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$483 Million Reasons: How Solar and Wind Are Saving Rural Schools | EP291 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Ethan Loomis: So being able to be compassionate and listening well and understanding the concerns and being able to address those concerns in a reasonable way, I think, goes a long way for building trust with with people. The more you can have folks that are local to the project area come and speak about the benefits. So getting the local county assessor to be able to look at the economic benefits, to be able to look at a third party report like ours, and be able to kind of look through it, make sure that our numbers are correct and in line with what they're seeing and how they would evaluate it that is going to go a long way to win local trust and support.
• 1:38
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:48
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition
• 2:04
  Tim Montague: today on the Clean Power Hour the economic benefits of utility, solar, wind and battery projects. My guest today is Ethan Loomis. He is the Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Strategic Economic Research based here in Illinois. Welcome to the show, Ethan, thanks Tim for having me. Great to see the family tradition continuing.
• 2:24
  Tim Montague: I've had your father and the founder of ser on the show a couple of times when the show was known as the solar podcast, most recently in 2021 so it's been quite a while, but Ethan, paint us a picture of how you got involved in the family business, and what exactly does ser do?
• 2:46
  Ethan Loomis: Yeah. So my background is in visual communication, so I have a degree in journalism from Illinois State University and worked for a small nonprofit here in Rockford, Illinois for many years. My start at ser I came to Strategic Economic Research in the middle of the pandemic in 2020, and Dave approached me. I was doing the graphic design for his reports maybe four or five a year at that point in time. And he approached me and said, I'm having more and more developers coming my way, asking for these economic impact reports. I think I need to hire on my first full time employee. And would you consider that? So I gave it some thought and and loved the the nonprofit work that I was doing, I have a background in photo, video production and managing websites and how to communicate a good story, well visually. So learned a lot in that role, but came to SCR and joined the team full time, and now we've grown the company till over 20 employees. We've got people all across the US that work for us.
• 3:55
  Ethan Loomis: So yeah, my father started ser back 15 years ago. Just had some developers come to him asking for him to examine the economic impacts of back then, it was pretty much exclusively wind here in the state of Illinois, and he studied the Green Belt Express transmission line very early on. So with some of those early projects, it's really transition more over to the solar side and battery storage recently, but now we've studied over 500 projects in 38 different states, and we've we've grown our team to over 20 people, so it's been great to be on board with ser and help grow the team.
• 4:35
  Tim Montague: And we'll put a link in the show notes to your website, but check out strategic economic.com and go to the library tab, and you'll just see these are the publicly available reports they've done many, many other reports that are not publicly available because developers pay them for this work, and they don't necessarily want it in the wild. But it is truly impressive. The number of states you've worked in, the number and types of projects you covered. You see their solar, wind transmission and even a report from Lansing, Michigan on batteries. And there's, of course, many more projects in the in the in the back catalog that are not publicly available.
• 5:22
  Tim Montague: So, super cool. Um, so Ethan, you guys have built a true blue family business out of this economic research. Tell us a little more about the business and what is the scale and scope of ser
• 5:37
  Ethan Loomis: Yeah. So we're really focused on partnering with developers of these projects in their community engagement efforts and also during permitting. Oftentimes, when you're bringing this this large. Surge wind or solar project into a rural community, there's going to be a lot of questions that will pop up, and developers are increasingly experiencing opposition to these projects, just levels of concern from community members related to oftentimes, misinformation that's just get getting spread online, and so developers are having to be on the defensive in so many cases in answering these questions, our reports allow developers to partner with the community, to be able to show here's the economic benefits that are going to come to you locally, here's the property tax revenue that will be felt by the local school district, county fund, township fund, Fire District, road district. So we'll calculate out the property tax revenue that then feeds into our economic impact model showing the job creation earnings and economic output, which is essentially the GDP increase locally. So again, our reports can be used both on the community engagement side, at a very early stage in the project, we can calculate the impacts.
