The Solar Farm That Almost Destroyed Copake, N.Y.

By Francis Wilkinson | Bloomberg,

Back in 2016, when renewable power developer Hecate Energy was looking for a prime location for a solar energy farm, Copake, New York, caught the company’s attention. It’s easy to understand why: Solar panels take up space. Copake, a rural upstate hamlet of gentle hills and bucolic pastureland, has plenty. There is also an electrical substation nearby to handle the power that the solar farm would produce. And with Democratic political leadership, and a relatively liberal bent, Copake seemed poised to be a welcoming environment for renewable energy.

By the beginning of 2017, Hecate was striking lease deals with local farmers for a 60-megawatt installation on multiple parcels of land, to be called Shepherd’s Run solar farm. The company conducted feasibility studies and environmental analyses. It planned for traffic flow and animal migration and stormwater runoff.

Then it all bogged down. The town changed its zoning rules in April 2017 to try to thwart large solar development. Then it went to court to try to stop Shepherd’s Run.

With about 3,000 residents, depending on the number of second-home owners who are in town at any given moment, Copake is the sort of place that affluent residents of New York City value precisely because nothing much happens there. The downtown consists of two roads dotted with a few homes and a handful of small businesses — including a wine shop — converging on a traffic circle. There’s no stoplight.

Nor did it appear, after steady opposition, that there would be a solar farm. But then, last month, something surprising happened: A self-organized “working group” of Copake residents, aided by volunteer experts, presented what seemed very much like a civic plan to embrace the project. They agreed to work together to “reinforce Hecate’s commitment to being a community partner, and secure community support for Shepherd’s Run.”

It was quite a turnaround. Just a couple months before the February presentation, at the end of November, a 90-minute Zoom meeting conducted by a local group opposed to Shepherd’s Run had featured a litany of horrors that would ensue if Hecate ever managed to mount its solar panels in Copake. More than 100 people had participated. Now, some leaders of that call were joining with local solar power advocates to support a slightly modified version of Shepherd’s Run, calling it a model project for the state and urging locals to get behind it.

After they watched the working group’s crisp, professional presentation, which also took place over Zoom and was accompanied by the release of a new website explaining the proposal, the 140 or so participants were invited to provide feedback. Almost everyone who spoke expressed some level of support. It was dizzying. A plan that had been publicly battered for five years — and is still opposed by local politicians — suddenly had momentum.

“I’ve worked on geothermal projects in Ethiopia, hydro projects in Africa and South America, geothermal in Papua, New Guinea. I mean, I’ve done some projects in some crazy, crazy jurisdictions,” said Alex Campbell, Hecate’s project manager for Shepherd’s Run. “And I’ve never encountered anything remotely close to this.”

There is an element of mystery to the sudden reversal. But there are also lessons about planning, leadership and local politics for renewable energy advocates. Perhaps the most important lesson is that it’s possible to win converts and overcome local opposition to development. But Copake is a cautionary tale as well. Because if it takes the better part of a decade to site a medium-size solar project in a rural community with a liberal political disposition, the transition to clean energy could well be a slow-motion disaster.

***

To slow climate change, carbon-powered electricity must be replaced by energy derived from wind, solar, hydro and other noncarbon sources. However, zero emissions cannot be attained merely by supplanting fossil-fuel-powered electricity with emissions-free power. In New York, for example, three in five homes are heated by natural gas — not electricity. If homes and buildings and automobiles all make the transition to electricity, then additional electricity must be generated to meet that increased demand.

Yet even that won’t be enough. Because wind and solar are less consistent than gas and coal, and because battery technology is still evolving, some overbuilding is necessary. “The cheapest way to produce power around the clock and around the year is to build more solar than you need,” said Richard Perez, a researcher in atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany. Disposing of excess solar power is clean and easy, Perez said: You simply “throw it away.”

New York State’s efforts to abandon fossil fuels have been characterized by both consensus and failure. In 2019, after consistently falling far short of previous renewable energy goals, New York adopted the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. It set goals of 70% renewable electricity by 2030, 100% emissions-free electricity by 2040 and net-zero carbon emissions in the state by 2050.

Under a “Net Zero by 2050” transition to renewables, according to the International Energy Agency, solar power would become the world’s largest source of electricity. Yet even presuming widespread adoption of rooftop solar panels on homes and commercial buildings, reaching zero emissions will require hundreds of commercial solar farms in a state as large as New York.

Fewer than two dozen renewable projects have been approved in the state in the past decade. Under the new expedited process, the state has green-lighted three solar farms and one wind facility.

Both wind and solar energy are land-intensive, requiring at least 10 times as much land per unit of power produced as natural-gas plants. That fact is key to a new generation of political conflicts. Who will provide the land? Where will new transmission lines run? It took years to get approval of transmission lines to run clean power to downstate New York from a hydropower station in Quebec — and those lines were planned underground and out of sight.

