Matt Sheafer farms around 900 acres in Kankakee Township in Jasper County in corn and soybeans in what he described as “a typical Indiana farm.”
Sheafer, who’s been farming outside of Wheatfield for 10 years and farmed for 20 years in Crown Point before that, will soon house a different crop that relies on the sun to produce a yield: solar panels.
“Approximately one-third of our ground is going to go into solar and I’m going to farm around it,” Sheafer said on a recent morning.
The soil in Jasper County is sandy, he said, and every year, his crops get stressed because of drought. He uses a no-till method for farming, strip intercropping, alternating sections of corn and soybeans to maximize the amount of sunlight each crop receives.
“I kept the better ground to farm. The land that’s less productive is going into solar,” he said, adding he looks at farming as an investment. “You’re just maximizing your return on that lesser ground.”
NextEra Energy Resources is proposing a $250 million investment in Porter County through its Malden Solar project, with an estimated $52 million coming back to the county over the life of the project, an estimated 35 years.
The project, still in its preliminary stages, has yet to receive approval from the county, though NextEra is expected to ask for a tax abatement or other incentives for bringing the project here.
NextEra officials are mum on several aspects of the proposal, including who the farmers are so far who have agreed to lease their property for solar array panels or the exact location of where the panels will go, other than to say it includes land on either side of Smoke Road.
They did confirm that around nine farmers have signed on so far, with another few possibly agreeing to lease their land. They also declined to identify who the farmers who signed prospective leases are, unless the names are released during a public meeting, or how much revenue they can expect to receive.
“It’s right there along Smoke Road. That’s the meridian line,” said Matt Johnson, developer of the project for NextEra Energy, adding 80% to 90% of the land has been secured through lease agreements at about 1,800 acres, with the possibility of an additional 160 to 800 acres.
“It’s safe to say we have a project in Porter County,” added Zachary Melda, development director for NextEra, who is based in Juno Beach, Florida, the company headquarters.
Dunns Bridge Solar in Jasper County
NextEra, on its company website, touts itself as “the world leader in electricity generated from wind and solar,” with $135 billion in total assets.
On a recent morning, officials from NextEra and Northern Indiana Public Service Company, which is harvesting the wattage generated by the Dunns Bridge project, offered a tour of the Jasper County work in progress in Kankakee Township near Wheatfield, visiting different parcels of land in varying stages of completion.
That included parcels with solar array panels fully installed and others that had only the metal racks upon which they connect, all secured behind chain link fencing. NIPSCO’s R.M. Schahfer Generating Station, which is being shut down, was visible in the distance.
The Porter County project is expected to be similar in size and scope to the first phase of Dunns Bridge Solar, which should be finished by May of next year. The second phase of that project, which stretches into nearby Starke County, is expected to be complete in December 2024.
“Jasper County was always in a different position than what the Malden project would be,” said Stephen Eastridge, executive director of the Jasper County Economic Development Organization.
The Schahfer Generating Station is being shut down in stages and is expected to be out of service around 2025, according to NIPSCO communications manager Tara McElmurry. Dunns Bridge Solar, she said, is just one of the utility’s projects as the company moves away from coal to renewable energy.
The generating station, Eastridge said, provided almost 20% of Jasper County’s tax base when he started his job there in 2017.
“That retirement was a really big blow to our local government bodies,” he said. “We had real concerns about our tax base and tax rate jumps.”
And that’s where Dunns Bridge Solar comes in. The Indiana legislature sets the value of agricultural property at $1,250 per acre where the solar panels are going in, Eastridge said. That will go up considerably with solar.
“It’s about $13,000 per acre once it’s put in solar use,” he said.
The Jasper County Council, according to minutes from a March 19, 2019, meeting, approved a declining seven-year tax abatement for the first phase of Dunns Bridge Solar. The abatement, approved unanimously by the county council, has the county abating $1.4 million from a tax bill of a little more than $2 million.
By the seventh year, Eastridge said, NextEra will be paying its full tax liability.
The project, according to the meeting minutes, is expected to generate $35 million for landowners over 30 years. The estimated tax benefit to the county is projected at $24.5 million on a $300 million solar investment. Estimated annual revenue for the Kankakee Valley School Corporation is $660,000 annually, with other taxing units in the county benefiting as well.
Renewable energy in general is a hot topic, Eastridge said, and the project hasn’t gone without its critics.
“The biggest thing we come back to is, ‘How does this impact my life? What am I going to look at when I leave my driveway?'” he said, adding that makes up about 90% of the concerns he hears in the community.
The project can’t be stopped on that, Eastridge said, adding he also hears what he calls rumors based on bad science about chemicals from the solar panels leaching into the ground. People also talk about the loss of farmland.
More Top Picks Google Pixel Watch 2
“My counter argument to that is at the end of the day, if it didn’t make financial sense, it wouldn’t happen,” he said. “This is some of the least productive land we have in Jasper County.”
Additionally, he said farmers can continue farming the rest of their acreage while reaping the financial benefits of solar, income that can be spent on equipment, farm outbuildings and the like and invested back into the local economy.
“No matter what your opinion of solar or renewables is, people still want power to plug their phones in,” Eastridge said.
If or when the time comes that solar energy is no longer viable, he said, the county’s tax base will be stable and diversified by then and the county won’t “run into the same kind of cliff” it did with the retirement of the generating station.
Malden Solar’s build out will take 12 to 18 months and create 250 construction jobs, Johnson said, adding that depending on the permitting process and timelines, Malden Solar could begin operation at the end of 2024 but that could change.
