Micro Solar Leases: A New Income Stream for Black Farmers in the South?
Published Wednesday, February 14, 2024 By Daniel Walton
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‘Postage stamp’ solar facility approved in Northampton
Published 2:54 pm Friday, February 10, 2023 By Holly Taylor
JACKSON – Unlike large solar facility requests that have come before the Northampton County Board of Commissioners in the past, the most recent one under consideration is expected to take up less than three acres of land. The commissioners held a public hearing for the special use request at their regular meeting on Feb. 6. Because the county’s Code Enforcement Director was unable to attend, County Attorney Scott McKellar presented the information to the board instead. McKellar explained that the proposed solar facility will be located on a 65-acre parcel of land outside of Pendleton. The solar facility itself, however, will only cover approximately 2.6 acres in total. That’s in contrast to several solar facility requests that have come before the board in the past, which usually encompass hundreds of acres. Additionally, this solar facility is planned to be a part of the local electrical co-op. Ajulo Othow, who represented the project developer, spoke before the board to detail their plans for compliance with the county’s ordinance, including fencing, underground transmission lines, and a decommissioning plan. The special use application for the project was first submitted in 2022. “Are you limited to the 2.6 acres,” asked Commissioner Ed Martin. Othow answered yes. Commissioner Melvetta Broadnax Taylor asked if the farmland on the property will continue to be used simultaneously with the solar facility. “Yes ma’am,” Othow answered. “This project was actually designed to be small enough – we call it a postage stamp sized project – so that agricultural production could take place alongside the solar energy production.” Board Chair Charles Tyner called for public comments. The only person who opted to speak was Marshall Cherry, who serves as CEO for Roanoke Electric Cooperative, which is supporting the small solar project. “I’m really proud to have this project as part of our portfolio,” Cherry said. He explained that the proposed solar project is one step forward in their longterm goal for net-zero carbon emissions, and that it will be a resource to help power the grid during peak periods and keep the cooperative more resilient during adverse weather events. “It gives us an opportunity in being flexible in how we utilize the grid,” Cherry concluded. Without any further discussion, Commissioner Geneva Faulkner motioned to approve the special use request, and Martin seconded. The vote was unanimously in favor among those in attendance. Commissioner Kelvin Edwards was absent from Monday’s meeting. In July 2021, the Northampton commissioners enacted a moratorium on solar facilities in the county in order to give the Planning Board the opportunity to gather and conduct research about the impact of solar facilities. That moratorium expired in April 2022. Following the moratorium period, the commissioners approved changes in the county ordinances for solar power generation facilities. That change removed solar facilities from “permitted use” under the zoning ordinance to “special use.” That would mean those wishing to construct a solar facility would have to get approval first before a permit is issued. The reasoning behind the change included being able to better inform the community about solar facility proposals. A public hearing is required for special use permit approval. Additionally, the ordinance amendment also added more setback, landscape buffer, and security fencing regulations for solar facilities.
Read more at: https://www.roanoke-chowannewsherald.com/2023/02/10/postage-stamp-solar-facility-approved-in-northampton/
Read more at: https://www.roanoke-chowannewsherald.com/2023/02/10/postage-stamp-solar-facility-approved-in-northampton/
Sid Shapiro and Ajulo Othow: Clean, affordable electricity for all in NC
Sid Shapiro and Ajulo Othow - Dec 18, 2022
In a recent article and editorial (“Walmart does the right thing, Dec. 7) , the News & Record reported that Walmart had joined environmental and climate advocates in opposition to Duke Energy’s proposed carbon reduction plan which is now under review by the North Carolina Energy Commission. In the clash of evidence and arguments between Walmart, environmental and climate advocates, and Duke Energy, the fate of low-wealth ratepayers has been almost entirely lost.
As important as it is to adopt a plan that relies on renewable sources of energy, we cannot forget that this process affects people — people who need reliable access to affordable electricity as we shift to a clean energy future. Otherwise, even more of us won’t be able to power our lives.
