Climate and conservation clash: Why this Houston County naturalist is fighting a solar farm

A Houston County naturalist is trying to stop a solar farm from being built on a 4,700-acre site directly adjoining the Oaky Woods Wildlife Management Area — a patch of land he was instrumental in persuading the state to preserve 13 years ago.

John Trussell, a 72-year-old retired probation officer, certified Georgia Master Naturalist, and longtime writer for a Georgia outdoor magazine, sits on Houston County’s planning and zoning commission.

In recent weeks, Trussell has been contacting officials and lawmakers around Georgia to sound the alarm about what he sees as a threat to the isolated group of 300 or so black bears for whom Oaky Woods is home.

“They’re kind of a remnant of the population that was there in the Pioneer days,” he told the Telegraph — and, being the only group of black bears between mountainous North Georgia and the Okefenokee Swamp, they are stranded some 150 miles from larger bear populations in either direction.

A massive solar farm right next to the bears’ primary habitat would restrict their home range, Trussell said, since male black bears roam an area up to 50,000 acres — and the Oaky Woods WMA is just 13,450 acres.

Trussell also expressed concern that soil erosion might result from developers grading the land, as is sometimes done to make land optimally flat to capture as much sunlight as possible. He also said Oaky Woods and its surrounds are home to protected species like the gopher tortoise and indigo snake, which could be threatened by development.

The Nashville-based company Silicon Ranch, one of the largest utility-scale solar developers in the Southeast, confirmed to the Telegraph that it is assessing the site for a solar farm.

The site under assessment consists of two adjacent undeveloped lots of timber land on Kovac Road currently owned by Southern Timber Consultants, a Perry-based LLC. According to county tax records, the land is currently valued at $5.7 million.

When a Telegraph reporter visited the site in September, portions visible from the wildlife management area were being clear-cut.

A spokesperson for Silicon Ranch, Rob Hamilton, said the assessment underway involves “evaluating the environmental aspects of the site, and wildlife that’s on the site,” and stressed the environmentally friendly practices his company has adopted at its other facilities.

At some of its solar farms, sheep are brought in to graze between the panels — a ‘regenerative agriculture’ technique to help prevent soil erosion and preserve biodiversity (and keep the panels clear of vegetation).

This practice is in use at another Silicon Ranch facility in Houston County, visible from I-75 south of Perry. That project has a 705-acre footprint and supplies energy to Green Power EMC, the renewable power supplier for Georgia’s rural electric co-ops.

Hamilton confirmed that the total area of the site being assessed near Oaky Woods is 4,700 acres, but said the proposed solar farm, if built, might be smaller than that footprint if the assessment finds there are buffer zones or wetlands on which solar panels could not be installed.

If a development on that land gets built and is even close to the total size of the property, it will likely be among the largest solar farms in the state.

Ted Will, the director of the Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife Resources Division, which administers the wildlife management areas, told the Telegraph he was aware of the project but that no plans had yet been submitted.

An emerging challenge for state officials, lawmakers

In recent years, the construction of large-scale solar farms in South and Middle Georgia has become a key part of the state’s energy plans — and crucial if Georgia’s coal plants are to be retired on schedule (an increasingly dicey prospect).

But the state’s solar arrays have had their critics — and their catastrophes.

Facing pressure from farmers concerned about the loss of potential agricultural land, some counties have issued temporary moratoriums on the development of new solar farms in recent years.

At one of its Georgia projects, Silicon Ranch was successfully sued by a Stewart County couple for damage to their property caused by inadequate erosion controls at the Lumpkin Solar Facility. That lawsuit made headlines earlier this year when a jury awarded the plaintiffs $135 million in damages; in October, however, a judge reduced the award to just $5 million.

In the aftermath of the Stewart County lawsuit, “EPD has stepped in and is taking a larger role in when these things are sited,” Georgia Rep. Robert Dickey told the Telegraph, adding, “I’m glad they’re taking a more proactive role.”

In recent months, state agencies and environmental nonprofits have published guides to best practices for solar siting.

Dickey said he had “some concerns” about the proposed solar farm near Oaky Woods — and that the issue is one that counties and communities across Georgia are facing.

“I’m pro-solar, solar’s great,” Dickey said. “Georgia has a good mix of solar, nuclear, and fossil fuels and renewables and others, so there’s a place for solar. But when these large projects try to get sited in our state and affect some environmentally sensitive forest areas — I know they’re buying valuable farmland in South Georgia — I’m hearing a lot of concerns from communities where because of the size or the scope of some of these solar projects are really changing some dynamics of communities.”

The representative, who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, said solar issues will be taken up in the upcoming state legislative session.

