First utility-scale solar project files for OK in Tippecanoe Co.; calls to stop it grow

‘Rainbow Trout Solar Project’ would cover more than 1,000 acres in western Tippecanoe County. Neighbors push county commissioners for moratorium now to stop it.

• Support today comes from the 51st annual Round the Fountain Art Fair, with artists set up around the Tippecanoe County Courthouse 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, May 24. All proceeds from Round the Fountain go to fund local school art programs and community art projects. The fair is free and there are also free tours of the courthouse permanent collection, featuring some of the best through Round the Fountain’s decades, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Go to roundthefountain.org to donate or volunteer.

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FIRST UTILITY-SCALE SOLAR PROJECT FILES FOR APPROVAL IN TIPPECANOE CO. NEIGHBORS CALL FOR MORATORIUM TO STOP IT

A pair of companies looking to plant the first utility-scale solar project in Tippecanoe County, one that would include more than 1,000 acres of panels roughly five miles west of West Lafayette, filed for a required special exception late last week.

The application for what’s been dubbed the Rainbow Trout Solar Project, signaled for months and officially filed at the County Office Building on Friday, sets up a brewing showdown with residents in two sections of western Tippecanoe County.

This week, neighbors ramped up their call for county commissioners to block the 120-megawatt plan with a temporary moratorium.

(Photo: Unsplash)

More than two dozen residents who live between Division Road and Montmorenci – roughly the footprint of the solar project – returned Monday to plead with county commissioners to step in before the Rainbow Trout proposal gets a hearing, potentially as soon as June 25.

“We ask that you please consider that it’s still not too late to take a more sensible approach,” Kenny McCleary, a homeowner who presented the residents’ case to commissioners, said Monday.

“Hit the pause button here on utility-scale solar to give us time via temporary moratorium or other methods to understand the needs from an ordinance and zoning standpoint that such a large project that can stretch for over three miles takes on,” McCleary said. “It's not too late to pause and look at our ordinances to make appropriate guardrails and revisions that protect the county, that protect residents, that protect the environment and the existing property owners who are cooperating with this project.”

ABOVE: Here’s the map of of the proposed Rainbow Trout Solar Project, with two sections of western Tippecanoe County marked in blue. BELOW: The northern section, near Montmorenci, and the southern section, north of Division Road.

Commissioners didn’t commit on Monday to their next move – if there is one, four years after they approved an ordinance that set up the zoning rules covering large-scale solar projects and how they are decommissioned once their lifespan is up.

But commissioners agreed to invitations to tour the area with residents later this week.

“I know that area well,” Commissioner David Byers, a dairy farmer in western Tippecanoe County, said after Monday’s meeting. “The questions we have are about what a moratorium – if we go that way – really would do. … If we change the ordinance, since this is filed, do they get to work with the rules we have now? We can’t answer those questions, yet.”

Commissioners said they understood that that Rainbow Trout proposal likely wouldn’t be the last for the county.

Teresa Witkoske, owner of Black Blanket Farms Bed and Breakfast, points to her property on a map of a proposed solar project. She said the prospect of having her bed and breakfast overlooking acres of solar panels “would be devastating” to the business. (Photo: Dave Bangert)

Company officials with Geenex, who held an initial community information session at Purdue’s Convergence Center in March, did not immediately reply to questions this week.

But here’s some of what can be gleaned from an application that came in a three-ring binder roughly six inches thick, with more than 700 pages of specifications and studies about solar energy production.