photo by: Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission

The Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission approved the first application submitted under the county's new regulations for solar energy projects at its Monday, April 24, 2023 meeting.

The first application submitted under the county’s new regulations for solar energy projects may be just one step away from winning final approval from the Douglas County Commission.

On Monday, the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission voted unanimously in favor of a conditional use permit application for the “Stull Solar Farm,” a small-scale solar project located on about 12.6 acres of a 117-acre parcel south of Lecompton. With that vote, the Planning Commission is sending the application to the County Commission and recommending that the county commissioners sign off on it. The County Commission is responsible for making the final decision on conditional use permits, and the project should appear on its meeting agenda in the coming weeks.

Members of the planning commission on Monday spent most of their discussion time hashing out the nuts and bolts of the application. Some members said it was a valuable experience for learning what the group should consider for future solar projects — especially those that are larger in scale.

“This was a great exercise, on a smaller scale for the first time, to go through,” said planning commissioner Jim Carpenter, who was one of the commissioners who served on an ad hoc committee formed to workshop the solar regulations as they were being developed last year. “… I’m glad for all the questions, and I’ll answer any other ones you have, at any time.”

As the Journal-World reported, the project itself is a partnership between FreeState Electric Cooperative, a rural electric cooperative serving nine counties in eastern Kansas including Douglas County, and Evergy. According to the application, Evergy would take the lead in developing and operating the facility, and FreeState would eventually purchase it. Once built, the facility would be unmanned and enclosed with a 6-foot-tall chain-link fence, and any electricity produced there would be transmitted to a substation about a mile to the south on East 400 Road instead of being stored onsite.

photo by: Lawrence-Douglas County Planning and Development Services Office

This map shows the various land uses near the proposed site of Stull Solar Farm south of Lecompton. The proposed project site is denoted by a blue box.

If county commissioners do approve the project, it would pave the way for Evergy to begin construction. County planning staff told the planning commission Monday that the application calls for construction to be completed within six months, with June as the tentative starting time depending on when the project’s approved.

Chris Carey with ppB Enviro-solutions, the environmental consulting firm Evergy and FreeState Electric Cooperative have brought on to assist with permitting for the project, went over some elements of the project for the planning commission Monday night. Carey also made a point to distance the project from any others in the works in Douglas County.

“I want to make it very clear to everybody here that this project isn’t related to anything that may be happening off of Highway 24 or in that general area,” Carey said, referring to a much larger-scale proposed solar project about a mile north of Lawrence that also involves Evergy. “This is a limited-scale project associated with FreeState that’s going to be a distribution-scale solar project.”

That means, Carey said, that the energy generated at the proposed facility will tie directly into FreeState’s substation and will then serve customers here in the area.

“This really is local energy serving local customers,” Carey said.

But it seemed during Monday’s planning commission meeting that there wasn’t much need to drill in on that point. Though one commenter at the meeting voiced some concern about how the small-scale solar farm would affect area property values and whether the companies were doing enough to consider neighbors in general, there’s typically been a much larger organized presence from folks opposed to industrial-scale energy projects in particular whenever any related action is on the agenda for either the planning commission or the Douglas County Commission.

That’s especially been the case for any business related to Florida-based energy firm NextEra’s 3,000-acre “West Gardner Solar” project. While the developers behind the project north of Lawrence have voiced an intent to submit a conditional use permit application by as early as June, NextEra has yet to make any public statement of its own on that front.