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Planners recommend changes to solar facilities ordinance

The Gloucester Planning Commission recommended modifying regulations for the county’s solar energy facilities during a meeting Thursday night in the colonial courthouse.

If approved by supervisors, the changes in the zoning ordinance would make utility-scale solar facility a by-right use in the county’s Rural Countryside (RC-1) district.

The changes would remove the size/area consideration of solar systems for the ordinance; base the scale of the systems on State Code language for net metering; add provisions for waiving buffer requirements, and add a surety requirement to the decommissioning plan with provisions regarding when a surety must be posted.

As recommended by the commission, a utility-scale solar energy facility would have rated capacity to produce more than 1 megawatt (MW) of electrical power. A large-scale system would have up to 1 MW of electrical power production, and a small facility would have up to 20 kilowatts of power.

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