Lexington-Fayette County should say yes to solar development in our built environment and yes to putting time and resources towards solutions that can help us reach our goals of carbon neutrality. If our elected officials are serious about reducing local carbon emissions, the first step should be focusing efforts on every suitable roof, brownfield, parking lot, industrial area, and government building in Lexington-Fayette County.
We should dedicate time and resources to talking to community stakeholders like Fayette County Public Schools (who already have a net-zero campus at Locust Trace), the University of Kentucky, Transylvania University, Bluegrass Airport, and others, about how we can identify potential sites for innovative solar projects which directly offset our local energy footprint. Other communities have done it with big results — and so can we.
Instead, efforts by some elected officials have solely focused on how to change our local policies to permit private companies, like Nashville-based but Shell Oil-owned Silicon Ranch, and inevitably others, to build industrial-scale solar energy developments on Fayette County farmland…