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Renewable energy projects in the U.S. are becoming more common, and a recent survey shows they're becoming more popular, too, except some nearby farmers oppose them. Energy companies are trying to win those neighbors over with something called agrivoltaics, combining green energy and farming on the same land. Sam Fuqua reports.
SAM FUQUA: Rolling hills of grass are most of what you see from rancher Ed Prosser's patio in Wyoming, plus one lonely county road.
ED PROSSER: As you can see, while we're sitting here, you haven't seen a car go by, and that'll all change during construction, which will be a at least three- or four-years project.
FUQUA: The project is a 5,500-acre installation called Cowboy Solar. Canadian energy giant Enbridge intends to build it on leased land bordering Prosser's ranch. Next year, a steady stream of trucks is set to go down that road, starting construction and tearing up the grassland.
PROSSER: It's never been touched by a plow, or it's never been used for anything other than grazing of ungulates as far back as anybody knows. And I just hated to see that change.
FUQUA: Prosser was offered $500 an acre to rent his land for solar. He declined, but several of his neighbors said yes. This solar project is expected to generate enough electricity to power over 130,000 homes. It's going instead to large data centers on the outskirts of Cheyenne, operated by companies including Meta and Microsoft. But just because solar panels are going up on the high plains here doesn't mean animal grazing has to stop. Just across the state line in Colorado, a solar company is paying Tom Brown to graze his sheep under their panels near a busy highway.
TOM BROWN: Here, they're eating kochia, which is, like, a native weed to Colorado, and they gain a lot of weight on it.
FUQUA: Brown is a 29-year-old fifth-generation family rancher.
BROWN: I mean, ag is not very lucrative to begin with, so it's definitely helped have a future for us. You know, I have kids that want to ranch and farm as well, and I think this is a great opportunity for them to grow up in it.
FUQUA: National Renewable Energy Laboratory data shows that solar grazing acreage has almost tripled in the past five years to about 50,000 acres today. A survey released this year by the Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab shows the greatest opposition to rural solar projects is from people who live closest to them. Joe Rand, a policy researcher at the lab, says that including crops and grazing improved the attitude of survey respondents by a little.
JOE RAND: Preliminarily, we did see more positive attitudes generally around these agrivoltaic sites that incorporate, you know, whether crop production or grazing or pollination, something like that. But the correlation wasn't as strong as we thought.
FUQUA: Rancher Ed Prosser says the energy company Enbridge wasn't interested in grazing when he asked.
PROSSER: I think I asked one of those representatives if they had any interest in running sheep possibly under these panels, and they said they weren't in the sheep business. They were in the energy business.
FUQUA: Enbridge declined to be interviewed for this story but, in a statement, said it's too early for them to make decisions on vegetation management at the Wyoming solar site.
For NPR News, I'm Sam Fuqua.
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