Shifting politics and on-the-ground realities are changing the conversation about solar energy in rural America — and congressional Republicans like Andy Harris of Maryland are riding the anti-solar trend.
Harris, who six years ago celebrated $270,000 in solar and energy efficiency grants to farms and small businesses in his Eastern Shore district, has switched gears. Solar energy is “undependable,” he said recently in supporting the Agriculture Department’s decision to stop supporting solar arrays on prime farmland.
The chair of the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee is far from alone. He and other Republicans have turned against solar development in farm country since the Biden administration and Democrats boosted renewable energy grants in their climate law. Republicans are following the lead of President Donald Trump, who’s deemed solar energy — along with wind energy — “the scam of the century.”
Lawmakers are reacting to a real trend. Land that used to be planted with crops is increasingly being covered by solar arrays, including in Harris’ congressional district on the Eastern Shore, a top poultry-producing area. Since 2012, the USDA said, solar panels on farmland have increased by nearly 50 percent, helping to make less land available for beginning farmers.
The American Farm Bureau Federation, the biggest lobbying group for farmers, has estimated that as much as 1.25 million acres of U.S. farmland has been converted to solar energy production, although that’s a small fraction of the 879 million acres of farmland in the country.
The evidence is clear in Harris’ district, where solar arrays now share the landscape with the long narrow barns that mark poultry farms. But if the administration’s — and Congress’ — goal is to keep solar panels from covering wide swaths of land, advocates say smaller farms like the ones Harris calls neighbors may stand to lose the most.
The debate is now pulling in the Rural Energy for America Program, established by a different name in 2002 and extended as REAP in the 2008 farm bill. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced in August that it’s cutting support for solar systems in REAP and won’t allow any USDA-funded solar projects to include components made in China or other adversarial countries.
REAP isn’t for mega-solar farms. Instead, it covers modest energy efficiency improvements on farms, in recent years shifting heavily toward small or medium-sized solar energy systems. The systems are built either on roofs — which seem less caught in the administration’s crosshairs — or on the ground.
Advocates for REAP say they’re puzzled by the new Republican skepticism because most of the program’s grants go to congressional districts represented by Republicans. That includes funding from the Democrats’ hallmark climate bill during the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act.
For the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, the Trump administration asked Congress to eliminate REAP’s $50 million in discretionary spending for all types of projects. Appropriators rejected the request in committee-passed bills, but the final versions have yet to pass.
Several Republican lawmakers have lined up behind Rollins’ solar rollback, including Agriculture Committee members Austin Scott of Georgia and Mike Bost of Illinois.
Bost said in the USDA news release that prime farmland “is too valuable for producing the food and fuel our nation depends on,” although he’s proposed legislation that would allow subsidies for projects of 1 to 5 acres if farmers take measures to protect soil health.
Scott has navigated the issue over several years, at once praising REAP — including loan guarantees and grants for solar and wind projects as an important part of the farm bill that can save energy and help boost farm income — and criticizing the conversion of irrigated farmland, at the same hearing.
Conversion of productive cropland, Scott said at a 2020 Agriculture subcommittee hearing on rural energy, “is an indication that perhaps the solar subsidies are too generous.”
A spokesperson for Scott, Hunter Kirkland, declined Thursday to elaborate on which solar projects the lawmaker believes warrant subsidies and which don’t.
‘Not a great narrative now for farmers’
Solar proponents say the real threat to farmland is residential developments, especially where land values give farmers a strong incentive to sell.
“The danger of losing this prime farmland is that they’re going to sell to a developer,” said Liz Perera, senior director of national program and policy at the Coalition for Community Solar Access.
With community solar projects — which power multiple homes and businesses — the soil stays intact and can eventually be returned to agricultural use, Perera said. The two can even be combined, but neither farmers nor the USDA have fully latched onto agrovoltaics, or solar panels that coexist with crops or livestock.
Ideally, groups said, the USDA would continue to support agrovoltaics. The American Farmland Trust, which promotes policies to prevent development of farmland, said it would continue to push for agrovoltaics to keep productive land in farming.
As much as two-thirds of U.S. farmland is likely to change hands in the next 20 years, the American Farmland Trust has said. The fight over solar energy could help determine how that land is used.
One of the hurdles for agrovoltaics is a USDA definition that calls solar energy systems industrial and commercial. That precludes farmers from receiving much technical assistance through conservation programs, said Lucy Bullock-Sieger, chief strategy officer for Lightstar Renewables, which builds community solar projects around the U.S. and promotes agrovoltaics.
Solar energy supporters have been pushing the USDA and Congress to change the definition so farmers can qualify for conservation assistance. But what previously seemed like a gray area now seems like a “hard no” at the USDA, said Bullock-Sieger, who’s also chair of the Solar and Farming Association, a trade group.
“Our farmers are very deeply worried,” Bullock-Sieger said, adding that many see solar development as one more way to keep a farm viable. “It’s not a great narrative now for farmers.”
During the Biden administration, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture highlighted research grants for agrovoltaics. The Energy Department also touted the practice.
Big questions about intentions
Rollins, in the department’s news release, didn’t mention USDA research on mixing solar energy with farming.
“It has been disheartening to see our beautiful farmland displaced by solar projects, especially in rural areas that have strong agricultural heritage,” she said.
The USDA’s announcement has created many questions about the administration’s intentions, outside organizations said.
Some of the uncertainty plays out in the program’s fine print, including how the USDA will treat loan guarantees versus grants.
The announcement said ground-mounted solar systems greater than 50 kilowatt-hours won’t qualify for loan guarantees, nor for the “priority points” used in deciding applications for grants.
The fine print matters because, as Harris noted in an Appropriations Committee markup in 2023, loan guarantees have traditionally been the bigger part of REAP.
The guaranteed loans “allow much more money to be spent in these rural areas for rural energy than a grant program,” Harris said in praising the program’s goals.
Loan guarantees give the best value for REAP money and “unleash tremendous amounts of capital into rural areas for electric supply,” he said.
A spokesperson for Harris said the lawmaker maintains his preference for loans in REAP.
“REAP was intended as a loan program, not the expanded grant program created through the Inflation Reduction Act, and the congressman supports returning it to that original purpose,” Harris’ office said in a statement.
“He applauds USDA’s action to end subsidies for solar projects on prime farmland, protecting America’s farmland for food production and future generations.”
Contact this reporter on Signal at hellmarcman.49.
