Walking along a snowy trail, Kate McPherson points out evidence of life in the frozen forest. She stops to examine a spot where the snow has been disturbed by deer digging up grass and acorns. She traces the path of a mink: where it bounded along a streambed, swam through a culvert, and wriggled out on the bank.

“You can see these little specks on the ground,” she said, pointing out scattered brown dots on the snow. “That’s from birds, probably things like chickadees and titmice, coming through and foraging – either eating the buds off the trees, eating the seeds out of the cones, or just looking for tasty tidbits in there.”

McPherson is a wetlands scientist and wildlife biologist with Save The Bay. Hearing an American goldfinch, she stops to listen.

“One thing you’ll notice is, we can’t hear the highway anymore. We’re maybe a mile into the woods. And this is pretty rare for Rhode Island. We have a lot of roads. And so anytime you’re in a spot where you can just hear quiet it’s – you can’t really put a value on that. But I think it’s really important.”

We’re in Fort Wildlife Refuge, a conservation area owned by the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, not far from where she grew up in North Smithfield.

Since the 1960s, Rhode Island has been losing forested land to residential and commercial development. And forests are being broken into smaller chunks, which provide less habitat and are more vulnerable to invasive species. The loss comes with costs: forests filter air and water, and help slow down climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the air.

“When I was in high school, I definitely remember lots of blank cul de sacs, new roads going in off of the roads that my friends lived on,” she said.

“But the biggest threat in the past five years has been solar developments. There are at least four or five solar installations in North Smithfield that were previously forested pieces of land.”

The largest, on nearby Whortleberry Hill, involved cutting down 120 acres of forest where McPherson remembers playing paintball as a kid.

“The Whortleberry Hill property is unique because there are no roads that go nearby,” making it a secluded piece of habitat for wildlife, she said. “A large portion of it is mapped as a rare species habitat… which is sort of like a double gut punch.”

In the last four years, more than a thousand acres of Rhode Island forest have been cleared for solar, according to the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. That accounts for more than two thirds of forested land that was cleared for development.

John Rogan, a professor at Clark University in Worcester, has used satellite imagery to map solar development, and study where it’s being built. In Rhode Island and Massachusetts, he found that about half of ground-mounted solar was replacing forest.

“For a relatively large amount of forest loss to occur to an industry that is essentially termed and represented as green energy and renewable energy, it really was surprising to me,” he said.

Conservation groups say replacing forests with solar is short-sighted and counter-productive. They’re pushing the state to change its renewable energy incentive programs to minimize solar development on forested land.

“At first, your gut reaction is, yes, we need more solar, we have to get away from fossil fuels,” McPherson said, remembering when she first began to see solar applications flood in. “Climate change is a thing. Let's get some clean, renewable energy. But it quickly became apparent to me that it's just not sustainable, or smart, or energy efficient to put a solar field in a forest.”

Rhode Island forests pull about 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year, according to a state Department of Environmental Management report – the equivalent of taking more than 100,000 cars off the road.

To slow the effects of climate change, “we need to both maximize the growth of solar and all renewables in Rhode Island and across the country. And also, to meet those same goals, we need to conserve and protect our most important open spaces,” said Sue AnderBois, climate and energy program manager at The Nature Conservancy.

“We need to do both of those things. And they've kind of been pitted against each other,” she said. “It doesn't actually really need to be that way, but the way that our programs are currently set up really drives development to open spaces.”

Solar expansion key to effort to combat climate change

Transitioning to renewable energy sources is part of the effort to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Nearly 90 percent of Rhode Island’s electricity currently comes from burning natural gas, which pumps greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, causing climate change. Locally, that’s driving more extreme weather, sea level rise and flooding, and heatwaves on land and in the ocean.

Since 2017, the state has increased its solar capacity eight-fold, from just under 50 MW connected to the grid in 2017, to about 400 MW by the end of 2021.

But to meet the state’s climate goals, significantly more solar will be needed.

Rhode Island lawmakers are set to consider a bill that would raise the state’s Renewable Energy Standard to 100 percent by 2030, requiring utilities in the state to get all electricity from renewable sources or purchase offset credits.

Meeting that target would require the state to increase solar energy production by more than 13 times current levels, according to an analysis commissioned by the state Office of Energy Resources.

The pace of solar development is causing a reckoning: where will it all go? It’s a question that’s especially fraught in Rhode Island, which is densely populated and where the price of land is among the highest in the country.

Environmental groups push policy aimed at driving development away from forested land

Some lawmakers and environmental advocacy groups want to carve out ecologically important areas where state subsidies for solar could not be used. And they want to further incentivize development on contaminated land, landfills, rooftops and parking lots.

Currently, developers are paid the same rate for electricity, regardless of where the solar panels are located. For commercial-scale solar, developers and industry observers say it’s cheaper and easier to build on land that’s never been developed.

“It's not as easy as, ‘Oh, there's an old dump, you know, slap a bunch of solar panels on there,’” explained state Sen. Alana DiMario, who’s sponsoring the bill. “There's a lot to be done with site remediation and things like that.”

“So we're trying to figure out, how do we create some incentives to make [development on contaminated sites] more desirable, and also to identify what the conservation opportunities are for forests and green spaces that we really do not want to have developed, and disincentivize going in that direction,” she said.