• 6:59
  Ethan Loomis: You know, when a developer really just has the county that they're interested in, and they may know the the megawatt capacity that they would be looking to build, we have enough industry standard data on our side to be able to calculate out what those economic benefits are going to be and what the project costs are going to be. But we do work directly with developers as they refine their project footprint and have a better idea of where they're looking to build and what the project costs are going to be. We prefer to get as granular as we can in that project cost data to where developers hand off their project cost to us. We put it in our model. We use in plan, which stands for impact analysis, for planning, and then we'll calculate out those, those impacts to the county.
• 7:50
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's kind of a layer cake of economic benefits. You know, I think consumers think very simply about these projects, but there are many layers of impacts. Of course, there's the pre construction engineering design permitting, okay? So there's, there's a company behind every project that's providing jobs, and then a project goes to construction. Of course, there's construction labor, which is significant, and then there are decades of tax benefits that flow to various taxing bodies, and I want to break that down for our listener. So we just need to as energy professionals, we need to be savvy when talking to the public about the benefits of solar, wind and battery projects, because it's not just installing a piece of hardware on a piece of ground, and then you're done. So how do you like to break this down? Ethan, I call it the value stack. But what are the what are the big buckets of economic benefits, and then maybe we can bite into some details, but let's just focus on solar and batteries, because that is my core audience. Yeah,
• 9:23
  Ethan Loomis: absolutely. So the way that we think about it and the way that the model presents the results is breaking it down into three different layers, the direct, indirect and induced impacts. So those direct impacts are really going to be the on site construction, and then on the operation side, the operations and maintenance technicians, those folks that you can see, you know, working at the project site. So if you show up to a solar project site and you see the construction workforce, those are going to be those direct impacts, but then oftentimes what we see is developers communicating those direct impacts, but they fail to include the indirect and induced impacts as well, and that's where our model can really come in handy for developers. So the indirect impacts are looking at those supply chain impacts. So we look at what materials will be sourced locally for wind projects. You know, we're looking at the rebar and cement and any other type of materials that are used in those foundations that would typically be sourced within the county or very close by, because the cost of transporting those goods and materials is going to become exponentially higher as you're looking outside, outside the project radius. So on the solar side, again, it's it's materials for road repairs, it's fencing that's used to be able to include in that process. So you.
• 10:48
  Ethan Loomis: Um, those are the indirect supply chain impacts and then induced impacts would be just increased local spending when you're bringing, you know, sometimes four or 500 construction workers into a local county. What hotels will benefit? What gas stations, what grocery stores, what other local restaurants and businesses will benefit as a result of that construction workforce, and then those those technicians for the life of the project, staying in the local area. So that's kind of the value stack that you described, of the job creation.
• 11:22
  Ethan Loomis: And then again, the property tax revenue, you know, for these projects, especially in Illinois, for the schools, they're typically receiving about 60 65% of that property tax revenue, and so they are going to benefit tremendously from these projects coming into a rural area.
• 11:44
  Tim Montague: Yeah, we need to remember that rural areas in the United States are hurting. Not everything is hunky dory. The population is diminishing. Young people are going to the urban centers. And while farming is still lucrative, farming cash crops, let's just think of the Midwest where you know, it's it's corn and bean farming that is a lucrative business, but it is largely automated, and so you don't need a big workforce to run that operation, but literally, farming communities are struggling and and so clean energy projects are somewhat of a lifeline. They're an additional source of revenue that, yeah, you're converting some percent of corn and bean farming. In the case of solar, okay, some acreage, you know, in Champaign County right now, there is 100 and I think 70 megawatt solar farm being built.
• 12:51
  Tim Montague: And this county has, you know, 640,000 acres and some 15,000 or no, sorry, 1500 acres are going to be converted to a solar farm.
