Serving Barnwell County and it's neighbors since 1852
In Allendale County, the Lily Solar field consists of 640 acres of photovoltaic solar panels.
Peppered throughout fields in Allendale, Barnwell and other nearby rural counties are vast fields of solar panels, the start of the future of renewable energy in rural South Carolina, where new solar projects are being announced every other week. However, questions remain about how the solar boom will affect rural communities.
Around the world, countries are in a race against time to get off of fossil fuels. In the United States, a flurry of state and federal tax credits to incentivize the installation, transitioning rural areas of South Carolina like Barnwell and Allendale off of fossil fuels, is coming within reach.
The goal of the tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act is to outcompete the price of fossil fuels on global markets, by incentivizing businesses to get off of planet-warming fossil fuels. In rural South Carolina, new factories for manufacturing solar panels have been announced, including in nearby Orangeburg County. In agricultural counties like Barnwell and Allendale, where empty fields and declining economies are in no short supply, solar farms are being permitted, constructed and connected to the grid at a breakneck pace.
“What you’re going to see is this continued massive buildout of renewables,” said Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). “Who’s doing the building is what is yet to be determined.”
Solar farms & distributed installation
One of the largest solar farms in the region is the Lily Solar field in Allendale, which has 640 acres of solar panels in Allendale County. The solar farm was announced in 2015, completed in 2019 and has been generating electricity ever since. In Blackville, a 7.2-megawatt solar farm was completed in 2019, and was acquired by Dominion Energy.
Additionally, multiple new solar fields have yet to be built and are in the early stages of their development. In a field just outside of Fairfax, Southern Current, a solar developer that focuses on large scale projects, is in pre-construction on a solar farm called Quest Solar that is slated to be finished in 2026. That same year, a field just outside the Town of Elko will become a solar farm.
Wamsted said that although large utility companies like Dominion Energy are building out solar farms, the tax credits are also being used by small businesses and merchants.
“[We don’t know yet] if it’s going to be utilities leading the way, or outside developers leading the way,” Wamsted said. “In North Carolina and South Carolina, the utilities there are building solar, but I would not say they are building it as fast as they can or as fast as they should.”
Businesses in rural regions of the state are beginning to pursue solar due to the low cost, according to Andrew Broome, a design specialist at Southern Coker Power, a solar provider that helps install utility scale, residential and commercial solar.
“Farms are one of the biggest consumers when it comes to [the USDA’s] solar program for agriculture,” Broome said.
Solar manufacturing
The Inflation Reduction Act contains multiple corporate subsidies for advanced solar manufacturing. These include the manufacturing of inverters, batteries (which charge during the day and keep the lights on at night) and photovoltaic cells as well as silicon, a key ingredient in manufacturing solar panels.
Additionally, to attract new industry to the state of South Carolina, the state government has thrown money at solar manufacturing companies. A recently announced solar manufacturing facility in York County, South Carolina received $2 million from South Carolina’s Coordinating Council for Economic Development. In the year since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, South Carolina has become second in the United States — behind only Georgia — for the most investments in new manufacturing of photovoltaic solar panels.
On the installation side, tax credits exist to help reduce the costs of purchasing solar energy for both businesses and private consumers.
For rural regions of the country, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program (also called REAP) has grants and loans for small businesses and farmers that aim to reduce upfront costs.
In March 2023, Chinese solar manufacturer Hounen Solar announced that it would be setting up a new solar factory in Orangeburg County, which the company claims will create 200 jobs and bring $33 million in investment. Additionally, on September 19, Canadian solar company Silfab Solar announced a new solar factory in York County that it claims will bring 800 jobs and $150 million.
Climate crisis & barriers
The economic viability of renewable energy like solar panels is happening concurrently to the escalating effects of the global climate crisis, which is manifesting itself locally in increasingly intense storms, hotter summers and ecosystem decline. In order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the world must reduce emissions of carbon — which comes from burning fossil fuels — by 43% by 2030, as well as reduce other greenhouse gasses like methane. Climate scientists say ending fossil fuels as an energy source and replacing them with renewable energy like solar is a major part of the solution.
“Solar works phenomenally well,” Wamsted said. “Yes, we all know that there is no such thing as sunshine at night and [solar] is not dependable 24 hours a day, nobody ever said it was. … Renewables are different from oil and gas or coal but that certainly doesn’t mean they don’t work exactly as they’re supposed to. Wind and solar work quite well, it’s just a different way of running the system.”
Within the community, local business groups like the Bunch Team Corporation, which had a table at the Southern Palmetto Regional Chamber’s recent business expo, help bundle together the tax credits and grants entering the community.
A 60kW solar system that costs $186,000 up front would recover $164,000 within the first year of the installation after combining together the federal tax credits, state tax credits and USDA’s Reap Grant, according to the Bunch Team Corporation’s calculations.
Across the United States, renewable energy is outcompeting fossil fuels, particularly coal. However, the low cost of renewable energy has not yet translated into significant reductions in carbon emissions.
Despite the new incentives, certain barriers to the transition remain for members of rural South Carolina to benefit from the solar boom that is occurring within their community.
Many of the tax credits, grants and loans haven’t yet translated into the much-needed rapid transition off of fossil fuels, which, according to Wamsted, is a national trend.
“The [Inflation Reduction] Act was passed in August of 2022 and we’re still getting through the process of everybody internalizing ‘Okay, I can use that tax credit for this, this tax credit for that,’” Wamsted said.
Fully understanding and calculating how the different requirements and credits can be used requires time before solar buildouts can be done, Wamsted said. “You have to incorporate it in all of your business models and Excel spreadsheets. A lot of that is an unfortunate time function that had to happen, [but] I think we’re going to start seeing a speeding up of the process going forward.”
