Colorado’s Mesa County worked hand to balance diverse interests and values when writing codes governing utility-scale solar. The work was quick, the result a success  — for now.

 

by Allen Best

For three years, Rhiannon Lawson and her husband, Jason, traveled across 40 states and five Canadian provinces before choosing to create a home and raise their boy in Colorado’s Mesa County.

The attraction?

“Well, first off is the sun,” said Lawson on a sunshine-splashed day in early June.

Lawson was looking out the 10-by 12-foot north-facing window of her family’s small house near Palisade. The landscape she and her family see is both sparse and dramatic. The small house sits on the side of a hill. Below is a thinly vegetated plain, a sort of fishbowl or amphitheater covered with cheatgrass and other vegetation that can survive on the sparse precipitation received there, just 10 inches annually. Beyond are the lush green orchards of peaches, pears, and plums irrigated by water from the Colorado River. The Book Cliffs, De Beque Canyon and Roan Plateau lie farther away.

The Lawsons grew up in western Washington where, she reported with authority, it rains nine months of the year. “It’s like the Prozac capital of the world. It’s just real dark.”

That same sunshine that made Mesa County stand out, though, makes it attractive to solar developers. The first solar application in the fishbowl below the Lawsons’ house arrived in 2018, two years before they built their house.

A solar developer named Pivot Energy had an option on land in the fishbowl and gained county approval for a two-megawatt solar project. It then decided it couldn’t make the economics work at that size. Pivot Energy consigned the rights to another developer, One Energy, which gained approval from Mesa County in November 2023 for a larger 4.5-megawatt project with 11,000 photovoltaic panels.

The Lawsons opposed that project, protesting the visual intrusion 200 vertical feet below their deck. They argued it would displace elk that gather during winter. Other neighbors also strenuously objected.

The neighbors made the case that the land-use regulations were somewhat vague regarding energy sources.

In response, the Mesa County Commissioners in January adopted a six-month moratorium on new utility-scale solar installations. The moratorium did not include residential.

This story won’t end with everybody happy in a kumbaya moment. The takeaway — at least for now – is that compromises were struck and Mesa County adopted new regulations governing new installations of solar and also other energy developments. This was done by May 2, remarkably in fewer than four months.

Mesa County’s work should be understood in the context of a dramatic shift in energy generation as Colorado retires all of its coal-fired power plants in little more than the next six years. New gas generation will be coming on line, but even more will come from wind and solar coupled in many cases with batteries.

A decade ago solar provided very little of Colorado’s electricity and was almost entirely confined to rooftops and relatively small solar projects of a few acres or less. Largely because of lobbying by solar advocates in 2016-2018, the amount of utility-scale solar generation surged in 2023. (See graph above).

This is just the beginning. Modeling conducted for the Colorado Energy Office points to a rapid growth in overall generating capacity from 15 megawatts to 25 gigawatts from 2019 to 2034. Most of that will be in wind and solar.

“It’s a good time to be a solar installer, to be a solar developer,” said Mike Kruger, the chief executive of Colorado Solar and Storage, in an April interview. “There’s a ‘gignormous’ market in Colorado. It’s heavily competitive, but it’s a big market.”

Mesa County’s new regulations are part of the work by local governments in Colorado to prepare for what lies ahead. Many have already adopted regulations, but some are still to come. They vary greatly.

Kelly Flenniken, the executive director of Colorado Counties, Inc., the non-profit consortium of county governments, emphasizes that “one size does not fit all in Colorado.”

The counties “value that autonomy” and want to create regulations that respect their community values while looking at the larger picture, she says.

A bill as originally written for introduction in Colorado’s 2024 legislative session would have created a statewide template. It was watered down substantially before introduction. Now a law, SB24-212 requires state assistance to counties in helping create land-use regulations governing renewable energy, if the local governments request it. The law also requires the Colorado Energy Office to complete a study by September 2025 to evaluate local government processes for the siting of renewable energy and energy transmission.

This is in line with what Colorado Counties, Inc. wanted. It allows counties to become thought leaders, to share what they’ve come up with.

The state study is to become a repository of best practices. Or, from the perspective of the solar industry, some worst practices, too.

But whether in uber-liberal Boulder County or arch-conservative Mesa County, the changing land use produces tensions that must be explored and balances that must be struck. In many eyes, Mesa County struck the right balance – at least for Mesa County.