About one in six North Carolinians couldn’t pay at least one monthly energy bill last year. And due to systemic inequity and discrimination, those of us who struggle are more likely to be low-wealth and of color.
A subsidiary of Duke Energy recently asked state energy officials to increase electrical rates in Raleigh, Asheville and other areas by a whopping 16% by 2025 — a plan that follows sharp increases in other parts of the state. That’s about $300 more per year for the typical residential customer on top of already sky-high bills for electricity and other basic needs.
Duke Energy notes that some customers “might” qualify for lower rates and proposed to help make homes more energy-efficient as a way to reduce costs. But the devil is always in the details, and the impact of such an offer — if it comes to pass — remains to be seen.
For its part, the N.C. Energy Commission needs to do more to hear from all types of “ratepayers,” including by reaching out to underserved communities (few of whom can afford to skip out on work to attend a hearing on state energy policy).
The commission should also adopt the ideas in a petition filed by N.C. Interfaith Power and Light, an affiliate of the North Carolina Council of Churches, which supports consumer-owned generation to help low-wealth North Carolinians generate their own electricity, pay bills and more, while also reducing carbon emissions.
With customer-owned generation of renewable energy, a customer typically receives a credit from the utility company for any excess electricity generated and sold. In the typical scenario, a residential customer’s solar rooftop system generates more electricity than is needed during the day, when sunlight is abundant. This extra electricity then flows back onto the utility system’s grid and the customer will receive a credit against the electricity consumed in the evening. In this way, consumer-owned generation lowers energy bills, spurs statewide economic development and creates more jobs in manufacturing, installation, construction and maintenance.
For its part, the N.C. Energy Commission needs to do more to hear from all types of “ratepayers,” including by reaching out to underserved communities (few of whom can afford to skip out on work to attend a hearing on state energy policy).
The commission should also adopt the ideas in a petition filed by N.C. Interfaith Power and Light, an affiliate of the North Carolina Council of Churches, which supports consumer-owned generation to help low-wealth North Carolinians generate their own electricity, pay bills and more, while also reducing carbon emissions.
With customer-owned generation of renewable energy, a customer typically receives a credit from the utility company for any excess electricity generated and sold. In the typical scenario, a residential customer’s solar rooftop system generates more electricity than is needed during the day, when sunlight is abundant. This extra electricity then flows back onto the utility system’s grid and the customer will receive a credit against the electricity consumed in the evening. In this way, consumer-owned generation lowers energy bills, spurs statewide economic development and creates more jobs in manufacturing, installation, construction and maintenance.
Sid Shapiro holds the Fletcher Chair in Administrative Law at the Wake Forest University School of Law, and Ajulo Othow is founder and CEO of EnerWealth Solutions in Oxford, N.C. Both serve on the board of directors of the Center for Progressive Reform.
Shaping a More Equitable Renewable Energy Transition in North Carolina
Carolina
This story was originally published in the Hive Fund’s triennial report.
“When I tell people that I work in the solar industry, they say, ‘you mean those solar fields that I see dotted across the landscape? What good is that for me?”
-Ajulo Othwo, EnerWealth Solutions
North Carolina is by many accounts a solar success story. Between 2010 and 2020, solar jumped from nearly zero to seven percent of the state’s energy mix, and North Carolina ranked third nationally in solar generating capacity, most of it coming from utility-scale projects in rural areas of the state. But the communities where this solar is situated rarely see the economic benefits. They don't even have access to the energy created there.
Under state law, Duke Energy, the monopoly utility that provides power to most North Carolinians, has an exclusive right to sell power in its territories, giving it almost total control over the state’s solar industry. In 2018, in a case intended to test the limits of this restrictive regulatory scheme, local nonprofit NC WARN was fined $60,000 for installing a solar array on a Greensboro church and selling them power at a reduced rate.
NC WARN is part of a growing movement of organizations—many of them led by women of color—that are working to wrest control over energy policy and production from Duke and shape a more equitable renewable energy transition.
