What's going on with a massive Nebraska solar farm project?

But then Rosentrader, 66, put on her glasses and read through what had arrived and realized she was dealing with a horse of an entirely different color.

The letter from Mission Clean Energy, a San Francisco-based renewable energy infrastructure company, spelled out plans for a proposed 2,900-acre, 360-megawatt solar farm in rural Dakota County near where Rosentrader lives along 200th Street. Accounting for property line setbacks and other building restrictions, the fenced area for the proposed solar farm would be about 2,100 acres spread across parcels from eight landowners.

The farm would be relatively contiguous though there’s a detached piece that was added to take additional capacity at a substation. The company has said that the Mission farm would interconnect through the Twin Church Substation north of the project to tie into the public power grid so that anyone in the local area could have power available to them.

Rosentrader, who immigrated to the United States from Germany, doesn’t have an issue with solar farms in general but more this proposed project. She has lived in rural Dakota County for more than three decades and said she moved there for the peace and quiet.

“I live out here in the country. I don’t really want to look at solar panels no matter how they want to disguise them,” Rosentrader said. (To comply with a Dakota County solar ordinance, Mission would be mandated to include a vegetative buffer from any roadway. Ethan Frazier, a senior permitting manager of three years with Mission, said the company is building plans to spell out future upkeep of the project that would be legally binding.)

“The main concern for me is that I just don’t really want that here,” Rosentrader said. “For the first two weeks (after receiving the letter) I didn’t do anything other than just brood over this and think about it and pray about it. And you know what can be done?”

Eventually Rosentrader got an area map from the county’s zoning department office. That trip emboldened her.

“A friend drove me there so as I’m driving back home I had a view of that whole valley and I’m like: ‘Oh my gosh, this is the whole valley. Everything I see is going to be solar panels,’” she said. “So I went to my neighbors and talked to them and they’re like: ‘Yeah, we don’t want that here. We don’t like the idea. We’re living here. We don’t want to have our land devalued and we don’t really want to look at that. That’s not why we’re living in the country.’”

Mood of the residents

On July 15, there was a meeting regarding the project at the Dakota County Road Department building in Hubbard, Neb. Dakota County Planning and Zoning Administrator Joe O’Neill said so many people showed up that no decision was reached regarding conditional use permits for the project. Rosentrader showed up as did her daughter and son.

“Neither of them live in the area but they’re concerned,” she explained. “This is not much but this is their inheritance. This is their home. They grew up here.”

Next will be a pair of public hearings on Aug. 19 at the Hubbard Community Center.

“I feel that there will be a decision, I can’t tell you which way it will be,” O’Neill said. “Whatever the commission decides, it is a recommendation that we will send to the county commissioners.” Dakota County commissioners would then make the final call at a subsequent meeting following advertising of a public hearing on the matter.

O’Neill said a recurring question the county has gotten is local folks wanting to know how their little of quietude might be disrupted. But not everyone who has contacted the county is opposed to the plan, he said. “It’s a mix. There’s several that are opposed that will live adjacent to the solar energy conversion system but there are some that were neutral.”

The county administrator made sure to point out that the project couldn’t have even gotten to this point without buy-in from landowners willing to sell their land for this purpose.

“They feel it’s a good use,” O’Neill said.

Mission came to the county and said they were working with a landowner to put the project on his land and wanted to know what kind of permitting Dakota County had, O’Neill said.

“I told him we needed to update our solar energy conversion system regulations so they held off for the two years while we worked on the regulations,” he added.

Coast to coast, north to south

After Mission assessed the substation interconnection and the power grid (with help from the Nebraska Public Power District) and reached out to landowners, Frazier said about three months ago the company submitted its permit.

“We continue doing land negotiations, local landowners and then also, from my side, doing environmental permitting. We were doing site studies, for listed species, environmental site assessments, for potential contaminants, cultural resource investigations,” he explained.

Frazier said the company works nationally and has solar battery storage projects and standalone batter storage projects “coast to coast, north to south” and in Kansas, Illinois, Michigan and Missouri. However the company does not yet have a project that is operational.

“That’s just because the company is fairly new, starting about the same time as when I was hired,” Frazier said. “The overall development timeline for a project that’s the size of the one we’re proposing is typically about five years from kind of kicking it off to getting it permitted to getting it built and then operational. So we have projects that are kind of on that five-year time plan but nothing that’s operational at this point.”

He did note that Mission senior leadership has a lengthy resume of work on operational projects in the renewable energy field, including the head of development, the CEO, the COO and the vice president of engineering. Frazier himself has experience working on solar, wind and battery storage projects and on transmission lines, pipelines and power plants.

In addition to the permitting work, Frazier fielded questions from landowners, such as Rosentrader, since the letters went out.

“I’m guessing it’s probably what you might expect, where adjacent landowners definitely had a lot of questions, since they’re going to be the ones living the closest to the project,” Frazier said. “I think a lot of those concerns are currently addressed in the application side of the project through a variety of different plans, studies and surveys that we have to do. We’ve really been having great conversations with some number of them, and then a much larger number at the open house and other events to get them more comfortable with what’s coming.”

Despite her opposition to the project, Rosentrader said she hasn’t had issues dealing with Frazier and the company.

“They answer all my questions. They’re very well researched in the questions people would have. They have a definite answer to most questions,” she said.

An abiding question of Rosentrader’s is who is going to buy the electricity produced by the solar farm and who will benefit most from the project.

“Homer Public Schools is one of the largest recipients of the tax revenue for the project,” Frazier said. “As well as Dakota City, South Sioux City and the county as a whole benefitting from similar tax revenue increases tied to property tax assessments of the project.”

He added: “We’ve heard from not only the utility but also from economic development officials from various municipalities in the county that some developments or potential growth opportunities were stalled out because there wasn’t enough available power to fuel those developments.”

Frazier said Mission’s understanding is that the summer energy load need for South Sioux City was estimated at roughly 55 megawatts.

“That kind of shows you the basis of 360,” he said. “You can power about seven South Sioux Citys.”