Wind, solar farms continue to expand in Vermilion County

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FAIRMOUNT — When Fairmount-area farmer Steve Fourez served on the Vermilion County Board from around 2006 to 2022, wind and solar farms were few and far between in the area.

“I was on the board when the first windmills moved in, 10-plus years ago, up across Collison and Potomac,” Fourez said.

At the time, the county board didn’t have a Wind and Solar Committee; Fourez now chairs it.

“We put together a set of standards at that time,” he said, involving developers meeting financial responsibilities, siting and other issues. In the wake of laws passed by the Illinois Legislature, those standards had to be reworked and reformed.

“That’s when it really got serious, and that’s when the permit requests started flowing in,” said the 70-year-old, who farms corn and soybeans on about 500 acres.

When Fourez left the county board in 2022, he told the chair that he had some background and history with wind and solar projects and would like to be involved if applications cranked up. He didn’t know he’d be appointed chairman of the committee.

The first wind farm in the county was the California Ridge project from Chicago-based Invenergy; it went online in late 2012. The original project saw around 30 turbines placed in northeastern Champaign County and just over 100 more in Vermilion County.

Shortly after that, a small project went in west of Hoopeston, Fourez said.

The county approved ordinances on solar farms in 2019 and wind farms in 2021. Subsequent ordinances on commercial solar and wind farms came in 2023.

The Wind and Solar Committee has now spent the past three or four years trying to handle the permitting processes.

The committee, consisting of six community leaders, initially spent almost a year with the county board on realigning the county ordinances to line up with the state statute passed in 2023.

Fourez said they also had to convince people that the committee doesn’t have much choice on the matter, as the law requires that the county’s standards match the state’s minimum standards. He said the amount of farmland being used for wind and solar farms “aggravates” him.

Among the current projects in development are Earthrise Energy’s 1,500-acre solar farm on the Catlin-Tilton Road and one from Liberty Power/Mural Energy on another 1,500 acres of farmland between Fairmount and Sidell. There are also several community projects tied to Ameren, each around 40 acres or so, near Westville and Bismarck.

The bigger commercial projects sell energy back to the grid to benefit others outside the community.

“So, we’re probably 3,000 to 4,000 acres that are potentially going to get eaten up by solar,” Fourez said.

Where a project’s jurisdiction is also depends on whether Fourez and his committee know about it.

For the Catlin-Tilton Road project, Earthrise Energy is dealing with Catlin Township and the villages of Catlin and Tilton.

Fourez said some fall through the cracks and haven’t gone through the county committee, including one by Muncie on the north side of Interstate 74.

He said some companies are easy to work with and aren’t afraid to answer questions. The new state law includes all the necessary criteria, including setbacks, he said, but “it doesn’t give you any subjective measures where you look at that proposal and the company and whoever that’s behind it and go, is this somebody that is reputable, somebody that you want spending, committing to 30 years of being in the county?”

“But you can’t protect all the landowners from being less than diligent in who they choose to rent to,” he added. “I understand in today’s farm economy, if you’ve got farmland and they want to pay you four or five times what you can cash rent (those) acres for, it’s hard to turn around and say no.”

His biggest problem with the solar-farm projects?

“This will never be farmed again,” he said. “Once this is done, it’s gone. It’s lost. And for East Central Illinois and Vermilion County, that’s a natural resource that can never be replaced, can never be put back the way it was.”

He said while he understands that the land can be returned to use for farming, it doesn’t make any sense for a company that has invested in installing all the necessary infrastructure to turn around and tear it out 30 years later.

Even then, he said, it would be an undertaking to revert the land back to row-crop farming, and once the nutrient strata in the topsoil is destroyed, it can’t be restored.

He said land given over for solar farms is also no longer eligible for farm program participation.

Fourez said wind farms used to bother him more than solar, but the wind turbines can be farmed around, whereas the solar projects take much larger swaths of land completely out of production as farmland.

As a farmer, Fourez said they’re overproducing anyway, and if prime farmland is taken out of production, maybe product prices will go up.

“But I just hate seeing for future generations, that natural resource that we were blessed to get long before any of us ever set foot on the land” being taken up, he added.

He has relatives who farm near the first wind turbines that went in, and he said the only time they hear them is when the turbines are rotated to catch the wind.

Fourez said right now, the county’s Wind and Solar Committee has no permits to consider. The most recent project that the full county board approved siting for is from Musketeer Wind Energy LLC, which seeks to add up to 81 wind turbines between Rankin and Hoopeston.

Among the concerns raised by citizens was an 8-acre battery-storage facility that’s part of the plans. Fourez said they had to research how the county would deal with that.

The new development is expected to bring in $100 million in property-tax revenue over the next 30 years. The company plans to seek a building permit within a year and will likely take one to two years to erect the new wind turbines.

This fall, the county board also approved a livestock management plan for a small solar farm west of Ridge Farm.

The board rejected another proposal by Mural Energy to erect solar panels on 1,400 acres of farmland in Jamaica and Vance townships in the in the southwestern part of the county.

For the Catlin-Tilton solar project, until a permit application is filed, the Wind and Solar Committee is sitting on the sidelines.

The loss of tax incentives has Fourez and others wondering how much longer projects will continue to be pursued.

“The pendulum is beginning to swing, and I had the feeling that on a lot of these solar projects, and wind projects, the original developer went in, maybe put the infrastructure in place, took all the federal and state subsidies and then turned around and wanted to sell it to somebody else to operate it,” he said.

Fourez said compared with other counties, he thinks Vermilion has worked hard to be receptive to companies, within the bounds of what’s logical and makes sense.

“Vermilion County is probably no worse off than a lot of other rural counties,” he said.

And when he looked at jobs that the solar and wind projected have created, as well as the tax revenue generated for the county and schools, he didn’t see any other industrial development that could match those results.