Santa Barbara County close to allowing thousands of acres of solar energy projects

The largest solar panel array in Santa Barbara County spans a dusty patch of the rural Cuyama Valley for a reason.

The remote setting is the one place in the county where the project’s broad footprint and scale—327 acres of panel after panel—is legally allowed.

That’s likely to change, however, as elected officials consider expanding solar energy production. New standards would pave the way for commercial installations countywide on a range of non-residential properties.

“So much work has gone into this,” said county Supervisor Laura Capps, who represents the Second District. “We just have a little bit longer.”

A handful of key decisions remain. One—whether to cap the largest projects at 10,000 cumulative acres—focuses on how visible and intrusive the projects would be.

Another factor—how to regulate energy storage at stand-alone battery facilities—echoes a national debate over public safety and tolerable risks.

Years in the making

The potential expansion is a long time coming. The package the Board of Supervisors will consider Sept. 1 follows more than a decade of research and planning.

“It is disappointing that solar energy is still not legal at the scale needed to provide a solution in the birthplace of environmentalism,” said solar supporter Das Williams, the former First District supervisor turned energy-industry advisor, whose advocacy in office helped shape the current proposal.

The proposal’s underpinnings predate 2014, when the county allowed a large solar project on a special 600-acre “overlay” on agricultural land in Cuyama.

That decision cleared a path for the Cuyama Solar Project. In 2017, the New York City-based investment firm the D. E. Shaw Group, the current owner and operator, purchased the project located at Kirschenmann and Foothill roads from First Solar for an undisclosed sum while it was still under construction.

Estimates vary, but the 40 megawatts of electricity the Cuyama project generates is enough to power approximately 16,000 California homes annually.

Another smaller, 20-acre Cuyama project nearby followed in 2021.

That same year, the board tasked county planners with figuring out how to spread large solar projects from Carpinteria to the Santa Maria Valley and beyond.

Tier 1 solar: mostly permit-free 

In its proposed new rules, the county primarily classifies solar energy systems by size. Whether a project consumes electricity onsite or feeds into the state’s electrical grid has no significant bearing in most cases.

Tier 1 systems, the smallest, would be allowed in all zones including residential. They’d be exempt from planning permits on properties located roughly 1,000 yards or more inland. Near the coast, Tier 1 systems would require a coastal development permit unless mounted to an existing structure.

Roof-mounted and “building-integrated” Tier 1 systems, as well as sunlight-capturing canopies often constructed over parking lots, could be any size.

Ground-mounted Tier 1 systems on undeveloped land could be up to a half-acre in size. They could be up to five acres on legally paved, graded or cleared land. And on certain agricultural parcels, 15 acres might be allowed.

For Tier 1 projects, another quarter acre would be allowed when panels are paired with battery storage.

“Although these Tier 1 systems would in many cases be exempt from planning permits, they would still require building, electrical, plumbing and solar-use permits,” said county Planner Zoe Carlson.

Tiers 2 and 3: capturing acres of sunlight

Larger Tier 2, or community-scale, systems a half acre to 30 acres in size would be allowed with minor permitting. They could rise on a range of non-residential properties including agricultural, institutional and industrial sites.

The largest Tier 3, or utility-scale, systems would include projects greater than 30 acres on the same types of non-residential properties as Tier 2 systems. They’d require a major conditional use permit from the county Planning Commission.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 systems near the coast would receive extra scrutiny.

Hazards, site conditions, cultural resources and proximity to transmission lines would all play a part in restraining Tier 3 systems, county Planner Matt Hernandez said.

In addition, zone-by-zone development and agricultural land use rules would influence a project’s size and scale, he said.

The rule changes as currently proposed would allow solar on 10% or 10 acres of a single property’s prime agricultural land, whichever is less. On plots considered non-prime because of slopes or lower quality soil and water, solar could cover 10% of the land or 100 acres, whichever is less.

The 10,000-acre question

In a tentative compromise, the board on July 14 settled on a conceptual cap that would limit Tier 2 and Tier 3 projects to 10,000 total acres, a number comparable to less than 1.5% off all agricultural land in the county. That figure, which might change, emerged as the board considered as many as 16,000 acres and as few as 8,000.

Capps and Third District Supervisor Joan Hartmann advocated for no acreage cap.

Since then, Capps, who represents much of the South Coast, indicated she will push for more than 10,000.

“This whole effort is about resiliency,” said Capps, noting the impacts of hot weather warnings and deliberate rolling brownout electrical outages.

In addition, the board discussed whether to split any cap between the South Coast and the North County—perhaps proportionally based on total farmland acreage, or along the Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric service areas border.

It’s a debate swinging largely on visual impacts and even more so potential harm to agriculture.

Environmentalist concerns have focused largely on protecting soil, wildlife—and scenic views.

