June 2024

Sedgwick County appeared poised to follow its ban on wind farms with widely vetted regulations that would allow acre after acre of solar panels pumping renewable energy into the electrical grid.Instead, the county still has a moratorium on the construction of large-scale solar farms.“Boils down to a simple phrase: not in my backyard,” said Walt Chappell, a solar power booster and longtime critic of local government.The stall leaves the industry frustrated and some environmentalists upset that objections from neighbors who’d be near a proposed Chisholm Trail utility-scale solar project west of Maize may have blocked the project.Sedgwick County needed regulations for the relatively new form of industrial development — and it got high marks from the industry and federal agencies for what the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission drafted.But after the county was confronted with a specific solar farm proposed for the northwest suburbs of Wichita, local officials balked in March and extended the county’s moratorium for six months.What planning and public policy experts sayKimberly Svaty is a Topeka-based lobbyist for the firm, Invenergy, that wants to build the Chisholm Trail Solar Energy Center.