…"I was so excited and hoped to see solar canopies over parking lots, solar panels on rooftops, solar panels on big box stores" after Virginia passed a 2020 law requiring the elimination of fossil fuels from its power sector by 2050, Ms. Pettus says. "I never dreamed it would involve so much deforestation and grading in a place I deeply care about."
The conflict Ms. Pettus described is becoming increasingly common in rural Virginia, where a recent boom in solar farm construction has given many people pause. Conservationists and farmland advocates argue that the solar gold rush is displacing valuable forests and farms when panels could instead be going on already developed or degraded land, including abandoned industrial sites and landfills. Some even warn that a decades-long push to protect the Chesapeake Bay could be undermined by panel-driven forest loss...
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