Agenda - 05-08-2014 - 5a - Laserfiche WebLink

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