• 13:07
  Tim Montague: I think it's actually only half of that the project is 1500 acres, and some fraction are getting converted. But so there are some trade offs, right? We are losing some farm ground to solar. The biggest threat to farm ground, okay, is urban sprawl, bar none, by a, I would argue, by a factor of 10. You know, we only need to solarize one to 2% of the landscape, and that includes the built environment, the already built environment. So we're not paving over the bread basket, but we are converting some ground to alternative uses, wind, solar, battery farms. But how does this play out in your mind, and if you were, if you were to explain this to a lay person today, okay, farm, ground, traditional revenue from that tomorrow, wind, solar batteries, how does this impact a local economy?
• 14:14
  Ethan Loomis: Yeah, it's an important point that comes up in these rural communities. We're seeing a lot of questions raised around this issue in many permitting hearings that that we are a part of, we can do a land use analysis as part of our study to be able to look at the acreage that is being taken out of ag production and being used for solar. And typically, this is more of a an issue on the solar side, not so much on the wind side, and that that doesn't take up quite as much land. But as you said, these projects can take up, you know, 1500 upwards of 4000 acres, in some cases, for the projects that we're looking at, we try and look at the overall land footprint of ag within the within the county, and so how many acres are being used currently for agriculture, and typically, the projects that are being Built are taking up less than than 1% of the entire farmland in the county. So we try and paint a big picture of of this issue. We also need to take into consideration different perspectives, not only the landowners, but also the tenant farmer, the other residents local business over owners and government bodies. So we can do an analysis that'll show you know again, how will it affect the landowner? In many cases, it is kind of a no brainer decision for the amount that they are getting for the sole. Land lease, it's going to far exceed what they would make for farming. Oftentimes it'll be three to four times the profits that they would get for farming is what they would be getting for the solar land lease. And then the concern becomes, well, what about the Ag supply chain, we understand that it's beneficial for the landowner themself, but what about the other local businesses that may be affected? So we can do a project by project net economic analysis to be able to show any potential losses on the Ag supply chain side, and kind of net out the increases from the solar and from, you know, we've been doing this for the past few months, is this net economic impact analysis, and we've seen a net benefit still from solar coming in to a county. And every situation, every county is different. So again, our model will look at kind of inter industry spend and how, when you bring in a capital expenditure into a local county, what ripple effects will be felt. So it is quite, quite complicated, but our model can account for that, the the losses on the Ag side, and also the gains that you get from from the solar side. And there still is in the cases that we've looked at, a net benefit.
• 17:19
  Ethan Loomis: So that's that's what we're seeing. Again, a big issue is a question that is posed oftentimes is, how are we going to continue feeding the world if all of our farmland is taken up by these solar panels and so this this issue becomes very dramatized. Oftentimes, we will mention in those permitting hearings that about almost half of corn and soybean production is already being used for energy in the form of ethanol and biodiesel, right? So when you are converting kind of that existing energy usage to to solar, solar is much more efficient in terms of of the per unit of energy that's that's being used.
• 18:16
  Tim Montague: So by a factor of 10, I think, yeah, there was a there
• 18:20
  Ethan Loomis: was a recent study that that came out that was really interesting on this issue, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of the sciences that showed the efficiency of solar versus corn and soybeans, and it was really, really compelling. So we are looking at this issue very closely. Yields increase about 1% annually. So when you're taking out a certain acreage of that farmland from the county, just due to yields increasing on trend each year. Typically, we find that it takes about one to two years for just yields to increasing to make up for that lost acreage in farmland. So we try and look at all aspects of this argument, and be be able to give a fair and balanced view across the board.
• 19:16
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• 19:56
  Tim Montague: Go to Chint power systems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more, I just looked this up in the US, the the total average of corn is 45% of the corn crop is used for ethanol. In the Midwest, that statistic is even higher. It's greater than 70% of our corn acreage is used for ethanol, and that industry is extremely highly subsidized, something like 30% of a corn farmer's income is subsidies, and that makes the industry work. All industries require subsidies, and we're not alone in solar, wind and batteries, and that's true of all fossil fuels and nuclear as well. So.
• 20:50
  Tim Montague: So if you don't use perplexity, check it out. Perplexity.ai.
