When Michigan farmer Clara Ostrander heard about the benefits of hosting a solar energy project, she remembered something her father had told her four days before he died: Don’t sell the farm. Keep it in the family.
Skeptical at first, Ostrander ultimately decided that harvesting the sun on most of her 120-acre corn-and-soybeans farm south of Detroit would enable her to someday pass the land to her son.
But the project proposed by Virginia-based Apex Clean Energy faced fierce opposition from neighbors who feared lower property values, the spoiling of farmland, and an end to the picturesque views that defined their community. They lobbied township officials for zoning rules to block it.
Ostrander and other neighbors fought back, convincing Michigan lawmakers last year to enact a statewide permitting law that usurps local authority to stop such large-scale plans. “We’re trying to do exactly what our forefathers did, and keep our property they worked so hard for,” said Ostrander.
As renewable energy proposals have flooded the flat, sunny and windy sweeps of Midwest farmland, they have sharply divided tight-knit rural communities.
Nationwide, opponents had used 395 local ordinances like the one in Ostrander’s township to halt green energy projects in 41 states by May 2023, according to a study by Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Even Michigan’s new state law, which takes effect this fall, is not sure to last. Opponents claim the legislation is an affront to the democratic process and are aiming for a referendum to return those decisions to the local level.
“We have deliberate