Fourth in area among Colorado’s 64 counties Mesa County has 158,000 residents, fewer than Fort Collins. But 72% of the land is federal. Grand Junction, the county seat, veers slightly liberal. Unincorporated areas veer deeply conservative.

Private property rights vs. community concerns are central to the tensions about regulations governing renewable energy. Mesa County veers hard in one direction. “This is my property, don’t tell me what I can do,” is how Rhiannon Lawson summarizes the prevailing viewpoint. A county planner confirms that.

A strong community desire to maintain agriculture also rises high in Mesa County’s community concerns, as was reflected in a recently adopted master plan. In the county’s calculus, private property rights will triumph over ag preservation, but there are efforts to cater to both. In solar, the concept is called agrivoltaics, a relatively recent wrinkle in the solar story.

The inadequacy of Mesa County’s regulations quickly became apparent after the Lawsons and their neighbors made their unhappiness known about the project proposed for their exurban neighborhood.

Sean Norris, the county’s planning manager, was charged with managing the process. Public engagement was the given. Bringing community members, business interests and the solar industry to the table was required. In a May interview, Norris described — perhaps facetiously — his overarching goal once the regulations were adopted.

“If everyone was mad, then I must have found the right compromise in the middle, because no one got what they wanted,” he said. “That included the commissioners. It included the public. It included industry.”

Norris saw part of his work to cull emotional reactions, as real as they might be, and hew as much as possible to the concrete.

“You cannot codify emotional issues: ’I have lived here all my life and I don’t want to see that there, because it’s going to destroy the view of that rabbitbrush that I have right out my window, or this mountain range, or that elk herd,’” he said.

Some people wanted no solar projects within a five-mile radius of any residential structure.

“Well, that effectively would be a prohibition on solar in the county, on any private land,” Norris said. “If you stopped any development because it interfered with somebody’s pre-existing viewshed, nothing more would get built.”

Also important in drawing up regulations is discarding loose statements open to broad interpretation. His goal: “something that you can measure and write into a code that you can enforce.”

In overseeing this process of creating new rules, Norris saw need to examine the narratives. Was there factual basis for the stories that were told?

“If the public is opposed to something, they will easily find narrative on the internet from other people who were opposed to something, and they create their own narrative and back it up with facts by something that someone else wrote on the internet,” he said.

“It took a considerable amount of work to check sources back several layers deep, to try to find where some pertinent kernel of information may have come from originally.” Industry, he added, would do the same thing, if not to the same extent.

Industry most of all needed consistency and predictability. And Mesa County’s interest in preserving agriculture took Norris to a study of agrivoltaics. If somebody said they wanted to install solar while maintaining agricultural productivity, they had to show how that would be done.

In explaining Mesa County’s interest in agrivoltaics, Norris notes rising temperatures in western Colorado could endanger fruit production. Agrivoltaics are seen as a way to diminish the risk.

”Well, if you could have a peach crop with a solar apparatus and generate enough power off of that solar apparatus to run your packing plants and things like that, that’s awesome. Let’s not constrain them with setbacks from specific roads or building structures.”

In July, Talbott Farms, the biggest orchard operator in the area, announced it had received a $700,000 grant to defray the full cost of an agrivoltaic system it plans amid its peach orchards near Palisade. See The Daily Sentinel story of July 4.

The new energy code amendment to county regulations was written with the idea of equal applicability across the county, whether to the corn fields near Fruita, the alfalfa pastures near Mack, or the fruit orchards of Palisade.

“If you can demonstrate to the county that you are both maintaining productive agriculture and you’re generating electricity to be sold into the grid, you qualify for agrivoltaics,” he said.

Applicants who don’t convince Mesa County of their agricultural components don’t quality for agrivoltaics and must then go through the energy generation production and approval process.

While the emphasis in this new amendment is on solar, it would also apply to other forms of energy production: hydropower, wind energy, geothermal, coal, even nuclear. Oil and gas as a feedstock for power generation facilities are also covered.

“Obviously, (solar) is currently the biggest player on the block in terms of interest and demand,” Norris said. “But the code was written to manage all of that, so we had a skeleton to come back and put meat on later if we need.”

Reared in Golden, Norris was a geologist by training. He is comfortable on horseback. He chased cows in the Bijou Creek drainage of northeastern Colorado, but by 1984 was on Colorado’s Western Slope. There, he worked for Chevron for 20 years, mostly in the Piceance Basin. He was on a global team called Environmental, Social, Health Impact Assessment.