• 20:56
  Tim Montague: They're not a sponsor of the show. They should be. But I love that search engine because it gives you sources, right? It's it's doing, it's scouring the web and publicly available reports, and then it actually references those in the content that it feeds you, but so it's a super, super useful tool for just asking these technical questions. So there's, there's always a trade off, right, where we're trading some of existing farming. You know, corn and bean farming. Gotta love corn and bean farming. But you know, farming is also something that is dynamic. We didn't corn and bean farm forever. It's not, you know, and we now have propped up this industry called the ethanol industry, the biofuels industry, which, at some point is going to wane. It just is, because it's it's not very economical. It's more economical to farm photons and wind. And it's the physics of that are not that complicated. When you think about what you have to do to the corn to turn it into ethanol.
• 22:08
  Tim Montague: It's highly, highly energetic that process, whereas with solar or wind, right, you're just building a machine, putting it out there, and it gathers free wind and sunshine for 30 years.
• 22:22
  Tim Montague: So there are trade offs. You have published a very interesting report, though, on your website, strategic economic.com forward slash property tax, historic, historical property tax revenues from wind and solar in Illinois, key insights. And you know, you can see, for example, that a county by county assessment of how this has impacted some counties in Illinois where you have a lot of wind and solar, and this includes McLean County, where Bloomington Normal is Lee County, LaSalle County, Bureau County and Henry County. But when you think about this, Ethan pros versus cons economically for rural communities and these Midwest farming communities, what is the net benefit economically, from a property tax perspective, to those communities?
• 23:27
  Ethan Loomis: Yeah, when you're bringing in a project of this size, it's going to create enormous benefits on the property tax side. So as you mentioned, we did a historical property tax revenue report looking at the state of Illinois for all the wind and solar projects that have been built in the state, and we were able to find that the grand total amount of property tax revenue that's been generated for the state of Illinois from these projects across all counties is over $483 million and again, a majority of that tax revenue is going to the local school districts. The thing about these projects is that, as opposed to urban sprawl, as you mentioned, when a solar project is coming in, it's increasing the tax base, but it's not increasing the population to a great degree. So you're not needing to use those services to the degree that you might with urban sprawl. So you're bringing in a large amount of property tax revenue to the schools, to the road district, to the county fund, township, Fire District, library, hospitals, but essentially you're not needing any more out of those services.
• 25:38
  Ethan Loomis: And so this is again, a big benefit to rural communities where they may have not have a whole lot going on, and so it may, in some cases, double their budget for the year with a project of this size, if it's a very small county population wise. So this is something that folks are really interested in.
• 26:06
  Ethan Loomis: People want to know what's, what's the slice of the pie that would kind of translate to economic benefits? To me, the resident locally,
• 26:18
  Tim Montague: yeah, it, when you really start to look at these numbers, it you go, wow, this is really good for rural communities. $484 million over what period of time was this study done? I don't see that.
• 26:36
  Ethan Loomis: So we looked at some of the earliest projects that were were installed. So that would have been in 2003 2004 some of those early projects, as you stated, in Lee and McLean County. And so those are the top counties, you know, looking at table three on page four, McLean County alone has received over $78 million from wind and solar projects in their county. And that's because they got in very early, right? If you look at the last table, table five, you can see McLean County, their school district, starting to benefit in 2007 so some of those earliest projects that were built, and you're just stacking that property tax revenue year over year to create that cumulative effect. So, yeah, the again, the school districts are benefiting from this property tax revenue the most oftentimes it can mean an additional million to $2 million per year. Yep,
• 27:47
  Tim Montague: it's real money.
• 27:47
  Tim Montague: So you know, one of the one of the themes I like to lean into on the show is that we as an industry need to be better about communicating the impact of solar, wind and batteries to the public. Farmers don't like change. They they think, well, we're paving over the bread basket. We're converting farm fields to corn field, I mean, to solar fields. And now that we have things like dual use solar, for example, it's a both and right? You can grow hay, you can grow pollinator friendly vegetation. You can graze sheep on solar farms. And, of course, wind farms is, is, is a very different thing. You can completely keep doing what you're doing on the wind farm, with the exception of the roads and the foundations. But I think I, you know, I want to prop up the developers who are getting better at this, and just say to the industry writ large that we need to do better. But when you think about, you know, your work at ser in terms of of these public hearings on large scale, wind, solar and battery projects. What is working? What is getting the attention of of the not in my backyard, movement, the nimbyism that goes on, some of it quite nefarious and funded by dark money. But what do you what is your advice to developers who are going into these counties where there's not necessarily a lot of friendly faces?
