A Chicago Company Plans to Cover 10% of This Township in Solar Panels

Fayette Township— Meetings of the local planning commission used to have no more than five or six attendees. But not for the past two months.

A Chicago-based company’s plan to cover 10% of the township in solar panels has drawn scores of residents to speak against the project at meetings.

Fayette has only 881 residents, but so many opponents filled the township hall in January that the township board and planning commission have since had to hold all meetings in the auditorium of nearby Jonesville High School. Opponents say the project, proposed by solar and wind company Ranger Power, would mar the landscape and disrupt wildlife.

The proposal to build 1,350 acres of solar panels has already roused residents to revolt. But the same company seems to be planning another solar project nearly twice the size.

Public records reveal that Ranger Power has secured the land use rights to an additional 2,200 acres in Fayette, Allen, and Litchfield townships under the name “Heartwood Solar III LLC.” About 1,400 of those acres are in Fayette. That covers another 10% of the township.

Steve Oleszkowicz, a Fayette Township resident who opposes the project through his group No Solar Fayette, mentioned the company’s acquisition of the land use rights for a third phase at a Feb. 10 meeting of the Fayette planning commission.

“You claim to be a fair, transparent, open, honest company that wants to be a good neighbor,” Oleszkowicz said. “I’d like you to move out of the neighborhood.”

Ranger Power assures residents that it conducts extensive environmental reviews, and the company offers to plant vegetation to shield neighbors’ views of the panels.

“We do a lot of work early on to minimize concerns of wetland or threatened and endangered species habitat impacts,” Brady Friss, a Ranger Power development manager overseeing the Heartwood Solar project, told the Hillsdale Collegian in January. “The projects do field surveys of the whole project area.”

The company doesn’t use eminent domain for these projects. Local landowners choose to lease their land to Ranger Power. But projects in Fayette and other townships must receive special land use permits from local planning commissions.

Even if local authorities halt the projects, the solar company can now go to a state regulatory agency and ask it to override local opposition, thanks to a 2023 law signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“We’re committed to permitting locally,” Friss told The Collegian last month. “That said, the state process exists, but we don’t intend to use it.

But Ranger Power has already asked the state to overrule local authorities on two projects in Ingham and Livingston counties. Fayette residents worry they may be next.

The township is trying to stop such a state takeover by adopting a Compatible Renewable Energy Ordinance, or CREO. The ordinance seeks to align Fayette Township’s zoning rules with state law while keeping restrictions on solar in place, making it more difficult to build. The Fayette Township planning commission recently green-lit a CREO. It must next gain approval from the Hillsdale County Planning Commission and the township’s board.

But there’s no guarantee this measure can stop the projects altogether.

“The system is rigged,” Oleszkowicz said. “If your local CREO exceeds the state mandates, they don't consider it a CREO. If you have a CREO and deny a project, they don't consider your CREO and allow the applicant to appeal to the state.”