On a recent afternoon, Robards Mayor David Sellers steered his pickup truck along narrow country roads around his town, past field after field of black solar panels, numbering in the thousands.
On yet more fields, metal frames stood in preparation for installation of thousands more.
“I never anticipated this many panels,” said Sellers, 70, who has lived his whole life in the little town that was once surrounded by farmland.
When solar farms were first being discussed several years ago, he said, “For me and a lot of citizens, we thought, solar panels—big deal, a field of solar panels.”
Now, the scale of two big solar farm projects is becoming evident. National Grid Renewables is developing its 1,500-acre Unbridled Solar Project immediately south of Robards—which will include 400,000 solar panels, according to the company—while NextEra Energy Resource’s two-phase Sebree Solar project will encompass 2,100 acres just to the north and west of Robards.
Those 3,500 acres are the equivalent of 2,651 football fields.
And the building permits issued for their construction are the biggest in Henderson County’s history: $186.5 million for Unbridled Solar, $119.8 million for the first phase of Sebree Solar.
“I don’t think people knew how massive they would be until they started installing them,” Sellers said. “You see these fields that are full of solar panels. People didn’t anticipate how big this project would be, and it just seems to keep growing.”
In places, “It’s as far as you can see,” he said. “Aesthetically it’s a problem.”
For folks who live in the countryside just outside town, “They’d rather look out at a field of corn than a field of solar panels,” he said. At least one resident said she has sold her home as a result and is moving to the other side of the county.
‘I’m heartbroken’
Keri Nicholson, who lives on Mehl Cates Road, said a solar array is coming her way. “They’ve not built near my home yet, but they’re going to build directly across the road from my house, less than 500 feet from my front door. I’m heartbroken. I’m absolutely heartbroken.
“I’ve lived here 20 years,” she said. “I’m devastated. I don’t know what to do, whether to move. I would almost feel guilty selling my house with a nice country view to someone when an industry is going to be built right across the street.”
Nicholson has watched the process of solar arrays being constructed. “In the beginning phases it just looks like they’re destroying property,” she said of the site preparation. “It gets a graveyard look”—what she calls the rows of posts that will hold the solar panels because they remind her of rows of tombstones—“then it goes all black” as the solar panels are installed.
“The prison fencing around it,” she called the tall security fences topped with barbed wire. “They planted trees around it (for visual screening) and every sixth one is dead. They’re tearing up the roads. I feel Henderson County has pretty much thrown Robards to the wolves.”
There are concerns about property values for rural homes that now have solar panels as neighbors. “When the solar companies came in, they said the land would not be devalued,” Sellers said. “You can’t tell me” that houses sitting next to a solar farm haven’t been impacted in value.
“I’m fortunate enough that I live in town”—on a street where he has lived most of his life, the three-term mayor said. “I don’t walk out my door and see panels,” though he can glimpse them in the distance.
But other homes on the edge or just outside town face row after row of solar panels.
Big money
On the one hand, Sellers understands that landowners are being paid more money to sell or lease their land than they could raising crops or leasing it out to farmers.
“The amount of money these solar companies are paying to buy or lease land” is reportedly very substantial, Sellers said. “It seems to be several times what they could get leasing” it for farming.
He’s not sure even he could have resisted the temptation. “I don’t have 100 acres of land,” the retired schoolteacher said. If he did, “I’d like to say in my heart, no,” that he wouldn’t lease it to a solar company, “because I (would) love the land and love the farm.” But he said it’s hard to know for sure.
He knows of some farmers and landowners who refused to lease or sell.
“This was such a pretty field right here,” Sellers said, driving past a tract where solar panels are being installed. The owner “used to run cattle on it, cut hay off it. I think he regrets leasing it. He says, ‘I have only my right hand to blame’” for signing the lease.
Local oversight
Some elected county officials say outright blocking the solar farms would have been outside their authority.
“There’s been comments from people saying, the county should do this or the county should do that,” Magistrate Taylor Tompkins, whose district includes the greater Robards area, said. “It’s not our job to tell private citizens what they can or can’t do with their private properties. The county can’t lord over them and say you can’t rent to these people.”
“I hope we remember we are an agricultural community,” Tompkins said, but added: “Just because I’m not in favor of them (solar arrays) at this volume doesn’t mean I’m in favor of government overreach.”
“Taylor’s dead on,” Henderson County Judge-Executive Brad Schneider said in a text message while on vacation during fall break. “In our deliberations about the solar ordinance and these facilities in general, property rights were a huge consideration. We put lots of restrictions on operators in the ordinance to force them, within reason, to be good neighbors. But banning solar farms altogether was never something we thought the county should do.”
“It’s my job as magistrate to represent everyone equally regardless of my personal opinion,” Tompkins said. “I’m doing my best to hear everyone’s grievance and hold the solar companies responsible for what they’re supposed to be doing.”
Tompkins said he, Schneider and County Engineer Nick Stallings are preparing to meet with one of the solar companies concerning complaints about road damage blamed on heavy trucks hauling materials to solar sites.
