be able to farm,” he said. “When you go into the grocery store lately, what’s the cost of food? It’s going to get worse. Now, my son can’t make a living on the farm, so I understand why farmers jump at the chance to get guaranteed income from solar. But we are selling out the future generations; we are selling out the farmland.”

The land the solar company wanted from Schilling was the best land on the farm, cleared and flat, he said.

“There are no development costs that way,” he said. “They go in and mow it and put their stuff in and they are in business. That’s why they are doing it. If they have to invest in bigger foundations because they are on a reclaimed surface mine where the ground isn’t suitable for footings, they have to invest more.”

Tax credits available

Penn State Extension senior educator for energy and Pennsylvania Farm Bureau member Joseph Conklin said federal tax credits are in place to incentivize solar development on formerly mined coal land, but they are often eclipsed by ballooning costs.

“If the site is on a slope, they’ll have to grade it – that’s a cost,” Conklin said. “If they grade it, they will have to address water runoff. Cost. If the ground isn’t considered stable enough, they may have to go deeper with the poles for the panels, that’s a cost.”

However, farmland is clear of environmental issues that would require remediation by companies.

Solar is clean energy but in the eyes of farmers including Schilling it’s no less ravaging to the land than coal mining was, and as Pennsylvania’s coal has powered communities far flung from the rural areas where it was mined, solar is in the same game, Schilling said.

The Mineral Basin Solar project underway by Swift Current Energy in Girard and Goshen townships, Clearfield County, is set to generate 402 megawatts – the largest solar project in Pennsylvania, which has the potential to power 75,000 households annually, the company said on its website.

The state’s largest solar farm, however, would export its energy to New York. The project in Clearfield County aims to replace power lost in New York from the closure of the coal-fired Homer City Generating Station in Indiana County.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority awarded Mineral Basin Solar a 20-year Renewable Energy Certificate contract as part of New York State’s large-scale renewable energy solicitation under its Clean Energy Standard.

Mineral Basin is proposed to be sited, however, on approximately 2,700 acres of formerly mined coal mine land despite the challenges of developing that type of acreage.

“It’s wildly expensive, so how did this happen in Clearfield?” Conklin said. “The federal government is giving the project $90 million, or it wouldn’t make any sense.”

The total cost of the project is $800 million, with federal tax incentives for renewable energy projects in addition to the grant of $90 million, the federal government could be funding more than 15% of the project before it even starts, Conklin said.

The federal Inflation Reduction Act extends the clean energy Investment Tax Credit to provide up to a 30% credit for renewable energy projects, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury. It also provides a bonus credit of up to 10 percentage points for qualifying clean energy investments in “energy communities.”

energycomms.tif

A map of energy communities in Pennsylvania.

Most Pennsylvania communities qualify as energy communities, as defined by the federal government, because they have had coal mine closures after 1999 or a coal-fired electric generating unit that has been retired after 2009, shows a map of energy communities on the U.S. Department of Energy website.

More tax credits may be available to a company depending on factors including whether it sources panels domestically or if the project serves an economically disadvantaged area, Conklin said.

Alec Jarvis, Swift Current Energy’s vice president of development, didn’t answer the question of whether the company would still be moving forward with plans to build the state’s largest solar farm on a brownfield in Clearfield County if it weren’t receiving a $90 million federal grant. But in an email, he noted the challenges that will be addressed with that money.

“The challenges to developing on brownfield sites are largely due to the civil engineering and added construction work, given the historic mine land use,” he said. “The award amount of $90 million would support the engineering and design challenges to development on former mine sites.”

In March, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it had selected Swift Current Energy’s Mineral Basin Solar project to begin award negotiations for the funding made available by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

“Swift Current is in the process of award negotiations,” Jarvis said. “Part of our objective in working with the U.S. DOE is to provide meaningful lessons learned to future renewable energy projects located on former mine lands.”

Brownfields are usually not located near suitable transmission lines, which is one of the biggest challenges to redeveloping them, Conklin said.

“The biggest challenge is that to get the power from a brownfield in the middle of nowhere to somewhere, it requires transmission lines which easily cost $1 million to $2 million per mile,” Conklin said, “and that price is probably only going to go up because of the inflation on some of the transformers and scarcity of finding the equipment.”

Transmission lines aren’t an issue for Mineral Basin however. Mineral Basin Solar will have direct, on-site grid interconnection to the 345 KV transmission line from the Homer City Power Plant to Mainesburg, New York.

The transmission line runs through the project area, in Girard and Goshen townships, so there is no need to put up transmission lines, Jarvis said.

“The transmission line that we will be interconnecting to is owned by NYSEG (New York State Electric and Gas) and is part of the NYISO (New York Independent System Operator) system,” Jarvis said.

Although the project’s goal is to serve New York, Jarvis said power could be shared with Pennsylvania.

“The NYISO and PJM system (Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection) are electrically connected, and power flows to and from these systems regularly,” he said.

Jobs coming

Where the Mineral Basin Solar project is planned, at the most local level in Girard Township, the prospect of jobs would be more enticing than the actual energy produced, Girard Township supervisors Chairman Ed Leigey said.

Even so, after the hundreds of construction jobs are completed – Swift Current plans to start construction in 2025 and be operational as soon as 2027, Jarvis said – the project would employ six people long-term.

“The facility will employ people to manage the physical plant – mowing, road maintenance, plowing,” he said.

The benefits to Clearfield County would include more than $1 million in annual tax revenue from the site. The company is expected to invest $200,000 a year for the life of the project to Girard and Goshen townships for community improvements once the solar farm is in operation, Jarvis said.

Leigey said company representatives have appeared at a township meeting.

“They told us what their intentions were and gave us the opportunity to ask different questions, which we did,” he said. “We wanted to know what was this going to be impacting the township, and what was going to be happening. In a way, it would be impacting us due to losing a lot of hunting ground. They are still saying people can use the ground for hunting, but it’s not all going to be how it used to be.”

Local return

Aside from signing routine permits, the township had no say in the private land acquisition, he said.

“Myself and everyone I’ve talked to, we are not happy about it for the simple fact that they are using our land and we are not really getting anything back for it,” he said. “The only main thing I’m seeing is the townships and local fire departments each got a donation for letting them come in and do the project.”

The DEP assessment that identified nearly 170,000 acres of formerly mined land that could be put into solar production also noted that local factors that would further refine the analysis could not be applied. Those include factors such as slope, terrain and access to electric distribution infrastructure. Application of those factors would further reduce the area viable for solar development.

Recommendations from the assessment including a “Previously Mined Land Solar Grant Fund” and a “State tax abatement or rebate program for qualifying projects on previously mined sites could address the fact that solar development on previously mined sites is more expensive than greenfield development, even with the availability of current public funding, the assessment said.

“The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has stated its priority to preserve agricultural land, forest land, and valuable habitat,” the DEP said in the assessment. “But there are limited regulatory and policy mechanisms to guide the deployment of solar installations to previously impacted sites, such as active, abandoned, or reclaimed mine sites.”

Schilling said something more must be done to build utility-scale solar projects on mine-scarred land or the tops of high-rises and urban warehouses to protect Pennsylvania’s farm land.

“It’s time somebody stops this,” he said. “If you look at the history of Western Pennsylvania, it started with the timber. Western Pa. was timbered so that city people or people elsewhere could have the benefit of it. Then it was the coal mines, because coal was king and Pennsylvania was again ravaged for the coal. Then it was natural gas, Pennsylvania is where Marcellus Shale has the most Marcellus shale layers, and so again we were ravaged for natural gas production, now here comes solar, and the solar again is going to again to ravage Western Pennsylvania.”