Salt Creek Solar project moving ahead as normal, despite lawsuit - KOLN
Salt Creek Solar project moving ahead as normal, despite lawsuit
LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) - It’s hard to visualize now, but rows of panels will soon replace the rows of corn and beans the fields east of Lincoln have brought up for decades.
“People are concerned,” Christa Yoakum, a Lancaster County commissioner, said. “People are concerned about how this is going to affect them personally. They’re concerned about how it’s going to affect their property taxes.”
That concern reached a boiling point in a lawsuit, which aims to strike down a special permit given to the Ranger Power company by the Lancaster County Board. Still, it hasn’t put the brakes on the project just yet.
“We’re going to let those continue to get worked through in the courts,” Oliver Chag, a development manager with Ranger Power, said. “No further comment or update at this time. But we’re continuing to progress this project in the development side as we would anyway.”
10/11 reached out to several of the plaintiffs in that suit, but no one was able to go talk at the time of publication.
The project has also gathered a lot of support.
“It’s important not only for Lancaster County, but this is important for our world, for the community that we live in,” Yoakum said. “To move to cleaner energy sources.”
Generating 250 megawatts, the farm will be able to power tens of thousands of Nebraska homes.
Chag said the location so close to Lincoln has to do available LES infrastructure. Their web of wires will be able to get that power on the grid.
“This is a clean source of domestic power that there’s an appetite for in the state, and we’re happy to be spearheading that effort,” Chag said.
Copyright 2023 KOLN. All rights reserved.
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.