“We’re still at 1% of the total farmland in Porter County,” he said, adding the project’s footprint of solar array panels and the fencing around them will be around 1,200 acres.
The ground coverage ratio, for the land under the panels, will be at 35% to 40%, he said, adding the actual footprint will be about 750 acres, “less than half of a percent of the farmland in the county.”
Malden Solar does not yet have an agreement to provide its energy to NIPSCO, which sends out requests for proposals for renewable energy projects, said Andy Campbell, NIPSCO’s director of portfolio planning and origination.
“If it’s not valuable to us for some reason, it could be valuable to someone else,” he said.
The Malden Solar project, Melda said, is within a few months of going to the permit stage with Porter County, depending on landowners, and environmental surveys are already underway.
Detractors raise concerns
Not everyone sees a promise in solar energy.
Darren Grieger lives a few miles from the Malden Solar site in Morgan Township. He’s been farming corn, beans and some livestock on the property for eight years. He took the farm over for his grandfather and his family has been farming on the same land for five or six generations.
He has “so many” concerns about the project, he said, including the infusion of government funds into green energy projects, which he called “bad business.”
Additionally, Grieger said solar farms reduce the amount of land available for farming, which could lead to an increase in production costs. He also questioned how truly green the solar panels are, from how they’re manufactured and shipped from China — officials from NextEra Energy said most of their panels come from Vietnam, though some are made in the United States — and how they’re disposed of. NextEra officials said 95% of the materials in the panels can be recycled.
The panels, Grieger said, are behind fencing so “it’s not like animals can graze” on that land. And while officials touted how the panels can be recycled, Grieger said solar energy is still a relatively new field and it could be cheaper to toss them in a landfill than to recycle them.
“It’s not going to be just Malden. It’s going to spread if this passes,” Grieger said, adding he doesn’t see any benefit to the solar farms.
“I think it’s a really inefficient way (to generate electricity) but it’s being pushed so hard by these solar companies because there’s so much government money behind it,” he said.
He expects a “domino effect” of farmers leasing their land for solar panels, lured by the promise of additional income and other farmers jumping aboard.
“Nobody wants to live next to it,” he said.
Officials don’t always welcome solar farms either.
NextEra had proposed a solar farm, dubbed Brickyard Solar, for Zionsville in Boone County, north of Indianapolis, according to published media reports. The proposal, for a 1,200-acre solar farm, straddled city limits into unincorporated Boone County, thereby requiring approval from both city and county boards.
The city’s board of zoning appeals denied a special exception request for the solar array. The county’s advisory planning commission also rejected the proposal, stating that it deviated from the county’s comprehensive plan, which said the area was supposed to stay in traditional agricultural production. NextEra subsequently withdrew its proposal about a year ago.
Robert Thompson, Porter County’s director of development and stormwater management, said in an email that the county’s comprehensive plan “does not discuss clean or green energy solutions,” and added that the plan was approved in 2002 but does not discuss that type of land use.
The county now has two small solar farms at around 10 acres each that produce about 1 megawatt each, Thompson said. One of them is west of the Sedley Road bridge just south of Indiana 130 and the other is on Robbins Road adjacent to Portage city limits.
County officials expect that, as is the case in Jasper County, NextEra will request a financial incentive for any project here.
“Most Indiana counties have negotiated economic development agreements with the solar farm developers,” Stu Summers, a consultant working with Porter County as part of the team of county staff negotiating economic development agreements for solar farms, said in an email.
“Typically, the agreements require a bond to assure that at the end of the solar panels’ useful life, the property will be returned to its original state, allowing for renewed agricultural activities. Also, counties have granted limited tax abatement in return for economic development payments from the solar farm operations.”
So far, they have not reached an agreement, Summers said, but if they do, it will require the approval of the Board of Commissioners and the County Council.
Nothing has been formally presented to the council for a tax abatement hearing, Thompson said in an email. “There have been some very preliminary discussions on an economic package but nothing has been agreed upon as of yet or drafted up in an agreement format.”
‘A little bit of a gamble’
Sheafer, the Jasper County farmer, said he was approached around 2015 by Orion Renewables, which came to the area to secure lease options for a solar project, with the goal of putting the project together and selling it. The project was sold to NextEra Energy, which is now developing it.
Sheafer, who turns 60 next month, has two adult children and neither is interested in farming. If they were, he would have been less inclined to go into solar.
“The beauty of it is as we get older, I don’t have to worry about weather because a percentage of our land won’t be cropped anymore,” he said, adding the returns on solar are roughly three times on average what he could make from farming the property.
While his property taxes will go up because of the added value of the land, NextEra Energy will pay for any additional assessment beyond what Sheafer is paying now and will do so for the life of the lease agreement.
“There’s really no additional cost for us at all and I don’t have to put the crops out, which is a lot of money,” he said.
He understands folks who oppose taking their land out of farm production and homeowners against solar because of how it changes the view from their property.
“I get it. This is pretty to look at,” he said, sitting at his dining room table with his wife Anne and gazing out at his yard, dotted with bird feeders and abutting alternating rows of corn and soybeans.
More Top Picks Brand
Both his traditional crops and his new one of solar panels capture the energy of the sun, Sheafer said.
“It’s a little bit of a gamble,” he said. “I hope we look back in 30 years and say, ‘Yeah, we’re glad we did this.'”
If you go
NextEra Energy hosts an open house for its Malden Solar project from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the Porter County Expo Center, 215 E. Division Road, Valparaiso. For more information, go to www.MaldenSolarProject.com.