Farmers are taking advantage of lucrative subsidies and tax breaks from North Carolina, Georgia and the federal government to indulge in the risky business of replacing their crops with solar panels.
Solar companies have installed solar panels on about 7,000 acres in pastures and cropland since 2013 in North Carolina alone, according to the NC Sustainable Energy Association. This happened because the state of North Carolina gave solar companies lucrative tax credits that paid for 35 percent of the purchased farmland. Other states, like Georgia, simply force electrical companies to buy certain amounts of solar power.
Solar companies pay about $300 to $700 annually per acre of farmland.
“Solar developers want to find the cheapest land near substations where they can connect,” Brion Fitzpatrick, director of project development for Inman Solar, told Bloomberg Monday. “That’s often farmland.”
If the subsidies are rolled back, which has already happened in states like Nevada, the farmers and solar companies could be left with a massive bill.
Farmers typically lease a portion of their land to the companies, who install panels and sell the power to local utilities. In some cases, farmers have leased their entire property to solar companies.
Nationally, solar power gets 326 times more in subsidies than coal, oil or natural gas power. Green energy in America got $13 billion in subsidies during 2013, compared to $3.4 billion in subsidies for conventional sources and $1.7 billion for nuclear, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Solar subsidies include 30 percent federal tax credit, which encourages companies to engage in risky business practices like installing panels that cost a minimum of $10,000, at no upfront cost to the consumer. Companies do this because the state and federal subsidies are so massive that such behavior is actually profitable. Solar companies simply cannot compete without government support.
Congress has been increasing subsidies for solar power as well. Green energy subsides in 1999 were a mere 17 percent of total subsidies, by 2007 that rose to 29 percent. Over the same time period, natural gas and petroleum-related subsidies declined from 25 percent to 13 percent of total subsidies, according to the Institute for Energy Research.
Solar power produced 0.4 of all energy used in America in 2014, according to the EIA.
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