Protect Spotsylvania: Massive Scale

The aerial video above shows approximatel 500 acres of the more than 6,000 acres of the proposed site. The light blue section of the map below shows the three Sites, (A B and C). The footage is of the farthest right edge of Site A.

The "Spotsylvania Solar Energy Center" would be:

• The 5^th largest solar plant in the United States. All of the four larger U.S. solar power plants (above 500 MW) are located in remote desert areas of California and Nevada. Furthermore, all 14 solar power plants in the U.S. that are 250 MW or greater are in California, Nevada and Arizona.

• This proposed power plant is surrounded by residential neighborhoods, farms, schools and churches, as well as lakes, streams and wetland areas.

• The project would consume 6,500 acres, or 10 square miles. This is equal to the size of the entire City of Fredericksburg, VA. It would be half the size of Manhattan (minus the great restaurants and Broadway musicals).

• This facility would take over 2.4% of the entire land mass of Spotsylvania County. It would consume 6% of the Livingston District. That ... is an extraordinary statistic. "Massive."

• Currently, the largest solar energy facility operating east of the Mississippi River is 120 MW (Moyock, NC), which started up in March 2018. Therefore, there is no data on its impact, and the Spotsylvania plant would be more than four times its size.

• The largest solar energy facility currently in Virginia is 100 MW (Southampton), which started up in December 2017. About three years ago, the largest solar facility in Virginia was 20 MW.

• This requires a huge step-out in scale … a 500% increase in size for Virginia in just three years!

• There has not been time to study the environmental impacts because even the smaller and mid-sized solar projects in Virginia have only recently been completed. Negative environmental impacts from increasingly larger solar power plants in Virginia environs, adjacent to residential neighborhoods, should be carefully evaluated before allowing even larger facilities to be constructed. Some impacts can be irreversible and devastating. Scale matters!

• The “solar heat island effect” could significantly impact the local climate of the site and surrounding areas. This risk is scale dependent, and much more research is needed to understand and mitigate the impacts in this region, near residential neighborhoods, farms, schools. Current studies of this effect are based on 1 MW facilities. One megawatt. The Spotsylvania plant ... is 500 MW.

Concerned Citizens therefore has recommended specific conditions be included in the Spotsylvania County Special Use Permit to alleviate these concerns, or at least mitigate any potential impact. Those recommended conditions can be found here:

Special Use Permit Conditions

"DO NO HARM"