Isle of Wight supervisors approved the county’s 10th solar farm and deferred action on two others at a seven-hour Aug. 15 meeting that extended just past midnight.
The 3-1 split vote to approve a 3-megawatt facility on 28 acres bordering Orbit Road, less than 2 miles from the county government complex where the supervisors meet, overturned a 7-2 July decision by the county’s Planning Commission to recommend denial of a permit to Elk Development LLC, a subsidiary of Denver-based Pivot Energy.
County staff too had urged denial, stating in a written report that the project would result in “saturation of uses in the same general neighborhood” due to its half-mile proximity to two other solar farms. According to the report, the site is a half-mile from the 20-acre, 2-megawatt Nuby Run solar farm the supervisors approved in 2022 for Orbit Road, which isn’t active yet, and 0.6 miles from the 193-acre, 20-megawatt Solidago facility at the corner of Orbit and Redhouse roads, which was approved in 2018 and began generating electricity in 2023.
Supervisor William McCarty cited the project’s lack of proximity to any dense residential areas among his reasons for joining Supervisors Rudolph Jefferson and Renee Rountree in supporting the project despite the Planning Commission’s and staff’s objections.
According to Robert Hickox, Pivot’s project development manager, there are fewer than 20 homes in the vicinity of the 28 acres, only 19 of which would be fenced and see solar panels. Several are owned by relatives of William Sawyer, who owns the land on which the solar farm would be located.
McCarty had earlier in the evening motioned to table a separate application by Elk Development for another 3-megawatt solar farm that would be located on 27 acres off Old Stage Highway and Morgarts Beach Road, less than a mile from Hardy Elementary and just over 750 feet from the closest residence in Wrenn’s Mill, a subdivision with more than 100 homes. The supervisors followed the 10:07 p.m. vote on the Orbit Road project with a unanimous vote to postpone, for the second consecutive month, a decision on Arlington-based AES Corp.’s application for Sycamore Cross, which if approved would be Isle of Wight’s largest solar farm to date at more than 2,000 acres spanning the westernmost edge of the Isle of Wight-Surry county border.
Vice Chairman Don Rosie, who led the meeting in the absence of Chairman Joel Acree, cast the lone dissenting vote on the Orbit Road project, citing an Aug. 1 final report by the five-member energy task force the supervisors had created last year to study the county’s capacity to accommodate “emerging energy generation technologies.”
“I think because of the newness of solar energy there’s a lot of things that we’re trying to understand and there’s concern about going too fast, too quickly and being too committed when you don’t know enough,” Rosie said.
Elk Development’s Orbit Road solar farm is projected to generate $227,900 in real estate and machinery and tools tax revenue over the project’s expected 25-year lifespan. Pivot has proposed an additional $135,000 in upfront payments paid in three $45,000 installments prior to the start of commercial operation, and a $15,000 contribution to the Virginia Cooperative Extension’s 4-H program.
The economic impact of the Old Stage Highway solar farm is similar, at $226,500 from real estate and M&T taxes over 25 years plus $135,000 in upfront payments, and $15,000 for the restoration of the Nike missile the city of Hampton donated to Isle of Wight in 2019 for display at Carrollton’s Nike Park, a former Army missile base. Sycamore Cross, which offers the highest upfront payment of the three, is proposing to pay $13.75 million within its first 10 years of operation.
In 2023, the supervisors amended Isle of Wight’s zoning ordinance to include a 2,446 acre, or 2%, cap on the cumulative amount of prime farmland devoted to solar, just over 2,200 of which are already spoken for. Pivot’s Orbit Road solar farm will remove an additional 11 acres deemed prime farmland, and another 17 deemed prime if drained, from agricultural use. The Old Stage Highway solar farm, if approved, would remove another six acres of prime farmland. Sycamore Cross, at 614 acres of prime farmland and another 236 deemed prime if drained, would exceed the cap and push the cumulative prime farmland devoted to solar to 2.6% of the county’s total, though Sycamore and Old Stage Highway are each grandfathered due to submitting applications prior to the enactment of the ordinance change.
Supervisor Rudolph Jefferson had urged tabling of the Old Stage Highway solar farm application, asserting the handful of opposition speakers at a same-day public hearing to be an inaccurate sampling of the Wrenn’s Mill community.
Of the nine speakers, five said they opposed the project, four of whom gave a Wrenn’s Mill address.
“I do know a lot of people in Wrenn’s Mill Estates and I would like to have the opportunity to actually go out and speak to some of those folks,” Jefferson said.
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