Developer withdraws application for Washington County solar farm

The company that wants to build a large solar farm with 500,000 panels in Washington County has withdrawn its application, but company officials plan to come back with a second proposal that has a smaller footprint.

The withdrawal came a week after Catalyst Energy Partners’ application for a special-exception permit was rejected by the county’s planning commission during a five-hour meeting in Abingdon that drew about 300 people.

The commission’s no vote was a recommendation to the board of supervisors, which had a public hearing and vote on the project on the agenda for its July 9 meeting. That agenda item will now be removed, County Administrator Jason Berry said Tuesday.

A special-exception permit is needed because some of the land is in agriculture zones that don’t allow that use. The remainder of the land is in an industrial zone.

Catalyst, an energy infrastructure company based in Dallas, has been working for more than two years on the Wolf Hills Solar project, a $400 million, 262-megawatt solar project that would have been built in the Wyndale community next to Wolf Hills Energy’s natural gas-generating facility.

The solar project would have interconnected at the gas facility’s substation and provided renewable power that would have made the power grid in this area stronger, according to Catalyst. The project would have provided enough power to the local grid to power approximately 42,000 houses, the company said.

If approved, about 500,000 solar panels would have been placed on about 1,900 acres that have been leased by the company. The company expected to pay between $400,000 and $500,000 in taxes per year.

Most of those who spoke during the planning commission’s June 24 hearing were opposed to the project because they said it would result in the loss of farmland, while some said the solar panels would diminish the area’s natural beauty.

In response to the concern about losing farmland, Ross Cox, an associate with Catalyst, said the plan was to use sheep to manage the vegetation on the land, which would mean it was still serving an agricultural purpose.

The company also planned to use fencing and plant trees as a buffer to the solar panels.

If Catalyst comes back with a new plan that still requires a special-exception permit, the county’s process would start over and the company would again have to go through the planning commission and the board of supervisors, according to Berry.

But if the new proposal is restricted to the industrial property, no special-exception permit would be needed and the project could proceed, the county administrator said.

However, Cox said 300 to 400 acres of the property are in the industrial zone, and that wouldn’t be economical for the company.

“In a perfect world, that would be great,” he said. “But that’s not really economical to just build on that acreage. … So, maybe we go with the land that has the least amount of visual impacts or we look at different parcels.”

Under the original proposal, construction would have begun in the third quarter of 2025, with the opening set for the third quarter of 2027.

Cox said Catalyst has just started thinking about coming up with a second proposal and he’s not sure how much time that will take. Company officials believe there is a way to make the project work in Washington County, he added.

Catalyst, which started in 2020, has several other solar projects in the works, including in Texas, Maryland, Illinois and others in Virginia, according to Cox.

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