Along the Gaviota Coast, the county should at a minimum prohibit utility-scale solar on undisturbed properties, the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County wrote the board.

“This approach,” according to the trust, “would continue to support renewable energy while recognizing that utility-scale facilities in rural coastal landscapes present a different level of potential conflict than rooftop, parking lot, community scale or disturbed-site solar.”

‘How do we want to proceed?’

Leaders at the Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties say they support more solar. They say they want new projects distributed evenly, not concentrated in the agriculture-heavy North County.

“We support a diverse and resilient energy portfolio,” association President Claire Wineman said in a letter to the board. “We are concerned with the potential conversion of farmland… especially in the Santa Maria and Lompoc valleys.”

Chair Bob Nelson, the board’s biggest solar program skeptic, has framed 10,000 acres as a sensible starting point.

If demand proves large enough, and if installations don’t disproportionally impact prime land, the board could allow additional acreage in the future, said Nelson, who represents the Fourth District, which includes most of the Santa Maria valley. 

“It’s an opportunity for us—at ten thousand, gosh, that’s a big number—to say, ‘Okay. How do we want to proceed?’” he said.

Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, whose Fifth District also includes Santa Maria, stressed that whatever acreage the county starts with can change.

“How many times have we gone back to the cannabis ordinance?” Lavagnino said, referencing 2018 rules repeatedly amended. “I don’t want anybody to get in a fight over what acreage is and all this. We can figure that out as the thing matures, and we’ll fix it.”

Battery storage

As the board mulls solar, the specter of a January 2025 battery storage fire at the Moss Landing Power Plant between Watsonville and Monterey looms large. 

As many as 1,200 nearby residents evacuated. The massive lithium-ion battery blaze burned for days at the facility, which stored 300 megawatts of power. Researchers later discovered toxic metals linked to the smoke plume in an environmentally sensitive nearby slough.

A month later, the city of Morro Bay north of Santa Barbara County adopted a two-year ban on battery storage.

Advocates of stand-alone storage say it’s safer than often portrayed, growing safer every year and critical to making solar energy effective.

In one eye-catching statistic, the independent and nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute found the global battery energy storage failure rate dropped 99% from 2018 to 2025.

Making the case for expanded solar, Hartmann noted California often produces more solar power than it can use.

“We’re going to have much more electricity demand coming, and we want to get ahead of this, said Hartmann, whose district spans Gaviota and the Santa Ynez and Lompoc valleys.

“Batteries are the way to do it,” she said. “They’re not just nice to have. They’re the thing that captures the investment that we’ve already made.”

The board will consider stand-alone storage projects up to a quarter acre in size in non-residential zones.

At the nonprofit Clean Coalition, Policy Director Ben Schwartz urged officials to embrace stand-alone storage now, not in the future.

“There are systems in place for drainage, for safety, for grading,” Schwartz said.

Farming interests express worry about negative impacts of toxic smoke plumes to air, crops and soil.

“We remain deeply concerned,” Wineman, the grower-shipper representative, told the board.

Balancing safety and viability

Nationally, battery energy storage is on the rise. 

Operators in the United States installed a record 3.3 gigawatts in the first quarter of this year. That’s enough to power an estimated 2.5 million average U.S. homes, surpassing the previous first quarter record by 54%, according to the latest U.S. Energy Storage Monitor report from the American Clean Power Association.

Utility-scale activity dominated, with more than 2.3 gigawatts installed during the quarter, according to the report. 

As it moves forward, the board plans to consider battery fire and toxic materials containment strategies.

“We do all these things for oil and gas,” Nelson said, acknowledging the alarms raised by growers. “We have groundwater basins here that are essential to what we do in this county.”

Nelson said he wants to keep battery equipment away from sensitive places like neighborhoods and schools, And he’s questioned fast-tracking approvals.

“I want these things to be permittable, but I want make sure that there’s a review process and they’re not exempt,” Nelson said, adding he worries about a lack of recourse over unpopular approvals. “I think there could be projects that are exempt if they’re within certain setbacks.”

Similarly, Lavagnino said he wants to ensure approved projects receive appropriate public scrutiny.

“As somebody who supports the oil and gas industry, I understand that there are problems with any energy,” Lavagnino said. “I don’t have any problems with battery storage as long as it’s transparent, we do proper noticing, people show up, we hear about it, you know, people get information.”

As the debate unfolds, supporters of solar say they plan to stay vigilant against regulations they say could make utility-scale projects unworkable.

“There’s none of it getting built out there,” said the former Supervisor Williams, who’s now senior advisor of policy and legislative affairs at Central Coast Community Energy, a nonprofit public agency that sources competitively priced electricity. “It’s important that you make regulations appropriate for the technology.”