His work for Chevron included impacts to school districts.

“The word impact brings an automatic social picture to mind that says that’s a bad thing,” he points out. “The impact to a school district of hundreds of thousands of dollars or a $5 million grant to build a county road could be a very good impact,” he says.

“Having worked in the oil-and-gas industry for 20-some years, I know that those people care more about their environmental impacts than maybe the people that are watching out over them. They’re very careful about what they do. They’re passionate about what they do. And they’re passionate about where they work and live.”

It was through this work that he was persuaded to join the Mesa County planning staff. He never took a class from a professor of planning. He’s not embarrassed by the fact. He might even be proud.

The specifics of what Mesa County came up with sound like those of most planning documents: almost painfully dull. For example, solar projects must seek to be within a fire district, not that the PV installations are likely to produce fires. The stakeholders just agreed it was a good idea.

Visual intrusions, though, are a much more difficult beast. In the case of the solar farm to be built by Pivot Energy at the foot of the hill where the Lawsons have their 20-acre parcel cannot easily be concealed except by perhaps a row of 80-foot trees. And since the site has no water and 80-foot trees take a long time to grow, there’s relatively little that can be done.

As a practical matter, nearly every solar project will be built relatively close to a transmission line. Transmission can cost $1 million a mile to build. The county code makes no attempt to tell solar developers where to build.

“It would be poor form on my part to think that I am such a wealth of knowledge that I could tell industry where the best places to build are because of what I want, not what they need. So, when we produced this amendment, I made sure that we didn’t interject something into the code based on staff’s thought process vs. what industry actually knows and what the residents actually expect.”

Of Colorado’s 64 counties, 19 counties had no land-use codes specific to ground-mounted solar as of November 2023, according to a report published in April 2024 by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Colorado Agrivoltaic Learning Center.

The remaining 39 had documented solar land-use regulations Some of these regulations were inherent in the 1041 regulations that allow local governments to identify, designate, and regulate areas and activities of state interest through a local permitting process.

Among the takeaways:

• Solar plant permitting requirements across Colorado are county-specific and highly variable.
• 89% of installed solar capacity can be found in 45% of the counties, and each of these counties has policies in place. Typically, counties have worked to create regulations once applications have arrived, triggering strong community responses or exposing clear gaps in the existing land-use codes.

The regulatory landscape, the report added, is “continually evolving.”

A case in point was Mesa County, which had a solar development moratorium in place when the report was being researched. Two other counties, Fremont and Saguache, have added moratoria in recent months.

For the first decade or so of the solar era in Colorado, the primary emphasis was on rooftop solar. Municipal and county governments commonly assigned permitting fees that, along with other “soft” costs, could constitute 40% of the total cost of a rooftop solar installation, according to Rebecca Cantwell, who was with the Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association, the predecessor to COSSA, for more than seven years, five of them as executive director.

The organization encouraged more friendly municipal codes through a program called Solar Friendly Communities that was embraced by 18 cities and counties with a combined population of three million.

Pivotal in Colorado’s embrace of solar was Xcel Energy’s electric resource planning that began in 2016. Cantwell recalls much lobbying by solar advocates well before the utility introduced those plans. A jaw-dropping moment came in late 2017, when Xcel revealed the prices that had been bid for both wind and solar. Prices for wind, especially, were undercutting fossil fuels, and solar wasn’t far behind.

That sent a clear signal to county governments: Get ready.

Some had been grappling with the issue long before. In the sunshine-flooded San Luis Valley, Tesserra Solar had proposed a 145-megawatt solar project in Saguache County in 2009, provoking community concern. The company withdrew the application in 2011.

In 2017, Adams County may have been the first county to adopt regulations in response to the coming wave of utility-scale solar applications.

Boulder County adopted its first set of regulations in 2009, then in 2011 added regulations to address small to medium-sized installations. In 2018, Boulder County adopted regulations to address large-scale solar projects. The county by then had embraced a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030 as compared to 2015 levels, and solar energy had been identified as a “viable and efficient renewable energy resource.”

But while up to 50% of rooftops might be viable for solar, the regulations addressed utility-scale solar projects. Even so, as a staff report noted, there were any number of factors to consider when discussing large-scale solar installations, including the high cost of land and land leases in Boulder County.