Ajulo Othow is a community leader, policy advocate, and renewable energy entrepreneur in rural North Carolina who sees what a boon solar could be for communities. “Many of these rural places have not seen this level of investment in decades,” she said. “This is an opportunity for African American people and people of color across the Southeast, in terms of benefitting their families and their rural communities, but there are too few of us involved in it.”
Othow partnered with The Roanoke Center, the nonprofit affiliate of local utility Roanoke Electric Cooperative (REC), to develop new models for bringing renewable energy and wealth-building opportunities to its largely Black, low- and moderate-income membership. As one of twenty-six rural electric cooperatives in North Carolina that serve customers outside of Duke Energy territory, REC has freedom to innovate, and has become a leading light for progressive co-ops across the South and beyond.
Ajulo Othow (right) leading a tour of one of the farm sites.
Its flagship program is an on-bill energy efficiency financing program that lowers energy bills for members while reducing peak energy costs for the utility. Subscriptions to a community solar array on REC’s property are also being leveraged with philanthropic support to fund repairs for homes that are not structurally sound enough for energy upgrades. Now REC is working with Othow’s company, EnerWealth Solutions, to build three more arrays, along with battery storage, on land leased from Black farmers. The projects will make the local grid more resilient and reduce costs for everyone, while generating extra income for the farmers.
“The [land] lease rate is more than 10 times what [the farmers] would normally receive if they were leasing for other uses, like for farming,” said Othow, noting that lucrative solar leases typically go to white landowners who have much more acreage to offer big developers.
These initiatives are part of a larger vision REC has to get to net zero by 2050 in a way that benefits both their members and their bottom line, a vision they are working to spread to other co-ops through a partnership with Clean Energy Works, another Hive Fund grantee partner.
“Our experience over the last seven years is that well-organized rural communities are faster to achieve their goals,” said Holmes Hummel, former Department of Energy policy advisor and founder and co-executive director of Clean Energy Works. “Electric cooperative victories often precede changes that the for-profit utilities from the major cities turn in. We’ve seen that in multiple places now.”
Outside of rural electric cooperative territories, community benefits from solar development have been harder to attain. Utility scale solar in nearby Halifax County is booming, but due to land requirements and other factors, Black people and other people of color have been largely excluded. Mozine Lowe, who runs the Center for Energy Education in Roanoke Rapids, focuses her efforts on getting residents job opportunities. The Center has trained over 280 people—including women and formerly incarcerated individuals—for solar jobs and helps them get hired when new projects come to the area.
Mozine Lowe (right) on the Center for Energy Education grounds with Hive Fund co-director Melanie Allen.
“There are limited workforce opportunities, and there are limited opportunities for people of color to grow and to prosper and to be part of the economic growth in rural counties,” she explained. “We are really impacting not only individuals, which is very important, but we are improving the economics of the county and that is equally important.”
Center for Energy Education and other Hive-supported community groups like A Better Chance a Better Community are also looking for ways solar developments can directly benefit communities and be better neighbors, including community benefit agreements and opportunities for community members to participate in planning processes for projects that impact their neighborhoods.
“People are not directly benefiting from [solar],” said Othow. “When I tell people that I work in the solar industry, they say, ‘you mean those solar fields that I see dotted across the landscape? What good is that for me?”
“North Carolina is supposed to reduce carbon by 70 percent by 2030, [and] many consumers look at solar as a fraud,” she said. “If I'm able to make a difference, then hopefully they will actually see the benefits of the panels that are going up across the landscape.”
Othow sits on the Board of Center for Progressive Reform, a leading policy advocacy group that, alongside NC Warn and other groups, is pushing for a more equitable renewable energy framework in the state. They are also building public pressure on Duke Energy to meet its stated climate goals, so that the state and municipalities can meet theirs. Public support for renewables is critical to this effort.
“I view success across all of the work that I do in North Carolina as creating more opportunity for people to benefit…environmentally, in terms of resilience to climate change, and economically as a result of this transition to clean energy,” Othow said, noting that as real benefits to people increase, public support does too, allowing renewables to expand further and faster.