Conservation and climate at odds

Tensions between conservationists and the renewable energy industry are playing out not only in Georgia, but across the nation.

But after years of knee-jerk opposition, conservationists — increasingly conscious of the urgency of fighting climate change — are starting to “come around” on the need for more renewable energy, said Grace Wu, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara who studies the environmental impacts of renewable development.

“They’re going from saying no — they’re used to saying no — to starting to think about ‘How do we get to yes?’” Wu said.

In October, a coalition of solar companies and conservationist groups reached a landmark agreement, the product of two years of negotiations convened by Stanford University, on the need to compromise between conservation and climate goals.

At its worst, utility-scale solar can cause a raft of ecological issues, not just limited to habitat loss. Leveling large swaths of land to install photovoltaic panels can render soil “completely unusable for anything else,” Wu said.

But at the other end of the spectrum, environmentally conscious solar farms can be “in some ways even ecologically restorative,” Wu said.

Some solar farms have integrated pollinator habitats in between the panels. Others, known as agrivoltaic solar farms, use construction techniques that reduce soil compaction to allow for the land to be used simultaneously for crop growth among the arrays.

Finally, there are “brownfield” sites — solar arrays that are built in already-developed places, thus minimizing their ecological impact (as opposed to “greenfield,” undeveloped sites).

In 2014, with a background in ecology, Wu began working for the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit with chapters around the country.

At the beginning of her career, Wu says, “I took a very hardline stance on development projects” — opposing greenfield development unless it presented “a net benefit for the environment.”

“My initial understanding was that we could have it all,” she said.

At that time, this was an approach common among conservationists, she says.

“That was the message ten years ago when we were anticipating this being a problem: It’s a win-win for wind and wildlife.”

But since then, Wu said, she has been forced to change her approach.

“It used to be that the prevailing argument against large scale solar development in the desert, or in any kind of pristine forest, is that we don’t need this type of development if we can have rooftop solar or distributed energy infrastructure like canopy solar over a parking lot or over a canal or along highways, which we definitely still need to do,” she said.

But there’s a key problem with this solution: there simply isn’t enough space for those methods to be sufficient to the task of achieving America’s climate goals.

“If we maximize brownfield development — integrated urban development of solar — we still don’t have enough. The research has now honed in on this. We need every type of development as quickly as possible to be able to get a chance at 1.5 and now probably 2 degrees,” Wu said.

In Houston County, it’s not about climate change

In Georgia, a perhaps regionally specific twist to this dilemma is that, especially in the deep-red rural counties where the buildout is occurring, the discussion of solar energy does not involve much mention of climate change.

Local politicians advocating solar instead tend to speak the language of cheap electricity rates, grid resiliency, economic development, and local tax benefits — seemingly following a script that state officials have used in recent years to successfully turn Georgia into a clean energy manufacturing hub.

When the Telegraph asked Hamilton, the Silicon Ranch spokesperson, to discuss the potential project’s climate benefits, he responded, “Our company is focused on the economic development aspect of this, and traditionally that and the resiliency aspect of this source of energy has really played a bigger role in the development and operation, especially in a state like GA, as opposed to climate change and carbon.”

Silicon Ranch is heavily backed by Shell, the British multinational oil company, which owns a 45% stake in it.

For Trussell, meanwhile, this fight is about the bears — and a lifetime connection to Oaky Woods.

“This is personal for me because when I was young and very poor, I couldn’t join a hunting club and the state started leasing this property.”

It became his hunting ground. Decades later, when the landowner wanted to sell the land to a local businessman, Trussell, led the campaign to persuade the state to buy and preserve it. Later, he wrote a book about this effort, titled Saving Oaky Woods.

On a recent afternoon, he led a reporter on a hike through the patch of land over which he is an unofficial, self-appointed steward.

He said the isolation of the Middle Georgia bear population has led to inbreeding. Asked how this had been observed, he said, “Because about 8% of the bears only have one testicle. That’s a genetic defect. We know that because they’ve been studied.”

He stooped to pick up prehistoric sand dollars, 35 million years old, relics of an unthinkable past in which the Fall Line formed Georgia’s coast.

“My days are numbered,” Trussell said. “And we need to preserve our natural world where we can, because it is disappearing. I’ve seen a lot of change in my lifetime. Solar farms are one of those things that I think is hastening the transition from good to bad.”

Asked what he thought of the argument that, even if a solar farm might do damage to Oaky Woods, it might be necessary for the larger project of protecting the world’s natural resources, he responded, “All things are connected. There’s good and bad and every scenario. You have to weigh what your options are and what’s most important at the time.”