Weld County, a neighbor to Boulder County but very different in its outlook, adopted regulations in 2021. Much of the state’s oil and gas production occurs there, between Firestone and Greeley. The county viewed it as just another energy extraction. The solar industry does not see the regulations adopted by Weld as onerous.

The Weld County 2021 regulations align solar with those governing wind farms. The regulations recognize distinctions in the sizes of solar projects. Today, reports Maxwell Nader, the planning manager, applications are commonly for 1,000 acres and more, in one case reaching 4,000 acres. (See “Agrivoltaics becoming part of Weld County proposals”).

Other counties in northeastern Colorado dominated by agriculture have produced codes the solar sector finds acceptable. They include Morgan, Logan, and Phillips counties, whose county seats, respectively, are Fort Morgan, Sterling, and Holyoke.

Washington County, however, produced regulations that solar companies see as confusing or worse, when considering potential solar projects in the agricultural lands around Akron. Those regulations seem to require photovoltaic panels be painted to mask the black-blue hues of the silicon. Painting them gray or some other color deemed non-obtrusive would diminish the productivity of the panels. Study them for yourself.

Jeremiah Garrick, the manager of community engagement and strategy for the Colorado Solar and Storage Association Institute reports solar companies who have studied the regulations have decided it’s better to go elsewhere.

“I have had multiple developers coming to me trying to get clarifications on what it means, and when I have tried to get clarification from the county, it has been difficult to get an answer,” he says.

“I don’t know of any (solar developers) who have even applied for a project in Washington County.”

Washington County also requires setbacks of 1,000 feet from any property zoned for residential use and 200 feet from all property lines. The setback for wind is a mile.

The same county has bonding requirements solar developers see as onerous. All the bond must be secure in advance instead of incrementally through the life of the project. Solar developers see this requirement as misplaced, as the cost of decommissioning a plant is not necessarily known 20-30 years in advance.

Other counties so far have not taken the same approaches.

Also problematic, but in a different way, have been Delta County’s regulations. As currently written, the regulations require the solar developer to have a power-purchase agreement in place with a utility. Solar developers think that has the cart before the horse. They need agreements in place before they can sell the power. The solar industry hopes Delta County will modify its rules.

In central Colorado, Chaffee County has had a moratorium on solar development in the Salida-Buena Vista area since 2020, the longest of any in Colorado. It gets extended every six months. Garrick said the solar sector expects to see some movement on the draft regulations before the end of the year. Rio Blanco County, on the Western Slope, which has had a moratorium since August 2023, expects to get something ready in March 2025.

Standing out has been San Miguel County, which adopted a solar moratorium in May 2023. The solar industry sees their proposed regulations as among the most challenging in Colorado, says Garrick.

“Their strategy with that code is to put the full burden on the developer to provide that they are mitigating any and all impacts from the development,” he says. “The regulations have 44 pages.”

San Miguel’s regulations were triggered by a proposal for a 500-acre project on Wrights Mesa, near Norwood. This is on the approach to 12,618-foot Lone Cone, a dormant volcano that was part of volcanic eruptions in the San Juan Mountains that peaked 26 to 28 million years ago.

The regulations going before the county commissioners meeting in Telluride during September will require visual renderings from key vantage points. This is seen from the solar industry as very difficult, because visual impacts to viewsheds will invariably be subjective.

Other counties have moved past solar codes and are now working through regulations governing battery storage. That includes Lincoln County, on Colorado’s eastern plains. The county — it’s home to Limon and Hugo — earlier adopted regulations governing solar projects that were considered “workable” by the industry, but has now turned attention to battery storage, with an eye particularly on what safety concerns may exist.

One concern is about the risk of fire, what firefighters would need to know, what safeguards need to be put into place. The code, if approved, will require 20,000 gallon cisterns of water to be located with battery storage.

Other parts of Colorado haven’t even begun adopting regulations. That is almost entirely true in southeastern Colorado. Construction of the Colorado Power Pathway from the Lamar area to Pueblo and the possibility of other transmission projects may trigger regulations.

Ironically, while the San Luis Valley may have Colorado’s best solar asset, due to its higher elevation and sunny skies, only one of the counties, Alamosa, has adopted regulations. However, Saguache County recently adopted a six-month moratorium, with the intent of getting regulations in place within four months, as was accomplished by Mesa County.

