Senate bill 931 passed the Maryland legislature in the final days of the session. This bill reduces the zoning restrictions across the state for solar plants. This change will have a positive impact for solar development in Maryland, as zoning laws are one of the biggest challenges that solar plants face and make solar development nearly impossible in many counties.
The Renewable Energy Certainty Act prevents local jurisdictions from denying site development plans which meet certain requirements and says that local jurisdictions must process site development plans as permitted use if they are under 5 MW. The exceptions to this are that projects larger than 5 MW cannot be in medium-density or high-density residential areas, mixed use areas with residential components, or tier 1 or tier 2 growth areas, and that county governments can limit solar development on currently designated priority preservation areas once 5% of them have been used. For most counties, a large portion of the land which previously prohibited solar farms will now be available to solar development.
The requirements to bypass local regulations include: 150-foot buffers from residential buildings, 100-foot buffers from property lines, fencing, landscaping buffers or vegetative screenings, maintenance of the vegetation, that the developers minimize grading and landscaping, post a landscaping bond, comply with environmental regulations, and do not emit light overnight. None of these regulations are unreasonable or outrageous. Under the current system where each jurisdiction may set their own set of rules, setbacks are often larger and screenings and landscaping requirements can be much more strict. The bill was written to avoid negatively impacting any project currently in the permitting process with local jurisdictions, since it includes a statement that any solar developers who enter into less strict agreements with the county governments are also considered to have met the necessary requirements.
The bill also includes a few other requirements for solar plants beyond site development plans. The first is that in overburdened areas, two public meetings about the proposed plan are required, which helps ensure that community members have a say in what is developed near them and addresses any impacts on the area. The second is that the project must post a bond with the Public Service Commission to cover the expected cost of decommissioning the plant. Requiring plants to have a decommissioning plan is a good idea. However, the fact that this requirement applies only to solar plants and battery storage is unusual. Solar typically has a minimal impact on the land compared to other types of power plants, so it is unclear why solar would need a decommissioning bond when a wind turbine or even a gas plant does not.
Utility scale energy storage development is beginning to take hold in Maryland and will be an important part of grid reliability in the future. The Renewable Energy Certainty Act fast tracks energy storage development, as long as the projects meet many of the same development plan requirements mentioned above for solar projects.
What makes this bill so important is that it will allow for the development of distributed resources in Maryland. Despite being the biggest consumers of electricity, counties in central Maryland have the strictest zoning laws against solar, which has prevented building power generation near where it is used. These policies keep Maryland using a centralized grid, even though a distributed grid is inherently more reliable and efficient. In a centralized electric grid, a few large generators which are far away from population centers make most of the energy, and transmission and distribution lines bring it to population centers. In this case, a single large transmission line or large generator failing causes many people to lose power. In a distributed grid, there are many smaller power plants which are near the electrical load. Therefore, a single failure will affect fewer people, on average fewer people will face power outages each year, less expensive power lines are required, and electrical losses are reduced. One additional consideration is the reliability of individual distributed resources. Since solar is not nearly as reliable as the common large power plants (nuclear, gas, coal, etc.), it is essential to include storage to increase the reliability of distributed renewable plants.
Here’s the link to the bill page.
Renewable Energy Certainty Act