Photos by Cornell Watson
Solar energy is growing in NC but still occupies less farmland than you might think
Solar energy is growing in NC but still occupies less farmland than you might think
ADAM WAGNER
July 5, 2022, 10:29 AM
A postcard led to roughly 300 acres of solar panels on Chris Barnhill’s land in Bladen County.
Barnhill, a fourth-generation blueberry farmer, recalled the postcard asking if he had a high-voltage power line on his property, and if he’d be interested in leasing some of his land for solar development. Now, about nine years later, the land has been cleared and is leased to Cypress Creek Renewables.
“It’s just amazing that you can take sunlight and make electricity from it,” Barnhill said. “That’s awesome.”
As large solar farms continue to blossom across North Carolina, local officials and members of the General Assembly occasionally express concern that their installation means the loss of valuable farmland. A report released last week by the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association shows that there are 703 solar systems that generate at least a megawatt of power installed in North Carolina.
The systems that are built on cropland or pastures or in evergreen forests total 31,125 acres — 0.28% of the state’s agricultural land, according to the Sustainable Energy Association report. A similar report in 2017 found 341 large solar systems in North Carolina covering 9,074 acres — 0.19% of the state’s agricultural land.
Jerry Carey, a market intelligence specialist with the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association, was one of the report’s authors. He recalled having a difficult time showing less than a third of one percent on a bar chart because it is such a small number.
“It’s not even a blip on the radar. So that’s what we’re trying to say and just back up the facts with real data rather than hearsay,” Carey said.
Preserving farmland
Solar developers prize farmland because it offers open space near high-voltage power lines, often on the outskirts of cities.
Harrison Cole, a senior project developer for Cypress Creek Renewables, estimated that a majority of the company’s projects in North Carolina are built on farmland or timberland.
“It’s kind of passive income so that they can support their families and future generations as well as another income stream in case they want to retire from the farming life,” Cole said.
When Cypress Creek starts a project, Cole added, the developer “typically” hosts a meeting for residents near the site to address concerns. Those meetings often include concerns about light and noise pollution — Cole said there generally isn’t any — from the solar farm that’s coming.
“It is a long-term lease, up to 40 years for these projects, so we want to make sure that we’re being good neighbors,” Cole said.
While working as an attorney for Strata Clean Energy, Ajulo Othow saw how that investment should impact rural communities. Othow, who had previously worked in rural development across the Southeast, put those observations into action in 2019 when she founded EnerWealth Solutions.
The company focuses on designing solar projects that benefit rural residents, particularly Black land owners or people with smaller farms. EnerWealth’s pilot projects were in Halifax and Northampton counties in northeastern North Carolina.
“Clean energy investment was some of the most significant investment that many rural counties have seen in decades, and I wanted to, to whatever degree that I could, influence that investment so that it could sort of do more in those rural communities,” Othow said.
Several of the farmers Othow worked with were growing older, with their children or younger family members uncertain about pursuing a career in farming. At the same time, the landowner wanted to keep the property.
Some were leasing their land to other farmers to grow soy beans, tobacco or cotton. But those leases didn’t offer anywhere near the $750 per year per acre Othow said they earn by working with EnerWealth, with the solar agreements spanning at least 35 years.
“That is long enough to allow them to pass that land from one generation to the next and also to generate enough income so that there’s savings and wealth creation,” Othow said.
Othow also sees the carbon reduction targets set out in last year’s House Bill 951 as an opportunity for the state’s agricultural communities. That legislation requires Duke Energy to submit to the N.C. Utilities Commission a plan that would see it reduce carbon emissions 70% from 2005 levels by 2030, with the state’s largest power generator reaching net zero by 2050.
‘Maximum profitability’ without headaches
In Bladen County, Barnhill remains deeply skeptical about climate change. He readily acknowledges that temperatures are growing warmer and that snow doesn’t fall in winters like it used to, but he attributes it to climate cycles more than man-made global warming.
