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Delaware | As previous posters have said, the money for cleanup is big. Solar farm was installed near us, and the company we have do our tile work did the grading for the solar farm. If I remember correctly he said the ground was destroyed just in the construction phase; the topsoil stripping was minimal; they just picked up whatever dirt was there and placed it in the holes. So when the farmer gets the land back, he may have topsoil 8 feet deep buried by 7 feet of fill material.
This is in an area where topsoil is limited to maybe 12-16 inches at most; some areas it may be closer to 10-12". I don't know what your Michigan ground is like.
We were approached by a solar company with regard to a 200 acre farm we own; from everyone we talked to it seemed too good to be true. The companies come in with a high dollar number (600, 1000, 1500/acre), get the landowner to agree to terms where the solar company can try and get an agreement with the local power utility (this is somewhere between 3-5 years they have to work something out), then if they do work something out they come back to the landowner and say "well, we can only make it work for 400/acre", and then the landowner has to decide whether to go through with it.
We decided against it because there were too many "what-ifs" and we aren't the size of a farm that can give up 200 acres for the next 25 years if the deal turns out to not be as good as it seemed to be. | |
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Farming the Sun
