ROCKINGHAM — Despite the cold weather, gray skies and drizzling rain, the Australian company New Energy Solar and Durham’s Cypress Creek Renewables ceremoniously opened the County Home solar farm Thursday, the seventh such facility in Richmond County.
A $10.5 million investment outside city limits, the County Home solar facility sits on roughly 80 acres. The small utility-scale solar farm houses 22,000 panels on about 40 acres. They produce approximately 7.2 megawatts of direct current, enough to provide around 800 homes with power for about 40 years.
“We’re celebrating the fact that we have everything up and running,” said Paul Whitacre, director of asset management for New Energy Solar. “Despite the rain.
“If you want to know what disruption looks like in a marketplace, just look at solar,” he said. “We are disrupting the marketplace and have been for a long time.”
North Carolina ranks second in the United States for solar energy capacity, trailing behind California, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Despite Whitacre’s talk of disruption, solar farms come with little in the way of permanent structures to disrupt the land — besides a concrete pad where panels are connected to the collection grid — and can be broken down and recycled at the end of their lease, when the equipment becomes outdated and/or unreliable. And they sell their power to existing utilities —Duke Energy, in the case of County Home.
Solar facilities, or “farms,” passively capture naturally occurring sunlight and convert it to clean, renewable energy on a scale large enough to supply electricity to homes, schools and businesses. Each solar farm is a collection of thousands of solar panels arranged to gather maximum amounts of sunlight during the day. The panels are linked to inverters and transformers that convert sunlight into usable electricity, which then is transferred to the existing electrical grid.
Once constructed, they require very little maintenance. According to the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, they don’t need travel infrastructure to accommodate traffic, and the panels don’t require on-site water or chemicals to keep them clean. Surrounding grass can be kept under control by mowing, and weeds can be spot-sprayed when necessary.
After the official ribbon-cutting and lunch, representatives took guests on a tour of the facility to see the panels and meters, and to ask questions. First, though, Kyle Cooper with Cypress Creek Renewables gave guests a warning.
“Don’t touch,” he said. “It’s easy to forget there’s energy flowing out there. I ensure you the panels feel like glass.”
In addition to the environmental benefits solar farms bring — including not having any toxic materials, not creating harmful electromagnetic fields and being highly unlikely to spark fires — they’re also an opportunity for economic advancement, backers say.
Sen. Tom McInnis, who also made an appearance during the ribbon ceremony, said the farms brought an income into rural areas, meaning more jobs for locals. The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates solar energy in North Carolina has created more than 7,000 jobs.
“We have to have jobs for today and not yesterday,” McInnis said. “The jobs of yesterday are gone and not coming back.”
He also said that Richmond Community College was in the research phase of creating curriculum for a program on solar farm management.
“This will bring a significantly higher tax value, and it’s not a drain on the economy,” he said. “This is a pristine solar farm. We need to work on rural North Carolina, and one way is through solar and wind.”
North Carolina has had a 40-year love affair with solar energy, including solar farms.
Richmond County has begun to make a name for itself in that area, too, with seven farms now up and running, and two near Hamlet approved for construction.
One of those, across from the city’s old Coca-Cola plant, will sit on what used to be a dairy farm. The plot also will be used for timber growth, its owner has said.
