Solar Demonstration Farm

Roundabout Meadows is the 140-acres of land that is bisected by Howser’s Branch Drive. The triangle of land that became stranded by the installation of the Route 50 traffic circles and the building of Howser’s Branch Drive contains the Community Farm at Roundabout Meadows; the address is 39990 Howsers Branch Dr. Aldie, VA 20105.

The Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) was given the140-acres at the southeast quadrant of US Route 50 and US Route 15 known around here as Gilberts Corner by a citizen group led by Scott Kasprowicz, a former member of the PEC Board of Directors. The group, Roundabout Partners, raised the funds and purchased the property to prevent a planned development. After purchasing the land they then donated the 140 acres to the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) for conservation purposes more than a decade ago. 

Now, the farm is being used for an agrivoltaics demonstration project. The PEC is experimenting with growing crops under solar panels to determine what works and what doesn’t. A small corner of the farm has become a crop-based agrivoltaics demonstration project. They hope the combination of solar panels and vegetable farming will showcase how much-needed renewable energy can complement, not harm, agricultural lands, at a time when data centers are demanding more and more electricity.

from PEC

In 2020, the General Assembly passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which mandated a goal of 100% zero-carbon energy generation by 2045 and  2050 and prescribed develop 16,100 megawatts of land-based renewable energy by 2035 — mostly in the form of solar.  The energy needs of the Commonwealth, its businesses and its families are changing – and growing at an unprecedented rate.

Virginia is already the data center capital of the world, and the industry is exploding along with the demand for more and more electricity 24 hours a day 7 days a week needed to run them. Data centers require power all the time even when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine, requiring greater and greater amounts of solar panels, wind turbines and backup power supply and storage. 

According to the PEC Virginia has more than enough land to meet that target without threatening great swaths of farmland; however, it does threaten trees. Using a conservative metric that 10 acres of land can host 1 megawatt of solar capacity, a Nature Conservancy analysis found that the Commonwealth has 40 times more available land area than needed for solar fields, even after ruling out over 2 million acres of ​“prime conservation lands” including farmland.

Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University determined that large-scale solar today is erected on less than 1% of the state’s cropland. Under a ​“high-growth scenario,” that figure could rise to 3.1% by 2035, including 1.2% of the state’s federally designated prime farmland. Yet low-density residential development may pose a far greater threat to those spaces, according to research by the nonprofit American Farmland Trust, which advocates for ​“smart solar” that doesn’t jeopardize agricultural land.

In fact, many landowners find that renting a portion of their land to solar companies can help their farming enterprise pencil out financially, reducing pressure to sell their property to developers. An acre of land, after all, may yield hundreds of dollars if devoted to crops but thousands if leased for panels.

And yet there’s no doubt that solar has grown exponentially in the state in the last decade, and that it has disproportionately displaced farmland. Cropland makes up 5% of Virginia’s total acreage but 28% of the land area now used for large-scale solar, the Virginia Commonwealth University researchers found.

Virginia’s tree canopy has also suffered under the solar onslaught. The tree canopy has  decreased 19% from 2001-2023. The Forest Conservation Act and the Forestland and Urban Tree Canopy Conservation Plan are vital steps towards reducing deforestation, reducing tree canopy loss, and maintaining the health of our landscapes and human communities. Beyond temperature regulation, tree canopies serve as natural buffer zones, preventing polluted water from entering our rivers and streams. Tree roots stabilize soil, reduce erosion, and filter out water contaminants. 

In Virginia, the top 11 regions for forest loss were responsible for almost 40% of all tree cover loss between 2001 and 2023. Forest loss was found in predominantly rural counties. Brunswick County had the most tree cover loss at 60.7 kha compared to an average of 9.83 kha. Brunswick was followed by Pittsylvania, Halifax, Buckingham and Sussex. It turns out that all these counties were home to millions of solar panels. We had cut down trees to build solar farms.

Especially in the early years of renewable-energy construction, some companies set a poor example for responsible development, said Ashish Kapoor, senior energy and climate advisor with the Piedmont Environmental Council. ​“It was a little bit ​‘Wild West,’” he said. ​“Those early projects in 2018, 2019 — there were a lot of significant runoff issues.”

As solar fields have gone up at a breakneck pace — replacing plots of forests as well as farmland — opposition to them has also grown. Virginia localities approved 100% of solar projects in 2016, according to reporting from Inside Climate News. By 2024, the approval rate had fallen to under 50%.

Agrivoltaics — combining agriculture and solar photovoltaics — has been proposed as a potential solution, keeping  farmland in production even while it hosts solar arrays. Keeping forests alongside solar arrays is not deemed possible because of the shadowing of the solar panels by the trees.

So far the most common application of agrivoltaice has been an attempt to bring in sheep. They graze on vegetation beneath the panels and prevent the need for expensive and polluting mowers. Planting flowers in and around panels to supply honeybees and other pollinators is also popular. However, that has been perceived as more “agriwashing” than a symbiotic relationship. (Sheep were used because goats were found to climb and damage the solar panels and cows knocked them down.) Most of the solar grazing instances documented appear to be less about combining agriculture and more window dressing and saving on mowing the solar farms.

The Piedmont Environmental Council team wanted to experiment with a crop-based model because it fits better with what most farmers in the area are doing now: raising vegetables. “You want to change as little as possible for the farmer,” said Teddy Pitsiokos, who is the current manager of the farm.