Witnesses urge change to Vermont’s ‘single plant’ rule to speed solar on already‑disturbed sites

Pierce Berlin, director of renewable energy markets at Renewable Energy Vermont, told the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on April 2 that the state’s current “single plant” definition in 30 V.S.A. §8002 is preventing new solar from being sited on already‑disturbed or otherwise suitable land and urged the Legislature to change the statute as part of S.50.

Berlin said the statute’s sentence that treats “common ownership, continued title, construction or proximity of facilities to each other” as relevant to whether facilities are part of the same project has created a presumption that adjacent or nearby arrays are one project, producing extra regulatory steps, cost and time. “We'd love to talk about how we can more efficiently use land that already posted in solar or is suitable for solar,” Berlin said.

The issue traces to how Vermont handled early incentive programs. Berlin told the committee the single‑plant language was added in 2009 to prevent larger solar projects from being subdivided into multiple smaller projects to capture above‑market payments under the original standard‑offer program. That program had a…