“Even though people like wind and solar power in the abstract,” a Brookings Institution report notes, “some object to large projects near their homes, especially if they don’t financially benefit from the project.”

The technical capacity of renewable energy generation is now running ahead of political capacity. Financial capital, too, is more abundant than political capital. Investors are eager. But time and again, communities resist clean power installations. Even projects that survive regulatory and legal gauntlets face long delays. Plans for wind farms in New York’s rural Lewis and Steuben counties took more than four years to gain approval.

In theory, just about everyone is in favor of solar energy. But the struggle to put a specific energy project on a particular parcel of land in an actual community is proving to be a very different matter.  

***

In the Covid summer of 2020, Juan-Pablo Velez was living in Columbia County in upstate New York. Like other New Yorkers of mobility and means, he had left Brooklyn for open space and a better chance, pre-vaccine, of dodging the pandemic. He eventually bought a house in Copake. Like Velez, a software engineer at Spotify, many weekenders were working full-time from their home offices in the countryside.

Velez, 34, had been a climate activist in college. Visiting the local farmer’s market one day, he learned that a solar project was planned for Copake. “There are these people handing out pamphlets saying, ‘Have you heard about these solar farms coming to town?’ And I was like, ‘No, that sounds great,’” he recalled. “And they said, ‘No, it’s terrible. It’s going to ruin the town. It’s going to kill birds.’” Their claims “seemed very strange to me,” he said.

Velez attended a town meeting and was stunned by the amount of opposition to Shepherd’s Run. Solar power is “a miracle,” he said. “We can use as much of it as we can get. Yet people were as upset as if it was a coal plant going into their backyard.”

Velez connected with Dan Haas, a retired special education teacher who has lived in Copake for three decades and is a longtime climate activist. I met him in late November at the local fire station, where Hecate was conducting a community open house on Shepherd’s Run.

Plans for Shepherd’s Run had already been reduced in geographic size — though not power output — more than once. The latest proposal, featured on displays at the firehouse, included ground-mounted solar panels on galvanized steel tracks. The installation would be up to 12 feet above ground, “about the height of field corn stalks,” the company noted. There would be 220 acres of panels inside fencing, and another 35 acres of “footprint” — what the company called “temporary and permanent disturbance required to construct the project, including access roads, buried collection lines, the substation, fencing, etc.”

The event at the firehouse was well-attended, but young people were scarce. Residents read the company’s promotional materials on a series of white boards, or peppered company representatives with questions about the project’s size, how much money would flow to the town, whether local energy costs would be reduced and why the company couldn’t build the project somewhere else. The mere fact that Hecate, based in Chicago, had homed in on a small upstate town on the New York side of the Berkshires aroused suspicion. Why us?

Haas was there as a representative of Friends of Columbia Solar, the local group that he and Velez had started to support the project. Wearing a yellow “Friends of Columbia Solar” shirt, he stood at one end of the room answering questions from skeptical neighbors who tried to puzzle out his views.

Dan, why are you supporting this?

“It’s all about climate change.”

Why does it have to be in Copake?

“We have an electrical substation and willing landowners.”

The night before Hecate’s open house, a group called Sensible Solar for Rural New York had held its own 90-minute Zoom meeting. The event featured a parade of horribles that would flow from Shepherd’s Run: It was too big. It was poorly sited. It would blight community “viewsheds.” It would squander prime farmland. It would harm flora and fauna.

Darin Johnson, a leader of Sensible Solar, described Hecate as a “Chicago-based” company that had negotiated “behind the scenes” with a local farmer. Everything about the project was wrong. “Slapping down an industrial-scale solar facility in the middle of an agriculture-and-tourism-centric region is not a smart decision,” he said. The land chosen for the solar farm was too hilly. Also, too forested. “No sensible renewable energy developer” would put solar panels there.

***

Richard Stedman, a sociologist at Cornell University, has been studying community reaction to renewable power proposals in upstate and western New York. The hesitancy in Copake is not unique.

“When we’re talking about rooftop, and even community-scale solar, it’s almost a motherhood-and-apple-pie thing,” Stedman told me. “There’s super, super strong support and very little opposition.” When discussion turns to what Stedman calls “utility-scale” solar, such as Shepherd’s Run, public support falls dramatically. “We basically see the bottom drop out.”

Opponents of Shepherd’s Run insisted that their activism wasn’t fueled by the privileged outsourcing of civic responsibility known as Not In My Backyard. “It was never about opposition to solar, and it was never about opposition to solar in our backyard,” said Meredith Kane, a leader of Sensible Solar, when we spoke soon after the November Zoom meeting. “In fact, we are always chagrined when it’s said that, ‘Oh, it’s NIMBY.’ It’s not NIMBY. We understand large-scale renewables are coming to New York. I mean, it’s active state policy and it’s right. We need this.”

