County commissioner table solar project floodplain permits - Enid News & Eagle
County commissioner table solar project floodplain permits | News | enidnews.com
ENID, Okla. — Garfield County commissioners once again tabled floodplain permits for the NextEra Energy Resources’ Skeleton Creek solar project at their meeting on Monday, July 29, 2024.
The commission opted to table three floodplain permits for the project over accuracy concerns on the map NextEra provided. The map indicated NextEra would install transmission lines on property it did not lease. NextEra said it was a mistake.
“At the meeting today, the commissioners presented me a map that we submitted, and there was a scrivener’s error, and one of the collection routes that showed it going through a property we currently do not have a lease on,” NextEra project manager Christopher Banks said. “We are not going through that area, because we do not own a lease, and we will only be going through areas or properties in which we do have the legal agreements to do so.”
The project will consist of 5,000 acres of solar panels, as well lithium batteries for storage. The solar project is to be located in a rural area south of Enid Woodring Regional Airport and northwest of Pioneer High School.
At the county commission meeting on July 22, commissioners tabled six floodplain permits for the Skeleton Creek project. Three of those floodplain permits were not under consideration at the July 29 meeting.
“There is existing driveways that we planned to put in there, but we got updated plans as of last week that remove the need to get those three additional locations,” Banks said.
Community members at the commission meeting also had concerns about boundary markers on their property. NextEra used the boundary markers to confirm the boundaries of land they have leased, according to a company spokesperson. The markers are not indicative of plans to build or operate on land they have not leased.
Also during the meeting, a NextEra emergency response plan made its way to the commissioners and the public. The emergency response plan states responding fire departments would be tasked with containing any fires and maintaining a safe perimeter. A team from NextEra would primarily handle an emergency situation, so local firefighters would not be asked to come in contact with the batteries or their containers.
Individuals at the meeting also shared concerns about evacuations in the event of a fire. Evacuations are uncommon in the event of a fire of any origin, a NextEra spokesperson said.
As it stands, the floodplain permits still need approval for the Skeleton Creek project to proceed. NextEra also will need to obtain a permit from the State Fire Marshal and submit a commercial use application to Garfield County. NextEra has not submitted a permit application to the State Fire Marshal.
The county commission also considered a road-use agreement for NextEra’s Breckenridge Energy Storage project. Clerical errors within the agreement were among the reasons the commission opted to table the agreement.
The Breckenridge Energy Storage project is unrelated to the NextEra Skeleton Creek project.
Related Knowledge Center: ENERGY BASICS: renewables
Renewable energy sources — once the fuel of the future, then practical in specific, narrow applications — are increasingly economic mainstream sources of power generation. Hydropower was long the mainstay of U.S. renewable electricity generation, although wind power surpassed hydro for the first time in 2019, and solar continues its rapid growth. The continued growth of wind and solar, with their fluctuations, is tied in part to improvements in storage technology: batteries.