When solar projects come knocking, how do communities achieve PV-SuCCESS?

Large projects pay production taxes, 80% of which go to the host county while the remaining 20% goes to the townships. Beyond that, when solar is done well, it can have benefits ranging from soil health and water quality to pollinators and carbon sequestration.

At the same time, it’s essential to ask host communities about what’s important to them and what they see as potential drawbacks, working collaboratively to address concerns. As Brian Ross, the project lead, noted, “Solar development affects the host community’s natural infrastructure, its agricultural base, and its cultural identity. Yet those risks can potentially become benefits with proper siting and site design. PV-SuCCESS was working to build tools for communities to shape solar development so that the projects help deliver the community’s priorities: stronger farm economies, protected or enhanced agricultural soils, restored natural functions.”

PV-SuCCESS brought together multiple partner organizations to learn more about how solar affects the landscape and the ways people use it. The project looked at those different pieces through the lens of ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are the benefits that the environment provides to humans — things like food, clean air, pollination, climate regulation, recreation, and even aesthetics and local identity.

With that in mind, PV-SuCCESS paired physical research (soil and water monitoring) with cultural research (community conversations). The end goal was to create a framework for understanding the different tradeoffs associated with where and how solar is developed, along with tools for applying that framework in the real world — by local, state, and Tribal decision makers, as well as by communities and developers.

Another key piece of the PV-SuCCESS project was to collect physical, chemical, and biological field data at solar facility sites. This information is being incorporated into the integrated framework to help decision makers understand the impacts of solar development on soil health and water quality.  

Dr. David Mulla from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Soil, Water, and Climate led the physical research. Jake Galzki and Muhammad Tahir, research professionals also with the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate, conducted field research and data collection. This work builds on previous work conducted as part of the PV-SMaRT project.

The study included 5 sites in Minnesota and one each in Iowa, Wisconsin, and New York. All sites had instruments for continuous soil moisture measurements under solar panels, between arrays of panels, and at the panel drip edge to measure soil-water interactions at these unique locations. This data was used with modeling software to develop a solar-specific runoff calculator to predict runoff at proposed solar sites with different soil characteristics, as well as the effects of measures like soil decompaction and the introduction of different ground cover conditions. Together, these can inform decisions about where solar is sited and how the site is managed to enhance local water quality.

The team also evaluated soil health at solar sites. All sites had sampling to establish baseline soil health conditions, and follow-up sampling is helping understand how soil health at these sites changes over time. Multiple sites have grazing under panels, so this analysis will also help characterize how different grazing practices impact soil health.

Finally, groundwater was sampled at the Minnesota sites to analyze nitrate levels, and initial results show that solar sites with deep rooted perennial vegetation can help protect groundwater resources from high nitrate levels.

Key partners on the cultural research included Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs), the Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, and the Great Plains Institute. Engagement included extensive interviews, surveys, and workshops in communities like Marshall, Crookston, and Caledonia, MN.
 

The University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment led the development of a framework to show tradeoffs associated with siting solar in different places. According to Research Scientist Nathaniel Springer, “We learned early on in the project how important the development and permitting process is, and that any framework should be flexible to align with these processes. This led us to building tools that consider both the before case — when a development site or developer has not yet been chosen or approved — and the after case, where the site and developer have been selected.”

The team developed a flexible framework to consider physical and cultural tradeoffs simultaneously, while also considering the differences in scale (from field scale to the landscape or community scale). While the project itself is no longer underway, the team has continued work on a draft mapping tool based on the PV-SuCCESS work.

The tool helps organize information for solar stakeholders about how development of a site or set of sites might improve some services but reduce others, and engage folks in a process of determining where development might be best, or if development is already happening, the tradeoffs associated with different management options.

Even though the project was cut short, there is the wealth of material on the project website, as well as the opportunity to adapt the PV-SuCCESS findings to other ongoing projects. In 2026, CERTs is leading a partnership of 11 organizations to launch the Minnesota Siting Collaborative to support stakeholders and strengthen decision-making processes on renewable energy development. There is more to come on that effort, so stay tuned!