VA Tech study sheds light on solar farm impacts to property values
As solar energy becomes more affordable and widespread, farmland has emerged as a prime location for large-scale solar development. But with this expansion comes a persistent question: Do nearby property values suffer when solar farms move in?
In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in Virginia Tech’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences looked at millions of property sales and thousands of commercial solar sites to shed some light on one of the mostly commonly cited downsides of large-scale solar adoption.
“As the U.S. scales up renewable energy, solar installations are increasingly being sited near homes and on farmland, and this often leads to push back from residents worried about aesthetics or property value loss,” said Chenyang (Nate) Hu, a Ph.D. graduate in economics from the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics and the paper’s lead author. “Until now, much of this discussion has been based on anecdotal evidence.”
The stigma that solar panels are visually unappealing and will lower the value of nearby land has been around in some form or another since adoption of the technology first began in the ’70s.