Triggering the moratorium was an application from Horus Energy, which owns 1,000 acres close to the 280kV transmission line owned jointly by Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Xcel Energy. Horus Energy believes the line has capacity.

The Colorado Solar and Storage Association Institute is a 501(c)3 arm of the industry trade group. It has a mission of education, not advocacy. They work hand in hand, though. For example, The Colorado Solar and Storage Association, or COSSA, held community events across Colorado in the last several years. Some of the agenda has shifted to sessions about storage.

Much information can be passed around on the internet and elsewhere, and — as was observed by Sean Norris in Mesa County — this can have grains of truth. But sometimes not. That’s in part why COSSA was created: to provide accurate information. For example, Garrick says, while a great deal of solar can be expected in years ahead, Colorado will not be carpeted in solar panels.

Will Toor, the director of the Colorado Energy Office, recently predicted new solar with the capacity of 10,000 megawatts will be built in Colorado during the next 15 years. It will require between 75 and 125 square miles of land.

Sounds like a lot, but it will be less than 0.001% of all of Colorado’s land mass.

See: “How much land for wind and solar?” Big Pivots, July 15, 2024

At the COSSA Institute, Garrick offers a similar observation. Colorado will add much solar, but will not be carpeted with panels.

“There is a right place and a right-size facility for any community,” he says. “There can be compromises on the industry side to make sure that community benefits are achieved.”

But as we transition from fossil fuels to a renewable energy future, he says, it’s crucial that everyone plays their part.

“That doesn’t mean it has to be a 400-acre facility in your backyard, but that does mean that when you drive through rural Colorado you might see some solar panels sometimes. That’s probably a reasonable tradeoff.”

Everybody has a backyard, though, and every plot of land in Colorado is likely considered by somebody to be their backyard.

Or front yard, as in the case of Rhiannon Lawson in Mesa County. She has resigned herself to seeing 25 acres of solar panels from her window instead of a herd of elk during winter.

The Lawsons had worried about displacing the elk, but state wildlife biologists concluded that the elk, if displaced, will survive. And all along, she believed in the need for solar power. How could she not? Her family lives off the grid, dependent upon solar power and battery backup.

“We never wanted to stop solar plants in the first place, because we need them,” she says. “We need the electricity, and this is the Southwest. This is where we need to build them.”

Mesa County’s process, she says, was intended to produce deep thinking about the consequences.

“Because nobody in political power is really thinking about those consequences. They’re just like, ‘We have to do this and that momentum is good.’ But hold on guys.”

Some 200 people had some say or another in Mesa County’s regulations, but the core group of stakeholders – landowners, solar developers, utilities and others – was relatively small.

Meetings were cordial, says Lawson.

“There was never any anger. It was really like, ‘Have you thought about it from this perspective?’ Everybody around the table was open to compromise, really wanting to come to something that everybody was okay with, knowing that nobody was really going to be happy.”

One of her favorite people was from Pivot Energy, the company that purchased the expanded Orchard Mesa project. She says the company rep might have countered one proposed solution as cost prohibitive , but what about if it could do this?

“There was never anybody that was grumpy or mean. It was really cooperative, which is kind of amazing actually,” says Lawson.

Pivot Energy, now the owner of the Orchard Mesa solar project, agrees.

“The revised code continues to recognize real property rights and the need for energy diversification in Mesa County,” says Kyle Sundman, Pivot Energy’s senior director for project development. “None of the stakeholders got everything they wanted, but Pivot believes Mesa County ended up with a good final product.”

Mesa County is known for its enclaves of deep conservatism.

“There definitely are people here who don’t believe climate change is real and don’t believe that we should have any green energy and are very much like oil-and-gas is the way it should be, it’s the way it’s always been,” Lawson says. “I don’t think that perspective is as common as one might think in such a deeply conservative valley. From what I have gathered, most people are like, yeah, solar is great. Bring it in. It doesn’t hurt anything, doesn’t do anything bad, which is kind of misinformed as well, but it definitely does less harm than other choices.”

Balance, she believes, is the right word – finding the balance between allowing the individual with private property to use that property while not hurting the properties around them too much.

“That’s where the tension is,” she says. That’s what makes land development difficult. You will never make everybody happy.”

As for the solar project in question, Orchard Mesa, Pivot Energy expects to begin construction in early 2025 and complete it before the end of the year.