P&Z eyes 5-acre limit for solar

 DUANE CROSS
MCO Publisher • Editor

In February, the Metro Council unanimously voted to impose a five-year moratorium on future large-scale solar farm development in Moore County.

Metro Moore Attorney Bill Rieder said the abeyance would allow the county to study the long-term effects of the Silicon Ranch solar farm on Highway 55 near the Moore-Coffee county line.

“The reason for that – a five-year moratorium – is because you want to see what impact this is going to have on the county and study that to see if there are any other types of restrictions or requirements that you place on those in the future,” Rieder said. “It does not impact the one [Silcon Ranch] already approved.”

On Tuesday, the Planning and Zoning Commission voted to give the moratorium some teeth.

Chairman Dexter Golden told the board that he had kicked around a “300 acres, 500-acre minimum” as a cutline for having a solar farm.

Commission member Scott Freuhauf asked about the goal of the moratorium.

Golden said, “The moratorium is to get our feelings about how [Silcon Ranch] is going, how well it does the community, how smooth everything goes, [and] impacts it could have on us.

“What we’re trying to do is not cut off the average farmer if he had a little bit of land he wanted to do solar on.”

Freuhauf asked, “Would five acres be more than enough to do anything non-commercial?”

Board member Jimmy Hammond added, “The hundreds of acres, that’s what we don’t want.”

“If we had a family compound with adjacent lots and there were six family members and we wanted to put five acres of solar panels in the middle of it and have our own power grid – five acres is a whole lot of power,” Freuhauf said. “That’s just my two cents.”

Golden asked the board to settle on a number it could recommend to the Metro Council. Freuhauf suggested five acres be the limit, and the board unanimously approved that number.

The recommendation will be presented to the Council for consideration, possibly at the March 17 meeting.