Yet NIMBY sentiment is a recurring element of conflict over renewable energy installations. Stedman, and Roberta Nilson, a graduate student, have found that many upstaters are coming to view renewable energy projects as a kind of assault. “They’re beginning to frame it in a way that they feel they are being treated unfairly,” Stedman said. They feel the state approves projects without adequate input from the community. And they feel that upstate is being exploited to power New York City.

“There’s a phrase for it in the literature,” Stedman said: energy colonialism. The idea is “that upstate New York is almost being perceived by these folks as a colony of downstate,” he said. Similar resentments hold sway far outside New York, and have been similarly mobilized for political gain.

At one point in the November Zoom meeting, a Sensible Solar member made a presentation about the town’s lawsuit against the project, which a judge had recently ruled against. But she added a side commentary: “I just want to say that, you know, nuclear energy is emissions free, but for some reason has not been considered part of the solution by New York State.”

The reason for that omission is no great mystery. Construction of nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been stymied by relentless opposition. One existing plant in New York, Indian Point, was permanently shut down last year in response to public pressure, ending its supply of clean power to New York City. The site still contains radioactivity; it just produces no electricity. More fossil-fuel energy had to be directed to the city to replace what was lost.

***

Both Friends of Columbia Solar, which supported Shepherd’s Run, and Sensible Solar, which until last month worked against it, waged public campaigns. Last summer, Friends of Columbia Solar ran two advertisements in a local paper. The first asserted that the project would help combat climate change while also making it possible to cut taxes, support farmers and pay less to power homes.

Shepherd’s Run would pay at least several million in taxes locally, though it’s unclear if that would result in any tax cuts to others. It would definitely pay farmers to house solar panels on their land. It seems far less likely that it would prompt lower electricity costs except that as the supply of cheap electricity rises, costs should, theoretically, go down.

Weeks later, Sensible Solar published a response ad. Calling Shepherd’s Run a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” the ad’s first sentence described Friends of Columbia Solar as “an organization claiming no connection to Hecate Energy.” The obvious implication was that the rival group had nefarious ties that it was keeping secret. The ad went on to denounce “misleading ‘facts’” promoted by Friends of Columbia Solar, including assertions that Shepherd’s Run would in any way benefit local residents.

In a small town, innuendo travels fast even without paid advertising. However, the implication of corruption wasn’t an artifact of local knowledge. There was no reason to believe that people who had supported solar power for years, even decades, were somehow on the take. The attack was a partisan commodity, an off-the-shelf product of the political marketplace: You’re bought; your views are illegitimate.

***

How Sensible Solar leaders moved from that attack mode to a cooperative mode, culminating in the Zoom presentation in February, is a little mysterious. Perhaps the town’s recent loss in court prompted reconsideration. Between the legal setback and the state’s transition to a fast-track approval process, it’s possible that some began to conclude that Shepherd’s Run couldn’t be stopped, and that it was best to try to shape the project to advantage. That view wasn’t shared by Shepherd’s Run project manager Alex Campbell; in early December he told me that he viewed the prospects of completing the project at “less than 50%.”

The idea for a community working group that would combine Sensible Solar leaders with advocates from Friends of Columbia Solar had surfaced many months before. (Campbell said he had encouraged the groups to work together himself.) The notion was for the two groups to stop feuding and search for common ground. If they could agree on a compromise plan for Copake solar power, they could then present a united front to Hecate and potentially get a better deal for the community.

But Sensible Solar’s commitment to solar in Copake was sketchy, and Friends of Columbia Solar seemed more interested in advancing solar power than in negotiating benefits for the town. Months went by and the working group didn’t happen. Until, suddenly, it did.

The foundation of the working group was a yearslong friendship between Sensible Solar’s Meredith Kane and Friend of Columbia Solar’s Dan Haas. Months of rancor had not destroyed their mutual trust. Haas is a calm, patient man. Kane, a retired corporate real estate lawyer with decades of experience negotiating deals, has the kind of solid political skills that can ease the way to compromise.

The working group shrewdly made itself larger, reaching out to experts who could shape the plan while also diffusing tension among the principals. Two landscape architects agreed to volunteer their services, reimagining Hecate’s rudimentary camouflage of solar panels with their own plan for a more sophisticated array of trees and shrubs that would better suit the local environment while also enhancing views. Two well-known regional environmental groups — Columbia Land Conservancy and Scenic Hudson — agreed to join.

“I spoke separately to folks from Friends of Columbia Solar and Sensible Solar,” said Columbia Land Conservancy president Troy Weldy on a Zoom call that included Dan Haas and Meredith Kane. “And I told them, ‘I don’t want to get involved unless you’re committed to finding a solution.’ And it was clear to me after a period of time that they really were.”