Still, Barnhill is openly excited about the benefits solar energy offers him and other farmers. His uncle just installed a solar farm of his own, and Barnhill routinely gets call from other blueberry farmers who are interested in putting panels on their land.
He is particularly intrigued by the potential for battery storage to provide power during periods when the sun isn’t shining as frequently, saying, “It’s going to be awesome.”
The solar panels sitting in the middle of woodlands where Barnhill used to hunt for deer and turkey now offers revenue diversification.
Over the last seven years, Barnhill said, labor costs and keeping up with regulations have cut into his profit margin. One year, a hail storm wiped out the entire crop.
Despite those and other uncertainties, the check from Cypress Creek comes every month. And it will for the duration of the 40-year lease.
“I look at it as the maximum profitability with the least amount of headaches,” Barnhill said.
Like many farmers, Barnhill’s children are pursuing careers that don’t involve the family farm. But Barnhill’s cousins are poised to become the fifth generation of his family that will grow blueberries on the land.
Barnhill hopes they keep the solar panels, possibly even beyond the initial 40-year lease.
“If they get it rid of it, they’re crazy,” he said. “And I don’t think they’re that crazy.”
This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
Duke Energy initiative looks to add diverse businesses to the solar energy industry
Duke Energy initiative looks to add diverse businesses to the solar energy industry
Ken Lemon
June 20, 2022·3 min read
On a quiet, rural road in Halifax County, farmer Haywood Harrell starts a new day.
“It’s a heritage,” Harrel told Channel 9′s Ken Lemon. “I grew up a sharecropper.”
He has thousands of acres waiting for new seeds.
“It’s a struggle out here,” Harrell said.
ALSO READ: Huge solar project will help local power company lower carbon footprint
Harrell’s fields and tractors don’t immediately bring to mind electric cars and solar power, but he says the thing he wants to plant most is a resource sprouting big in Cabarrus County: solar farms.
Power suppliers tell us Harrell could make as much as $700 an acre with a solar farm compared, to the $35 to $50 an acre from crops.
Harrell is banking on a new program backed by Duke Energy called the Diversity in Clean Energy initiative, or DiCE, to help.
“It’s always good to have something you can bank on,” he said.
The program is designed to create a database of Black and diverse businesses that can contribute to what is expected to be a booming industry, especially in North Carolina, which is one of the leading states for clean energy production.
The list of people the program is looking to engage includes not just energy suppliers, but contractors, logistics, transportation and everyone else it takes to get power from the farm to homes and businesses.
READ MORE: More solar farms could be coming to North Carolina
Big names are backing the initiative including Microsoft, GM, Kroger and T-Mobile.
“We all came together and said this issue is bigger than just a corporation. It’s something that impacts all communities,” said Irvine Sloan, Duke Energy’s vice president for strategic account management.
He said the corporations have not just created a database with names of diverse businesses in clean energy, they’re also networking and marketing for them.
“Where we want to get to is where diverse owned businesses are part of our working economy,” Sloan said.
They want to help smaller suppliers with Black ownership attract attention and compete for contracts.
“We want to create a platform to continue to grow and continue our span to grow over years and years to come,” Sloan said.
That’s big for Ajulo Othow, owner of EnerWealth Solutions, a solar provider in North Carolina.
“Too often we are the last to know or the last at the table,” Othow said.
READ ALSO: Solar construction in NC hits lowest level in 7 years
Othow is president of the board of directors of the Black Owners of Solar Services. She said DiCE is designed to allow businesses that can often go overlooked to be seen and included in an industry with few Black faces.
“There are thousands of solar businesses across the country, and right now our network consists of about 50 businesses,” she said.
All that corporate effort ends up impacting farmers like Harrell.
He is working to make space on his land where Othow can put solar panels on his farm. That will give the former sharecropper the money he needs to keep his family tradition going and growing.
“I want this product to keep going,” he said.
The DiCE database is set to launch in the late summer or early fall of this year.
(SEE SOURCE WSOCTV FOR VIDEO: The push for more solar farms in North Carolina)