350 Solar Projects Proposed to Takeover Pennsyvania

[Old Biker]

As someone that was born and raised in Pennsylvania and has a family heritage in that state going back to the 1700's it breaks my heart to see all that productive farm land replaced with ugly solar panels.

What is worse is that I have ancestors that lived, fought and died there during the civil war as well during other battles, in order to protect the rights of their families as well as their neighbors.

Now the state is about to be totally taken over by money hungry schemers that want to take away the land needed to grow food as well as land where battles were fought and replace it with solar panels that contain toxic chemicals and are knows to start fires.

Here is an excerpt from a news article.

Some communities have already begun to fight. In Mount Joy Township, Adams County, a group of 60 people hired a lawyer to contest a conditional use permit for a 75-megawatt solar field. Hearings have been ongoing for months, and are scheduled through January 2021.

The Brookview Solar project that Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources plans to build along Baltimore Pike, southeast of Gettysburg, has been in the works for a few years. The company is leasing 1,000 acres and plans to build on about half the area. Some of the 18 landowners leasing to the project signed contracts in 2017.

But it came as a shock to some who didn’t sign leases.

Todd McCauslin said the “nightmare hit” when he and his family came back from a vacation in Florida last December to find a note on their garage door.

“That’s how we found out initially that this was even going on. We had no clue,” he said.

McCauslin and other opponents say they’re concerned about the solar plant’s impact on property values and local wildlife. They fear it will cause problems with stormwater runoff. One person whose home would be surrounded by the project said it would be like living “in a prison;” another compared it to a concentration camp.

Tom Newhart, who owns a farm and a bed and breakfast that would border the proposed project, is concerned about the impact on his business and tourism.

But more important to him is that solar panels could go up on historic Civil War farmland. He said soldiers wounded in the battle of Gettysburg were cared for in homes in Mount Joy.

“I personally feel that it’s a desecration of what happened here,” he said.

Solar is a legal use in Pennsylvania, so municipalities have to allow it, but they can restrict things like size and where it can be built. There are more than 2,500 municipalities in the commonwealth, and solar requirements could look different in each one.

Mohamed Rali Badissy, a law professor at Penn State Dickinson Law who spent years working on energy matters at the U.S. Department of Commerce, said there’s no set guidance for how communities should zone solar.

“Internationally, domestically — there are no standards in this segment yet,” he said.
Badissy and a team are reviewing 2,000 zoning laws from Pennsylvania municipalities to see how they’re handling solar. They’re about halfway through, and so far, only about 9 percent mention solar. About 5 percent have regulations for utility-scale projects.

Badissy says that means solar development is still a largely undefined activity in the state.

Of the 368 solar plants in service and planned for Pennsylvania in the regional electric grid’s New Services Queue, more than 200 were added this year. About half of those have been added since September.

[FTW]

Here is a link to a petition to help the group of residents fight against the solar project in Mt. Joy, PA.

Their petition has the following statement.

"Although big brother solar wants everyone to believe they have been completely transparent and communicative with the local community, adjacent landowners did not even receive a project brochure from NextEra, until July 3, 2020, which was 6 months into these formal quasi-judicial township hearings...

Residents for Responsible Solar and Agriculture will continue to fight this solar sham and press on, even if that means taking up this land-use matter to Appeals Court.

This Brookview Solar application is both incomplete and woefully irresponsible for Mt Joy Township. Although Penn Gate Farms and Vice-Chair Supervisor Updyke reportedly hope to get rich off the backs of local tax payers and residents that actually reside here, we simply cannot afford to destroy our "rich history and rural character" for future generations to come..."

Click here to sign the petition while it is still active.
https://www.change.org/p/mount-joy-town ... fb1c3096ce