By the time the group produced the February Zoom meeting, the working group had a 45-slide deck ready. It was an extraordinary achievement by a small group of volunteers working together in a compressed time frame.

It was also not far removed from Hecate’s own plan. Significantly, the working group’s “re-envisioned” Shepherd’s Run would still produce 60 megawatts of solar power on roughly the same footprint to which Hecate had previously retreated. In addition to more creative landscaping, the plan called for public pathways for biking and walking, grazing space for sheep and solar panels for the public high school, with a proposal for charging electric school buses.

Hecate responded to the working group plan on its own Shepherd’s Run website, listing points of agreement while remaining enthusiastically noncommittal about proposals, such as “fair compensation to impacted homeowners,” that the company seems unlikely to embrace.

Property values promise to be a sticky component of local energy politics. While resident fears of losing home equity are understandable, it’s hard to know how a solar farm would actually influence property values in a place like Copake, especially over the long run as people grow more accustomed to seeing panels in rural settings. A study by researchers at the University of Rhode Island suggests the impact on property values is generally small. But it’s reasonable to think it might be somewhat larger in Copake. In one of our conversations, Hecate’s Alex Campbell described Copake not as a farm community but as a community with “farm views.”

He wasn’t being facetious. The phrase captures the rural gentrification attending Copake’s second homes. It also captures what those homeowners are looking at, and for.

***

Sunshine alternated with snow flurries on the December day when I met Campbell in Copake. The air was blustery and cold. He arrived at our meeting place in a Tesla. When you work in the solar industry, I guess, you drive an electric car.

I followed Campbell in my own carbon-emitting vehicle to one of the Shepherd’s Run sites. Each of us had brought a dog along and, since there was no traffic, we let them loose after we parked. The site was an empty field on a corner, with a forested hill rising gently in the rear. Solar panels here would be readily visible from both roads. But generous landscaping could help camouflage them.

Campbell led me to other Shepherd’s Run parcels. They were all different, but also more or less the same; mostly open pieces of land surrounded by trees on one or more sides, with a few homes nearby. Some parcels would be easier to camouflage than others. None seemed likely to “ruin” Copake, as Sensible Solar’s ubiquitous yard signs warned.

After touring the Shepherd’s Run parcels, I sat down at a local diner with Campbell. He’s 38 and has a master’s degree in renewable energy. He lives in a townhouse now, but had previously built his own high-efficiency home with solar on the roof to power his Tesla. I asked him if he had ever expected, when he started a career in renewable energy, to be cast as the bad guy in a public drama.

He chuckled, but not in a way that conveyed amusement. “Never did,” he said.

One of the findings by Stedman, the sociologist, is that the more people view their community as central to their identity, the more they resist changing it. It’s hardly a shocking discovery, but it’s one that renewable energy developers are going to have to reckon with again and again. “People protest changes to their local community across the political spectrum,” said Jennifer Ifft, an associate professor in agricultural economics at Kansas State University who has studied rural land-use issues.

***

Shepherd’s Run looks like it might finally be poised for takeoff. But five-plus years of stops and starts, retreats and reboots, was occasioned by a small number of people who didn’t like the look of changes coming their way. It wasn’t just the sight of solar panels that annoyed them. Some objected to a big company pushing its way into town.

Being against big business — and accusing your opponents of being “bought” by it — has a long tradition in American social activism. But it’s remarkably unhelpful in the context of climate change. Mom-and-pop shops are not well-positioned to revolutionize the complex energy systems driving a $24 trillion U.S. economy. And given the pace of climate change, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the health of the planet will depend in part on the health of the bottom lines of solar and wind developers.

Still, resentment, suspicion and animosity are part of American politics, and must be accounted for. To generate more clean power from more Shepherd’s Runs, the U.S. is going to need more civic working groups to blunt opposition and ease development. Kane, Haas and their colleagues put in an extraordinary amount of labor. But they produced a plan that, so far at least, appears to have calmed local anxieties and transformed a Chicago plan into a Copake plan.

The group put aside bad feelings and dared to work out a collective vision — “viewshed” — of what the project should be, while keeping the parameters grounded in reality. Then they made a detailed case, clearly communicated, to their neighbors. The presentation was so good, in fact, that no one bothered to ask how exactly they had managed to get from where they had been just a few months ago to where they are today.

Copake shows how easy it can be to throw wrenches in the works of renewable energy development. It also shows how civic politics can function at a high level. If New York State wants to smooth the transition to renewable energy, Copake’s working group demonstrates a political formula that can work. It just needs to start sooner in the process, and work more quickly.

Credible civic leadership — even in the face of opposition from elected officials — makes a difference. Local input is crucial to winning local support. There are many Copakes yet to go. And time is short.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes about U.S. politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously executive editor of the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

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