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Senate hearing opens on bill to change New Hampshire stormwater rules for solar arrays
Summary
Supporters told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that New Hampshire’s stormwater rules and wetland guidance are adding construction costs that threaten small- and mid-sized solar projects; DES officials said site-specific review and rulemaking are the appropriate next steps.
Sen. Howard Pearl opened a hearing on Senate Bill 65 on stormwater management for solar arrays, saying the bill would align New Hampshire’s stormwater and wetland rules for solar projects with “best available science.”
The bill’s proponents — solar developers, an environmental nonprofit and a utility representative — told the committee that the state’s current alteration-of-terrain (AOT) rules and DES guidance treat many solar arrays as impervious surfaces, forcing developers to design and build large stormwater basins that can add hundreds of thousands to more than $1 million in costs. “Your typical solar project in New Hampshire is about 20 acres in size…under DES’s rules, on average, you’re required to build about 3 or 4 acres of concrete stormwater basins,” Sam Feigenbaum of Kearsarge Energy said.
Why it matters: Proponents said the extra costs render many projects financially nonviable, cutting landowner lease income, local tax revenues and potential electric-bill savings for households. They urged the committee to adopt language that would let DES consider newer methodologies — notably the PVSmart tool developed by the University of Minnesota and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — to estimate post-construction stormwater impacts.
Developers and consultants described how neighboring states treat arrays differently. Dale Knapp of Walden Renewables said Maine and Vermont generally treat panels as pervious, and that PVSmart “is designed to evaluate soil texture, slope and porosity to figure out what the treatment capacity of that buffer underneath your panels is.” Lindsey Burgoyne of Revision Energy compared costs: in Maine, permit-by-rule fees for 10–20 acre projects typically cost roughly $5,000; she cited a New Hampshire project in a hayfield that incurred $15,000 in permitting and roughly $160,000 per stormwater basin, for about $175,000 total — “35 times” the Maine baseline in her example.
Engineers and soil scientists said the existing AOT solar-specific provisions (Part 1511) can overestimate impervious area and therefore require oversized centralized stormwater structures that may increase construction impacts and long-term maintenance. Scott Williams, a licensed professional engineer with Pathways Consulting, testified that the solar rules “presume the panels, suspended above the ground are essentially impervious areas, just like a parking lot or a roof,” and that in many low-impact installations the ground cover under panels remains meadow and continues to infiltrate runoff.
DES officials, including Phil Trowbridge (Land Resources) and Amy Clark (Alteration of Terrain bureau), responded that the department is not taking a blanket position against classifying some arrays as pervious and that their rules were written to address concentrated runoff and erosion that can occur on sloped sites. DES said the issue is highly site specific and that waivers and rule revisions are possible. “Declaring by fiat that all solar projects are pervious on meadows does not match when you’re going to clear cut a steep slope to put down solar panels,” Trowbridge said.
Eversource and Clean Energy New Hampshire urged a timely fix. Griffin Roberge of Eversource said the utility supports SB 65 because it could streamline permitting and reduce costs. Sam Evans Brown of Clean Energy New Hampshire warned the committee that ISO New England projects and interconnection queues show rising load and generation needs; he said a pipeline of smaller, distributed projects (developers cited hundreds of megawatts in queue territory) makes prompt resolution urgent.
Outcome and next steps: Committee members encouraged continued technical negotiations between DES and the industry to map PVSmart inputs to field-measurable parameters and to explore site-specific waivers. The chair said the committee would “sit on this bill just a little bit” to let parties continue discussions. No formal committee vote on the bill occured at the hearing.
Ending: Proponents and DES agreed to keep talking; developers emphasized the immediate practical impacts on projects in their pipelines while DES reiterated the need for site-by-site evaluation and careful rulemaking to avoid unintended erosion and water-quality impacts.
