I am writing to support the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) draft regulations requiring utility-scale solar developers to mitigate impacts on Virginia’s prime agricultural and forest lands.

We need to strongly support implementation of renewable energy in Virginia to convert to a carbon-neutral energy system.  Climate change, with its associated extreme weather events, is perhaps the greatest threat to Virginia's ecosystem, its wildlife, and the people of Virginia. 

As we promote this transition, we must be thoughtful on the siting of solar facilities that to reduce the impact on forests and prime agricultural lands. Protection of our important ecological forest cores is a very high priority, as these forests are also critical in sequestering carbon and reducing the impact of climate change.   Impact to forest land must be strongly mitigated, if not avoided.  On farm land, protection of soils and providing for ancillary agricultural activities such as pollinator ground covers, beekeeping, grazing, and/or growing hay are important mitigation steps.  

We need solar.  The draft regulations create a mitigation framework that provides solar developers with important flexibility to undertake mitigation in a way that will minimize the burden through thoughtful site design and the ability for a developer to undertake mitigation themselves or pay into a state run program to implement the mitigation. Please finalize these regulations to achieve the goals of supporting renewable energy transition and preserving Virginia’s critical natural resources.

Thank you for your consideration.