Previous bills aimed at changing the incentives for solar development have failed to win support. DiMario said projects that are already in progress would be grandfathered in, but she’s still working on the details of the legislation.

And policy analysts are split on whether solar developers really need the added incentives to make building on some of these prefered sites profitable.

“We've had development on a number of brownfields, on a number of landfills in Rhode Island, leveraging the existing laws and associated policies over the last six or seven years,” pointed out Chris Kearns, Assistant Director for Special Projects at the state’s Office of Energy Resources.

“We have to be sensitive to ratepayer costs, as well. And the natural question is, well, why do you necessarily need an adder to promote solar development on certain locations if you're already seeing solar development built on those locations without any additional incentive being needed?” he said.

The state already runs incentive programs for solar developments on brownfields and parking lots, which can be pricey to build because of the canopies needed to lift panels above parked cars. And Kearns said he’s worked with municipalities, school districts, and other solar customers to craft requests for proposals in a way that encourages developers to build on non-forested sites.

Beyond that, he said, the state’s role is limited. More than two thirds of forest in Rhode Island is privately owned. And zoning decisions are up to cities and towns.

Debate plays out locally

The question of where solar developments should be built has gotten contentious at the local level.

This fall, Warwick joined Cranston, Exeter, and North Smithfield in putting a temporary moratorium on solar development to give the city time to consider a solar ordinance.

“The administration was kind of grappling with a solar policy because there have been three commercial systems that had been already constructed,” said Tom Kravitz, the city planner.

In each case, the developer had applied for an individual amendment to the city’s zoning. Kravitz said city leaders realized, “We should really try to address this. It's not going to go away.”

In addition to the three existing solar installations, the city is expecting applications for a couple more. Several of these are on open space – one on a former golf course at the Valley Country Club, another on wooded land owned by the YMCA of Greater Providence, and a third on the property of the Little Rhody Beagle Club. And they’ve generated pushback from some residents.

“Warwick is overcrowded. We've already got the airport. We've already got the big malls. We've got the shopping areas,” said Leslie Derrig, who chairs the Warwick Land Trust. “We've got to find a way to save our open space here in Warwick.”

In October, Kravitz held a community meeting to get input on the ordinance. He said, “the general consensus was that, look, there's a lot of opportunity in Warwick for solar within the built environment,” on the city’s many rooftops, and pitched over the acres of parking lots.

“Simply stated, that’s what the policy is looking to do,” Kravitz said. “It's looking to really try to maximize the built environment versus the forested environment.”

The new version blocks commercial-scale solar development from all open space and residential zones, and prevents developers from getting a zoning change, as the first three facilities did. And it limits construction of stand-alone commercial-scale solar facilities to contaminated sites.

Kravitz is also wary of solar taking the place of businesses. He doesn’t want to see the city’s commercial and industrial districts converted into fields of solar panels.

“You can't beat jobs for people,” he said. “There's temporary construction jobs when you're building the solar, but then once it's up, it just sits there. And as a planner, let's face it, you kind of cringe at losing land, in this kind of acreage, in your general industrial districts to solar.”

His solution is to encourage solar development as an accessory use – making it easier for businesses to build solar canopies over parking lots without having to go through planning board review. The idea is that solar could supply businesses with electricity, without replacing them.

The city council is set to hold a public meeting on the revised ordinance in early March.

Local backlash to solar is part of the reason advocates say changes to the statewide policy are needed.

“If we just keep this as status quo, I think we're gonna see more towns like Warwick pass these really restrictive moratoriums,” said Sue AnderBois. “It's just going to create this weird patchwork of restrictions,” she said, which would make it difficult for the state to reach its renewable energy goals.

Changing solar incentives doesn’t make the forests less vulnerable

Even if solar development on forested land is made more difficult through local zoning or changes to state programs, conservation groups worry that the forests are still fundamentally vulnerable to encroaching development.

In many cases where solar has been proposed or built, land owners were choosing between residential development and solar. That was true on Whortleberry Hill, according to North Smithfield town council president John Beauregard. And in Warwick, the YMCA and Beagle Club said in letters to the city that, even if solar development is blocked, the land won’t remain forested.

“We have heard the objections to solar being developed on our property and the adjacent Beagle Club, but the arguments made by the opposition are fundamentally flawed,” the YMCA wrote. “The opposition compares solar to the existing wooded area. The correct comparison is responsible solar development vs. dense residential development.”

There are no laws that specifically protect forests from development, noted Larry Taft, director of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island.

“Up until the 1970s, wetlands were just places that hadn't been filled and put into productive use, until there was a wetlands law. And now wetlands are considered protected,” Taft said. The federal government has also recognized the value of agricultural soils, and protected farmland.

“The forest is sort of the last one standing to say, ‘Hey, can we recognize those ecological services and do what we need to do to protect them for the value they bring, and not just consider them land that hasn't been developed already?’”

—

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that more than 400 acres of forest were cleared for solar development on Whortleberry Hill. The property where that development was built is 420 acres, but only 120 acres were cleared.

—

Reporter Sofie Rudin can be reached at srudin@thepublicsradio.org.