NEW SCOTLAND — Approximately a year and half after last coming before the town with its proposal for a large-scale solar facility to be situated in a part of town not zoned for such big developments, RIC Energy is back with a plan to install a 4.55 megawatt solar farm in a less conspicuous area of town

The 19-acre facility would be installed at what’s being called 2373 New Scotland Road, 44 acres of currently-addressless land nestled between the homes of Crow Ridge Road and National Grid’s right-of-way. 

The property, along with another somewhat similarly-sized parcel on the opposite side of the utility right-of-way, is owned by Timothy and Maryann Murray. 

The facility would be a community-distributed generator of green energy, meaning once it is up and running, local residents could subscribe to “receive” a portion of the project’s clean electrical energy output.

The output actually comes in the form of bill reductions of between 5 and 15 percent, a figure that can nearly double for large commercial customers.

In New York state, the solar industry’s lobbyist estimates that 1 megawatt of solar energy is enough to power about 160 homes.

Updated local law

The project is poised to take advantage of changes made by the town last year to its 2017 solar law, allowing large-scale solar facilities an easier path to approval.

The original law, based largely on a state model, was written so that the level of scrutiny shown to the handful of solar proposals received by New Scotland prior to February 2023 was so high that the approval process resulted in one, perhaps two, installations since 2017. 

The text of the original law stated large-scale projects were not permitted on:

— Land with has prime soils, defined as “land that has the best combination of physical and chemical characteristics for producing food, feed, forage, fiber, and oilseed crops and that is available for these uses”;

— Land with soils of statewide importance, “where less than 50 percent of the components in the [area] are prime but a combination of lands of prime or statewide importance is 50 percent or more of the [area] composition”; or

— Land that has more than an acre of mature forest, which contains trees that are predominantly six inches in diameter or more.

The update to the 2017 law narrowed the prime-soils definition to  “Active Agricultural Land,” which is “considered a parcel of land greater than seven (7) acres that within the last five (5) years of the date the application is filed with the Town for a Large-Scale Solar Facility was used for farming, agriculture or nursery.”

The basic idea was to protect the town’s actual usable farmland, “not to have a blanket prohibition on something that hasn’t even been used for farmland for 10, 15, 20 years,” Councilman Dan Leinung told The Enterprise at the time; the town board worked to narrow the broad definition of prime agricultural property and focus on “the actual use of the … land.”

The new statute language allows RIC Energy to avoid some of the pitfalls that ultimately led to the company abandoning its 2022-23 proposal for a 5 megawatt photovoltaic farm at a 75-acre New Scotland Road property adjacent to the then-newly christened Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy Bender Melon Farm Preserve.

Zoning concerns

RIC’s current proposal would be installed on land that by definition falls under the categories of prime farmland and prime farmland, if drained.

In 2022, RIC had attempted to site a solar facility smack dab in the middle of an area of New Scotland that has been the focal point of not one but two planning and zoning, then rezoning, initiatives in the past seven years. 

In May 2018, the town board adopted a law that took about 550 acres of largely commercial, agricultural, and residential land and rezoned it to create the New Scotland Hamlet zoning district. 

The hamlet is bounded by the town of Bethlehem to the east, the village of Voorheesville and railroad to the west, the Helderberg-Hudson Rail Trail to the north, and commercial and medium-density residential districts to the south of Route 85.

The 2018 rezone saw the creation of three distinct sub-districts:

— A concentrated hamlet center with the character of a traditional village, situated at the intersection of routes 85 and 85A, and extending north to Fred the Butcher, and east past Stewart’s. This area, following a 2022 rezone, while largely planned as commercial, now allows for multi-unit housing, as long as it is part of a mixed-use development;

 — Radiating out from the hamlet center, north toward Fred the Butcher, and east-west along New Scotland Road from 1882, near Brookview Terrace, to 2100, Zock’s Supply, formerly Long Lumber, the  hamlet-expansion area, while initially planned and subsequently rezoned for mostly commercial uses, was rezoned again in 2022, allowing for multi-unit housing in the sub-district, provided its part of a mixed-use development; and 

— The hamlet’s sub-district development area, which was mostly rezoned as residential in 2018, comprising Bender Melon Preserve, Colonie Country Club, and the 77 acres adjacent to the preserve on which RIC wanted to site a solar facility about two years ago.

The 2022 project faced immediate zoning board skepticism for its proposed location and for the number of variance requests, three, that it was seeking.

RIC’s LLC — New Scotland PV — was looking for permission from the town to site its proposed facility on land outside of a permitted zoning district, while also requesting to do so on property containing over an acre of mature forest and prime farmlands.

The zoning board’s chairwoman Erin Casey said at the time, “In my mind, this is a significant number and variety of variances that this project is seeking to obtain.” 

Both the use and area variance requests “present a challenge,” Casey said, and more effort was needed from RIC to back up statements “about there not being other suitable sites” in town. Casey that the board needed “more documentation of the efforts that have been made, the analysis that has been done, [and] why this is necessary.”

But her request appeared to have fallen on deaf ears, as just a half-year after making the remarks, Casey was again telling representatives from New Scotland PV that more specifics were needed about the company’s intended location for the array.

Of the 130 postcards sent by New Scotland PV to potential solar facility sites in town, just one expressed interest: Peter Baltis, owner of the 77-acre parcel the solar company was looking to develop.

“I mean, even if we were to do this under the public-utilities standard, I think you’d have to show it’s a public necessity to build in that location,” Casey said.

Casey said New Scotland had a lot of open land and rural communities, and also already had  lots of power lines running through. “We’re just going to need a lot more convincing.”

Casey went on, “I think you need to make a more robust showing about why that particular property, which is in this relatively small area, where solar is prohibited … by the decisions made by our town board about the development that we hope our town to have, is a public necessity.”

Casey said that large-scale solar installations hadn't been allowed in that part of town for some time, meaning RIC had a self-created hardship on its hands.

“You are attempting to put a solar site where one is not permitted, and you want to cut down mature forest, and it was an area with prime soils,” Casey said.  “So, you know, none of this is new.”

Current proposal

RIC withdrew the application in May 2023, following its misunderstanding of “the Town’s intent behind the recent rezoning effort,” and realized “that siting a solar facility within the Hamlet District is not in line with the Town’s vision,” the company said. 

This time around, RIC isn’t seeking variances for its facility, situated in a mostly-out-of-the-way locale. RIC needs only a special-use permit from the town’s planning board, making the project a somewhat more straightforward proposal.

The planning board at its August meeting held off on setting a public hearing on the proposal because RIC hadn’t submitted all the necessary paperwork. Chairman Jeffrey Baker told representatives from RIC that the hearing will be set once the company has submitted a comprehensive wetland assessment, a corresponding mitigation plan, and a tree survey.

Wasting little time, RIC filed the paperwork to get on the planning board’s September agenda, with the hope that a hearing could be scheduled for the following month.