Legislation pending in Sacramento targets a common conundrum in rural parts of Kern County: farmers worrying there won’t be enough water to irrigate their crops at the same time developers are looking for somewhere to put up large solar arrays.
One obvious answer — put up solar arrays on farmland that may have to be fallowed anyway — has proved harder than it might seem, partly because of a law called the Williamson Act that was designed to protect agricultural fields from non-farm development.
Assembly Bill 1156 is an attempt to address the dilemma by relaxing a requirement that farmers keep their land development-free or lose the property tax benefits they enjoy under the Williamson Act. Only farmers claiming water shortages would qualify, and solar projects are the only kind of development the bill would allow.
Though supported by big business and environmentalists alike, the proposal is not without opposition. As the bill makes its way through the state Legislature, members of California’s ag industry are lining up on both sides, for and against.
Some individual growers facing restrictions on groundwater pumping are weighing opportunities to lease their land to solar developers. Such arrangements would allow them to make money outside agriculture while helping California meet growing demand for renewable energy.
But organizations including the California Farm Bureau oppose the measure, saying it puts farmland at risk of permanent conversion to industrial use, which is part of what the Williamson Act was intended to prevent.
One point of contention is how long the solar panels will remain in place. The industry has noted solar developers will only lease the land, not buy it, and that it can later return to agricultural use.
But Director Lorelei Oviatt of Kern’s Planning and Natural Resources Department is skeptical that land converted to solar farms will ever return to conventional agriculture.
Oviatt said her position is that farmland owners who want out of their obligation to keep their property open should go ahead and pay to cancel their Williamson Act contracts with the county Board of Supervisors. She said the county sees large-scale solar development as a permanent conversion of the land.
Oviatt also notes that the bill’s financial opportunities are not endless. Limited electrical transmission capacity in the Central Valley means that, until large infrastructure investments are made, not every farmer will get a chance to cash in.
Her hesitation is shared by the California Farm Bureau, whose director of policy advocacy, Peter Ansel, said by email that the bill would violate the integrity of the Williamson Act by allowing open-space contracts to be canceled without demanding the payments that for decades have protected farmland.
Ansel also criticized the bill as being overly broad, applying to even prime farmland and lacking clear definitions of what constitutes water supply changes and commercial viability. Without such details, he said, solar development could expand from property that would be appropriate to projects he called more speculative.
“The California Farm Bureau supports fair relief for farmers facing difficult decisions due to SGMA (California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act),” Ansel wrote. “However, the bill would benefit from guardrails to prevent speculative cancellations from becoming the norm.”
A different view comes from the owner of Alliance Ag Services, local ag appraiser Michael “Mike” Ming Sr., and his son George Ming. Working with large-scale solar developers, they sign up Central Valley farmers who want to lease out their land for development of photovoltaic arrays.
Calls from interested property owners come in almost every day, said George, owner of Alliance Renewable Resources. He said part of their motivation is the fallowing of hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland expected because of SGMA.
Alliance Renewable has more than 100,000 acres in the Central Valley under contract or already being developed into solar projects, George said. He noted that about half the projects have power-purchase agreements with companies planning to build data centers that will require large amounts of energy.
One of the projects Alliance is working on is called Buttonbush, a partnership with El Dorado Hills-based solar developer Avantus. Proposed to cover a net 13,000 acres of what is now western Kern County farmland, it is planned to be California’s single-largest solar array, powering an estimated 950,000 homes. A required environmental review of Buttonbush has not yet been released for public review but is expected to soon.
George emphasized that the project isn’t intended to be around forever — that after it runs its course over 30 to 35 years, the land can return to agriculture.
Michael made the same point in an opinion piece published Wednesday in The Californian.
“This is not a land grab, or a permanent shift,” he wrote in support of AB 1156. “It’s a tool to help us all weather a major economic and agricultural transition.”
Avantus declined to comment for this story. But Policy Director Lillian Mirviss of the Large-scale Solar Association said by email the bill would help create economic opportunities for areas hit hardest by water scarcity, especially the Central Valley.
“Up to 1 million acres of land in the San Joaquin Valley will be fallowed due to (SGMA) by 2040,” Mirviss wrote. “That land is sunny and is right where the state will build out its future transmission lines for connecting clean energy to the grid. And with the property tax from solar development, the county coffers will see hundreds of millions in new revenues.”