FRANKLIN COUNTY, Va. – On Monday night, neighbors around Smith Mountain Lake got their first look at a proposed solar farm in Franklin County.
The 220-acre project would be the first in the Roanoke Valley. The Israeli-owned company unveiled the Westlake Solar farm and said it’s slated to be off Route 122 about a mile west of Bridgewater Plaza.
“It is a proposed twenty-megawatt project so it’s a distribution level project, it will generate approximately enough energy to power twenty-four hundred homes,” Energix development manager Dominika Sink said.
It’s slated to begin and finish construction in 2022, adding about 75 temporary jobs. The company intends to sell its power to Appalachian Power and said they worked together to pick the site.
“At the end of the day we sell the energy to the grid and so we have to work with the utility to make sure where we put this project it’s a good location for it,” Sink said.
The project still needs federal and local permitting before it can move forward. Area residents shared their concerns with the company, who said although it’s located close to the water, it won’t be visible from the lake.
“We also are going to be planting trees all around the property and the fence line so as to make sure no one, if you go away from the fence no one can really see what’s inside the fence,” Energix development analyst Sanket Kolte said.
People in the area are also concerned about property values being next to a solar farm. They are afraid it will drive prices down, but the company said it believes otherwise.
“There’s extensive research that shows there’s no negative impact on adjacent residential or agricultural land,” Sink said.
The project is expected to last 25 years and contribute $2 million in taxes over that time.