While many property owners in Mt. Pleasant have had to deal with Foxconn-related issues, farmers in nearby Paris in Kenosha County are struggling with land issues of their own.
Several companies have expressed an interest in building a large solar farm. Landowners are being offered annual leases of up to $1,000 an acre in exchange for permission to allow a company to plaster their fields with solar panels. The town is geographically well-suited for such a development because it already hosts a small We Energies natural gas-fired plant and as a result is close to a thick network of transmission lines.
Paris Plan Commission Chairman John Holloway says he has mixed feelings about installing thousands of solar panels on land that currently is farmed. "We all like the idea of green energy," Holloway says. "But what I struggle with a little bit is the fact that we're taking tillable ground out. We aren't covering up brown fields with these."
The town has worked hard to maintain a rural landscape. Holloway is a farmer.
Holloway gave an update on the project at a public meeting Tuesday night. No one in the audience spoke.
Interest in solar energy has spiked ever since We Energies said it wants to increase the amount of power generated by solar.
Holloway is predicting that Paris will eventually wind up hosting a solar farm in part because one company already has received tentative approvals from landowners who control 900 acres. The minimum amount of acreage that’s deemed necessary to make such a project viable is 700. The amount of energy generated by such a farm would be 100 megawatts.
It's no coincidence that that is the threshold written into state law for companies to avoid having to go to the locals for project approval. At that level, the permitting process becomes a state matter.
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