In recent months, a proposed solar project that would rank among Vermont’s largest has had Shaftsbury residents urging their local leaders to strengthen the town’s ability to intervene when developers come knocking.
Earlier this week, some residents voiced that desire on Town Meeting Day, Vermont’s bastion of municipal democracy. Residents and town officials spent the majority of the day discussing the proposal, and when a resident proposed a motion for the town to become a formal intervenor in the forthcoming permitting process, meeting attendees voted in favor.
Residents also took a stand against the project in a voice vote — but neither of the actions are binding.
Ever since the developers, SunEast Development and Freepoint Solar, announced intentions to bring the project to Shaftsbury last December, residents have been wondering what kind of role the town would play in proceedings with the state’s Public Utility Commission, the body charged with approving or denying energy projects in Vermont.
Other than heeding the advisory votes of impassioned residents on Town Meeting Day, the town is moving ahead with another option that residents hope will give Shaftsbury more influence with the commission: an enhanced energy plan.
In 2016, the Legislature passed Act 174, which gave municipalities the option to create a document that would supplement town or city plans with detailed energy data and goals. If a town has created such a plan, the Public Utility Commission gives the town’s outlined ideas and goals “substantial deference.”
According to the law, substantial deference “means that a land conservation measure or specific policy shall be applied in accordance with its terms unless there is a clear and convincing demonstration that other factors affecting the general good of the State outweigh the application of the measure or policy.”
Otherwise, the commission would give a town “due consideration” — less legal sway.
“That’s the carrot that the state Legislature put out there for municipalities to develop these enhanced energy plans,” said Janet Hurley, planning program manager for the Bennington County Regional Commission.
In turn, such plans outline how towns intend to meet statewide energy goals detailed in the state’s Comprehensive Energy Plan.
“It establishes policy and maybe milestones, and it establishes a baseline so that a community can see what their energy demands are currently, and how they might be able to reduce them to try to meet these statewide goals,” Hurley said.
Towns use data from their regional commissions to create enhanced energy plans and complete mapping exercises to outline areas that would be optimal — or suboptimal — for the placement of energy projects, including solar. Plans can include anything from regulations that address outdoor lighting to the promotion of weatherization programs to land use planning, Hurley said.
Earlier this week, town officials in Shaftsbury contracted with the Bennington County Regional Commission to create an enhanced energy plan, a process Hurley is overseeing.
“The size of this project was kind of an eye-opener,” said Dave Kiernan, Shaftsbury’s town administrator. “We just need to have the ability to have a stronger voice when these projects come up.”
Shaftsbury hasn’t yet created a plan, in large part because Shaftsbury has wanted to support solar, Hurley said.
“They didn’t want to add any additional restrictions against it that the PUC wouldn’t add,” she said. Now, with a “very significant vocal opposition to the idea of a 20 megawatt solar array,” things have changed.
“Nobody probably even conceived of something that big when they said, ‘we don’t want to put any restrictions on solar,’” Hurley said.
Of Vermont’s 256 municipalities, only 91 have such a plan.
But increasingly, towns and cities around the state are fielding inquiries from renewable energy developers looking to build large projects within municipal lines.
In 2017, the Public Utility Commission approved the state’s largest solar project, another 20 megawatt array, in Ludlow.
It’s the only existing project in the state larger than 5 megawatts, according to Anne Margolis, deputy planning director of the Department of Public Service.
Now, Shaftsbury and Fair Haven are each fielding 20-megawatt project proposals, and developers of a separate 15-megawatt project in Brandon have a permit in hand.
And while part of lawmakers’ goal in passing Act 174 was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, towns such as Shaftsbury may begin to engage in the planning process so that, if townspeople or officials decide to oppose a project, they can.
How do the plans hold up in the Public Utility Commission process? So far, the commission has yet to rule on a project in which a municipality has created an enhanced energy plan and opposes a project, according to Margolis.
Even if a municipality doesn’t have an approved enhanced energy plan, but it does have specific language in its town or city plan that relates to energy siting, that language would be meaningful in the commission’s process, she said.
Hurley pointed to an example in which a Manchester project, which received approval from the town, was rejected by the Public Utility Commission on the grounds that it “would have an undue adverse effect on aesthetics.”
Peter Sterling, executive director of Renewable Energy Vermont, an organization that represents solar developers and others, said enhanced energy plans are “not the barrier to moving good projects forward.”
“Most of those towns work really hard with their Regional Planning Commission to get these plans certified, and once they’re certified, they usually do a reasonable job of making sure that new solar can go up in their community,” he said.
The roadblocks to getting new renewables built, as he sees it, are restrictions imposed by the Department of Public Service and the Public Utility Commission, he said.
Sterling, too, pointed to the failed project in Manchester and said the unpredictability of the commission’s process “has a real impact on Vermont meeting its climate change goals.”
“If we’re serious about taking greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere, we have to bring new renewables online to displace fossil fuels that are being burned somewhere else in New England,” he said.
Regardless of whether Shaftsbury’s enhanced energy plan would give it increased weight with the commission, the plan likely won’t be completed in time to influence the 20-megawatt project, Hurley said. She expects the plan will be completed in October, and the commission would look at the plan that’s in place when the developers file their official permit request, which is expected any day.
“There are a series of warned public hearings that need to happen,” she said. “It’s not something that you can just get done in a matter of a few months.”
Across Vermont, renewable energy siting has been a challenge, and a wide array of stakeholders — neighbors who don’t want solar in their backyard, climate change activists, environmentalists, developers — clash over whether large-scale solar developments benefit communities and whether drawbacks of the projects are outweighed by their contribution to fighting climate change.
Asked how she thinks about this debate, Hurley said the Bennington County Regional Commission won’t take a stand for or against the project. Rather, the commission will assess whether it meets the goals already outlined in the regional commission’s existing plan.
“I think what this has reinforced for citizens is that planning is important,” she said. “You need to try to anticipate all of these things, and you need to try to decide, as a community, how to address them.”