Residents in two Texas counties may soon face new renewable energy farms if local officials don’t change their tune.
Monday night (June 21 @ 6 p.m.) the trustees on the board of Troy I.S.D. can approve a tax abatement for Big Elm Solar. The solar farm will cover about 3,000 acres in Bell County, and many residents are not happy.
“This is all about the money that Clean Energy is promising the county and the school district,” said Robert Fleming, whose property would be affected by the solar farm. “It isn’t about right and wrong.”
Big Elm Solar is a joint project of High Road Clean Energy in Austin and Apex Energy from Virginia. The companies will place solar panels on about 1,400 of the about 3,000 acres under lease. The companies are seeking millions of dollars of property tax reductions from Troy ISD, having already received the tax breaks from Bell County.
Another Bell County resident, Mark Wolf, is also opposed to Big Elm Solar. “I’m a cancer survivor and have a heart condition,” he said. “We are going to be surrounded on three sides by solar panels. What is this going to do to us, our community, our neighbors?”
To the north, residents are fighting the possibility of a wind farm getting tax abatements in Jack County. County Commissioners appear set to approve abatements for the Lasso Wind, LLC wind farm on July 12 (10 am). Residents say that two commissioners are likely to file recusal affidavits because they’ve signed leases with the wind farm. That leaves 3 members of the court to vote, and at this time residents believe that 2 of them will vote for the abatements.
Roby Christie is a long-time resident of Wichita Falls who owns land in Jack County. He recently expressed some of the reasons why he is opposed to the new wind farm in an op-ed:
I am very concerned with the expansion of wind farms in Jack County as well as neighboring Montague and Clay counties.
Property owners (and their neighbors) face multifaceted and considerable issues when they lease their land to wind farms to build and operate their skyscraper-ish turbines.
Wind farms are not environmentally friendly to land or to nature. For example, the excavation of leased land to install and support wind farms permanently alters that property’s landscapes, rock outcroppings and micro-environments – all of which are irreplaceable. The long-term wind farm leases do not precisely spell out, to the landowner, what the installation of these large-scale operations will entail. Such omissions can include the size and extent of the development, buildings, storage, roads, repair areas, battery storage buildings, towers, weather towers, enlargement, etc.
A number of groups have sprung up across Texas to fight wind and solar farms. Some have had remarkable success. Others, faced with counties and school boards eager for new revenue, have not been able to convince their elected officials of the disruption and harm brought by these massive industrial operations.
Local governments granting these tax abatements are one of the primary reasons that the Texas electricity market is being overrun by renewable energy generation. Since 2018, 79.3% of all new generation has been intermittent renewable energy. Only 19.1% has come from generation that can be dispatched, and all of that comes from one source—natural gas. The lack of diversity that has resulted from this overreliance on renewables has come at a great cost to Texans. Particularly the Texas who live close by the wind and solar farms and often have their lives turned upside down.
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.