The Sedgwick County Commission is considering a stringent new set of regulations that would govern utility-scale solar power.
The new rules limit solar projects to 1,280 acres and ban large solar farms from areas around cities that are expected to grow. The commission heard public feedback on the potential regulations Wednesday.
If passed, one developer said some of the new restrictions could make a proposed large-scale solar project in west Sedgwick County unfeasible.
“It would terminate the project that we’re working on that our landowners have committed to participate in,” said Mitch Lucas, a project developer with Invenergy, the company seeking to build a solar farm.
“It would wipe away a $200 million dollar-plus investment, without even the chance for the details of that project to be publicized, reviewed, debated during the permitting process.”
County officials said, though, that the new rules still leave hundreds of thousands of acres in northwest and southwest Wichita available for solar development.
Some Sedgwick County residents would like the commission to prevent even that.
“We’d like to effectively ban the solar,” Bob Darter, a Valley Center resident, told commissioners Wednesday.
Invenergy began sharing details of its proposed solar farm in spring 2023, alarming some nearby residents about the potential for environmental, economic and visual impacts. By September 2023, the county put a temporary ban on all commercial solar projects while it began an exhaustive process to update its solar regulations.
The Wichita-Sedgwick County Metropolitan Area Planning Commission proposed a new set of rules last March, which set a height limit on solar panels among other changes. Invenergy supported the set of rules, but commissioners felt there were still unresolved concerns. In April, the county hired a consultant to study and make recommendations on subjects like solar’s impact on agriculture and stormwater management.
Following the Berkeley Group’s report, city-county planning staff updated and expanded the proposed regulations, which grew from five pages to 12. The new rules make developers place solar panels farther away from roads and require a “visual impact analysis” for proposed projects.
County commissioners voted to defer making a decision on the new regulations until next Wednesday.
“It looks like someone who is extremely smart wrote this, but it’s extremely high level, and I’m not sure it covers all the different scenarios that come up,” county commissioner Jim Howell said of the new regulations on Wednesday. “So, I’ve just got some concerns on interpretations of what’s been written here.”
