Grundy County introduces guidelines for permitting solar farms

RWE Clean Energy’s Buffalo Solar Farm project starts construction in the fall after a bumpy road getting there; its special use permit was initially denied in September 2023, leading to a lawsuit settled in March.

The rejection came amid public outcry against the solar farm and the Grundy County Board’s sympathy with its residents. It’s a regular occurrence at Grundy County Board meetings, an occurrence the board is hoping to cut down.

Development Manager Eli Varol said a lot of thought goes into selecting locations for solar farms, especially solar farms that are done on a utility scale rather than a community scale.

“You want to be very close to a transmission line,” Varol said. “This project, it’s adjacent to a transmission line with available capacity. In other words, you can think of a transmission line like a highway. You don’t want to park your solar farm next to a very crowded highway where there’s no room to drive. You want to be where there’s available room, and you need to be where the demand is.”

The Buffalo Solar project will be built on 960 acres at near 7000 County Road and West Dupont Road, and it will have a capacity of 116 megawatts. It will also generate more than $20 million in property tax revenue, according to the Buffalo Solar website.

Solar farms regularly draw crowds at Grundy County Board meetings. Some residents come out because they are concerned the farms are taking up prime farmland. Others argue the farms will ruin the views from their homes and create problems down the road when the project is decommissioned.

The issues arise, according to Grundy County Board Chairman Chris Balkema from two sets of residents: People who don’t like solar farms and don’t understand them, and people who understand exactly what solar farms are and don’t like them.

The Grundy County Board has spent time creating guidelines using a committee of State’s Attorney Russ Baker, Administrator Mary Kucharz, Highway Engineer Eric Gibson and members of the Grundy County Board. By creating these guidelines for future solar development, Balkema said the committee is attempting to move the first category of people to the second.

It also returned some power to the county level in regards to what solar farms get approved, and removed the partisan politics. Balkema said the process allows the county to use data to make suggestions to solar farms. Since the settlement with Buffalo Solar in March, Grundy County was able to get concessions from the project that calmed its concerns.

The Buffalo Solar project has gone through multiple design changes to ensure they can be a good neighbor to the residents of Norman Township, Varol said. The designs now include an additional setback and the entire area around the solar farm will be landscaped with greenery and trees. The panels will not be visible from local homes.

RWE Clean Energy also does not own the land. The land is leased from local farmers, and the law requires the company to be responsible for remediation once the project is decommissioned, Varol said.

“It is good farmland,” he said. “But this is an open and willing transaction that landowners on that land, for the next 20 or so years, chose to do. There’s no eminent domain or anything like that.”

Varol said there are neighbors near the project that are supportive, as it falls within the landowner’s rights.

Jim Fleischman, the farmer who owns the land, said he views using the plot for a solar farm as a business decision before anything else. Thirty-five percent of his corn already goes toward ethanol fuel, which is used for energy.

“The world is going to go more electric, even with transportation,” Fleischman said. “It’s just going to mean less corn is produced for liquid fuel. If you’re going to take sunlight and turn it into energy, which is what we do with corn, you want to do it as efficiently as possible.”

Fleischman said short-term, it’s difficult to beat solar and it can be used in a way that complements nuclear at a far cheaper cost.

“We pretend to be in the middle of nowhere,” Fleischman said. “We’re on the edge of everything. There’s 9.5 million people in the Chicagoland area. We have our electricity hub, the intermodal and the interstate highway system. Just because we’re on the edge of Chicagoland, we pretend it doesn’t exist. The demand for what we’re trying to produce is right at our back door. We’re in a spot where it makes perfect sense.”

Fleischman said he doesn’t think there should be any worry that solar is going to take over the county. Like Varol said, these solar farms have to be built near a transmission line. The farms can’t be built just anywhere.

Why solar farms are becoming more prevalent

A bond with Grundy County as the beneficiary ensures that there will be funding available to cover the full cost of decommissioning the solar farm, even if RWE Clean Energy isn’t around when the time comes. This is required by state law, Varol said.

Grundy County is an attractive location for solar farms because of the access to transmission lines, and because of House Bill 4412, which passed in January 2023 by a vote of 73-39.

The law, according to a January 2024 Morris Herald-News article, prevents counties from having stricter standards against solar projects than the state.

The law reads as follows: “Counties are permitted to regulate the siting of commercial wind energy facilities with standards that are not more restrictive than the requirements specified within the law. This includes unincorporated areas of the county that are outside of the zoning jurisdiction of the municipality and that are outside the 1.5-mile radius surrounding the zoning jurisdiction of the municipality.”

Balkema said the counties need a return to the pre-House Bill 4412 law that allowed them to create regulations for solar farms because the number of applicants has ballooned. Eight years ago, Balkema said, the board might see a few applicants a year.

“People would apply and we would approve them based on the merits of the laws of the time and the process for them to get connected to the grid, or go through the building process,” Balkema said.

“We didn’t see much pushback then. Over the last few years, there’s been some federal and state laws that have made it more financially savvy for large and small solar farms. The individual consumer and industrial commercial have some advantages financially to move forward,” he said.

Varol said House Bill 4412 makes Illinois a much more attractive target for development of solar and wind compared to other states, where permitting is risky and projects end up dying at early stages because a county or township passes an ordinance that kills the project.

“For the industry, it’s been a positive and then for the state, it’s been a positive,” Varol said. “It’s brought a significant amount of investment and these projects generate property tax, revenue for the communities where they’re located, and provide a significant amount of good-paying union labor, full-time jobs once they’re operating.”

It’s also a need for the state: 75% of Illinois’ coal plant capacity is either closed or announced to be closing soon. Prairie State, a coal power plant in Southern Illinois and one of the largest CO2 emitters in the U.S., is shutting down half of the plant by 2038 and fully retiring the plant by 2045.

“There’s a very strong need to replace that lost power generation capacity form those coal plants that are closed,” Varol said. “Right now, solar is the most economical strategy to replace that lost capacity.”

Balkema said he’s pro-solar energy, as he is any form of energy that allows Illinois to close the gaps where it needs to.

“My personal opinion is all types of energy are good, and we need to be able to blend solar and wind with nuclear, gas, coal and hydroelectric,” he said. “My personal motivation is to help Illinois continue to grow as an energy exporter, because we have so many sources here that could export energy and really make a positive more for the state.”

Balkema said he believes in the free market economy, but he doesn’t believe the government should be supplementing one section of energy over another.

Shaw Local columnist Scott T. Holland outlines how this battle is taking place west of Grundy County in Bureau County and to the north in McHenry County.

Grundy County still has two lawsuits to sort out with US Solar, but the Buffalo Solar project can now move forward. It starts construction in the fall, and Varol said it will be completed by summer 2026.