Orange County NC Website
Appraisal Analysis <br /> • Much lower in height, traffic, noise, light etc. than most other development <br /> • "Dark at night." <br /> • Passive Use Harmonizes with Adjacent Uses <br /> • Establishes certainty of a long term, low intensity use <br /> Professional Engineers' Affidavits <br /> • Will not endanger public health or safety <br /> • Project will meet all codes <br /> • Project will generate less traffic than one house. <br /> • No utilities are required or used. <br /> Solar Farm Meets SUP Conditions <br /> • Use will maintain or promote the public health, safety and general welfare <br /> • Use will maintain or enhance the value of contiguous property, and the use is a public <br /> necessity <br /> • Location and character of use are in harmony with area and in compliance with <br /> Comprehensive Plan <br /> Brent Nieman, professional engineer, will speak to some civil engineering issues. Gabe Cantor, <br /> PE runs all of our engineering, but he will speak principally to electrical engineering issues. <br /> Rich Kirkland, MAI on some evaluation issues, and Mr. Neill you've heard. The schedule of the <br /> presentation will be that I will tell you a little bit about Strata Solar; describe a solar electric <br /> power plant; describe some similar visual —some uses that we feel like are similar visual <br /> impacts; the appraisal analysis; and the engineers will speak and then just briefly touch on the <br /> S.U.P. conditions. <br /> North Carolina is the 5th ranked state in solar energy generation and Strata is the largest <br /> developer in North Carolina, and we are actually the 6th largest developer in the nation. We <br /> have just completed approximately 50, 5 megawatt farms, and this plant will be a template 5 <br /> megawatt project that we do. And our goal is to construct another 50 this year; so we are <br /> operating 50 of these plants at this point. So we do everything from this point— site acquisition, <br /> entitlement. We construct the plants. Of course we design it, get all necessary approvals, and <br /> then we own and operate the plants for 20 years or more. <br /> We create quite a bit of jobs. We have 80 professional staff approximately in Chapel Hill. That <br /> includes engineers, project managers, attorneys, accountants, technicians; and we employ <br /> anywhere from 500 to 1200 construction staff on about a dozen jobs at one - at any given time. <br /> It's about a 3 to 4 month construction cycle, so —and about 100 to 200 people on each job, so <br /> we can have quite a bit of employees at any point in time. We average about 1,000 employees <br /> over the course of a year in North Carolina. <br /> This is a typical 5 megawatt farm. This is in Wake County, in Fuquay. That's a 40 or 50 acre <br /> project with a 25 acre panel footprint- a typical project. A typical 5 megawatt farm is 30 to 50 <br /> acres with a 25 acre footprint, approximately 25,000 3 x 5 solar panels fixed on aluminum racks, <br /> up to ten feet high, excluding a handful of utility poles that we will install to connect to the <br /> existing power lines. We basically do not grade. We will clear trees and use existing land <br /> contours, very minimal grading, 4 or 5 ten foot square 100 square foot pads inside the plant that <br /> have an inverter and a transformer. And then we will re-plant the project, and at the end of the <br /> day the project will have approximately 1 percent impervious surface. <br />