• 29:35
  Ethan Loomis: Yeah, well, I think in a lot of these cases, there can be some some quite loud voices in the room and some prominent personalities that will voice their concerns, but that is not the majority of people, and I think it's important for developers to understand that. And you may not be able to sway the staunch opponents to the project, but people are listening in those hearings and local stakeholders want to take a balanced view and understand all perspectives, and so just being able to keep a level head and not being brought into the drama not to get emotional. And it can be emotional for people. They feel strongly about where they live and the type of lifestyle that is that they have around them, and so being able to be compassionate and listening well and understanding their concerns and being able to address those concerns in a reasonable way, I think, goes a long way for building trust with with people, the More you can have folks that are local to the project area come and speak about the benefits. So getting the local county assessor to be able to look at the economic benefits, to be able to look at a third party report like ours, and be able to kind of look through it, make sure that our numbers are correct and in line with what they're seeing and how they would evaluate it, that is going to go a long way to win local trust and support
• 31:15
  Tim Montague: in our last few minutes together. I do want to highlight that you host an annual renewable energy conference in Bloomington, normal. What? What are you looking forward to about the conference this year, and what are the dates?
• 31:31
  Ethan Loomis: Yeah, we're really excited. We're going to be in Normal, Illinois, September 30 and October 1. So a two day conference. We've done this the past couple years. So. So this will be another great year for learning about renewable energy in specifically the state of Illinois. We're expecting about three to 400 attendees from all areas of the renewable energy industry. The topics will include Illinois legislative updates, how Illinois is navigating the federal attitude towards renewable energy, interconnection issues, hot topics like battery storage and virtual power plants. And we've got some good speakers already lined up. They're going to include Brian granahan from the Illinois Power Agency, JC Kibbe from the state of he's the state of Illinois climate advisor, and then Mark Pruitt from the power Bureau, and we have early bird pricing going on. That ends June 30, so about a month from now, you can get registered at Illinois renewable.com renewable.com got the Yep, we'll put the URL, but we'll
• 32:49
  Tim Montague: put the website Illinois renewable.com in the show notes as well. Anything else before we go Ethan that you want our listeners to know about ser or what's going on in renewables in Illinois? Yeah,
• 33:03
  Ethan Loomis: if you're a developer of renewable energy projects, we would love to be able to provide an economic impact study for your project.
• 33:09
  Ethan Loomis: Again, we've done over 500 projects in 38 states, so we've got a good team here, good amount of experience and expertise in the energy industry. So thanks for the time on your show, Tim. I listen a lot to what you have, who you're interviewing, and it's a great show. So I appreciate having me on
• 33:32
  Tim Montague: well. Thank you. I really appreciate what what ser does, and I look forward to seeing you guys at the conference in at the end of September, and hopefully in at some of the other shows that are going on coming up here, we have Midwest solar Expo. We've got re plus Midwest, and we got the solar farm Summit. You can find that information about all of those events at clean power hour.com go to the events tab.
• 34:00
  Tim Montague: And with that, I'll say thank you so much to Ethan Loomis, of Strategic Economic Research for coming on the show today. How can our listeners find you?
• 34:07
  Tim Montague: Ethan,
• 34:09
  Ethan Loomis: yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can just search for my name. Ethan Loomis, l, o, M, i, s, would love to connect there and try and try and update what's going on with me and the company. So happy to connect on LinkedIn.
• 34:23
  Ethan Loomis: Great
• 34:24
  Tim Montague: with that, I will say, let's grow solar and storage. Thanks so much. You.