Bent Mountain solar

[dbcrawford]

If you are interested in supporting the proposed 4 MW solar farm on Bent Mountain but you are not a Roanoke County resident, you still can. The Roanoke Group of the Sierra Club covers ten counties, one of which is Roanoke. So If you speak as a Sierra Club volunteer, you have appropriate standing. A volunteer doesn't have to be a member, just someone acting in support of our position, in this case, renewable energy, when the site is appropriate, as this one clearly is.

The opportunities for comment are:

Planning Commission meeting on Tuesday, June 4, and the Board of Supervisors on June 25. Meetings are at the County Administration Building on Bernard Dr. Go early to sign up for comment.

For perspective of distributed, llke on roofs, versus utility-scale, these details from Virginia Energy are helpful:

In 2015, Virginia had no utility-scale solar, and about 3,000 distributed sites. At the end of 2021, we had fifty one solar farms of 5 MW or more with a capacity of 2,657 MW and about 26,000 distributed sites with a capacity of 248 MW. Drawing the line at 5 MW means a notable amount of the 248 MW comes from sizable solar arrays that don't make the 5 MW bar. For perspective, the largest array in the area is the Veterans Administration's at 1.6 MW. Personal management of our carbon footprint is important, but to address the need for a lot more renewable energy ASAP, we need the big producers, solar and wind farms.

Dan Crawford

Chair, Roanoke Group, Sierra Club

dbcra...@cox.net