The Gloucester County Planning Commission will hold a public hearing about solar energy facilities at 7:30 tonight in the colonial courthouse.

If ultimately adopted by the Gloucester County Board of Supervisors, the amendments to the county code specifically address solar energy facilities in the Rural Conservation (RC-1) district.

Planner Tripp Little said the commission has discussed the matter at several recent meetings and has come up with these proposed changes:

—Removing the size/area of systems for the ordinance;

—Basing the scale of the systems on state code language for net metering;

—Adding provisions for waiving buffer requirements, and

—Adding a surety requirement to the decommissioning plan, with provisions regarding when a surety must be posted. As proposed, a utility-scale solar energy facility would have rated capacity to produce more than one megawatt (MW) of electrical power. A large-scale system could produce more than 20 kilowatts of el...