“We’re highly engaged with managing this the best we can within the restraints of the law,” Tompkins said. “We’re doing absolutely the best we can with the situation we have. Hindsight is always 20/20. It’s why it was important to be engaged. The time for people to voice opinions is when it was before (the) planning commission.”
In the wake of the arrival of the two large solar farms, Tompkins said he, Henderson City-County Planning Commission Executive Director Brian Bishop and others “completely re-did the (county) solar ordinance” in hopes of limiting further solar development here, such as requiring future solar arrays greater than one acre to be located on land that’s zoned industrial with a site plan reviewed and approved by the planning commission that meets tougher new criteria.
With that in mind, Sellers said, the Robards City Comission recently voted to request that the planning commission limit zoning within the Robards city limits to either residential or agricultural in hopes of warding off any further solar panel installation in the town.
“There’s a lot of areas of fields in the city limits” that theoretically could be outfitted with solar panels, he said.
“My biggest concern is, I don’t want that expansion to come onto the city of Robards,” said Ed Carroll, a commissioner who lives on Railroad Street in the middle of Robards. “The rural countryside has always been part of the nature of Robards. What it’s been replaced with is nothing less than industrial sprawl.”
“I’m not saying we need to take up arms on this,” Sellers said. “But where is this going to stop? I think not just Robards, but the citizens of the county need to be concerned about when it’s going to stop.”
Companies respond
The Hendersonian reached out to the two solar companies.
National Grid shared an American Clean Power Association document that asserts that in most states, solar farms require less than 1-2% of existing farmland.
In Henderson County, the 3,500 acres being used for the National Grid and NextEra projects amount to 2.1% of the estimated 169,200 acres planted in corn and soybeans in 2020, as reported by the USDA. (That excludes the pasture land used to raise an estimated 7,500 head of cattle that same year, for which acreage figures aren’t available.)
But for those living in and near Robards, it appears that the portion of land being consumed for solar is vastly greater than that.
“It feels like the entire city of Robards is solar panels,” Sandra Thompson, who lives on Coal Mine Road, said. “You can’t get away from them.”
Thompson said she and her husband, Paul, live in his parents’ former home, which she fell in love with at first sight. They’ve lived there since 1994. Thompson, a Master Gardener, said she would get aggravated when farmers would spray nearby fields on windy days and the drifting herbicides would kill some of her plants.
“But I had a beautiful view,” she said. “I grew up on a farm. Now all I have is all these panels. I can sit in my kitchen and see them.”
While the loss of cropland indisputably impacts revenue potential for farmer-tenants, National Grid spokeswoman Lindsay Smith said the solar projects provide the landowners “a diversified, predictable” income.
“It’s significantly higher than cash-renting” to a farmer, Tompkins, the magistrate, said. “I’ve heard some astronomical values.”
Indeed, National Grid alone says it will have a $42 million economic impact during its first 20 years of operation here, much of it in land leases.
But that isn’t necessarily consoling to neighbors of the solar panels. It “is all for the almighty dollar,” said Rebecca Vincent, who lives on Mehl Cates Road and feels betrayed by landowners who sold or leased to a solar company. “It’s not neighbors looking out for other neighbors.”
“If you’re leasing property, you like it,” Tompkins said of the solar projects. “If you aren’t, you hate it. There’s not much middle ground.”
National Grid’s Smith said the Unbridled project will have other benefits, such as paying $11.4 million in tax revenue over the first 20 years of operation and eliminating 4.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over 20 years compared with generating electricity by burning fossil fuels.
At an event here in September, National Grid pledged $800,000 in charitable giving in Henderson and Webster counties over 20 years through donations to the nonprofit Community Foundation of Henderson.
All of Unbridled’s 160 megawatts of electricity will be sold to Big Rivers Electric Corp., which supplies power to Henderson-based Kenergy Corp.—the power company for thousands of rural residents in Henderson County and beyond.
And National Grid’s Smith disputed a concern expressed by some residents that the thousands of acres of black solar panels would make Robards hotter. “The concept that solar panels increase the temperature is not accurate,” she stated.
Likewise, NextEra spokeswoman Amanda Paez in an email said Sebree Solar “will bring numerous economic benefits to the community, including millions of dollars in additional tax revenue which can be used to enhance schools, roads and essential services.”
She said her company looks for “locations with good solar resources, land availability, proximity to transmission and landowners who are interested in participating in the project. All the land agreements for our solar projects are entered into on a voluntary basis.
“We understand the impact our operations have on local infrastructure, particularly roads. In the coming months, we will be working closely with local communities to repair roads used for construction activities,” Paez said.
While Sellers asserted that “land is the only thing they’re not making more of,” the Clean Power Association declares that a solar farm can be decommissioned after 30 years and restored as farmland, whereas land developed for commercial or residential subdivisions is permanently lost.
But 30 years is a long time if you don’t like living next to a solar farm.
“In no way do I think it’s a positive choice for the community,” said Vincent, who said solar panels will be installed right across Mehl Cates Road from her home. “… We’ve definitely been thrown under the bus.”