The author of this op-ed is a member of State College Borough Council.
President Jimmy Carter passed away this week. I’ve long respected him as a politician with true integrity and will always try to serve with the same honor and honesty that he did. Part of this honesty requires exposing the misleading statements that my fellow elected State College Borough Council member Josh Portney continues to make about solar. Those without all the facts may see his claims as forthright, but in reality, they are misleading.
Councilman Portney tried to explain his original misleading statements by saying, “I was referring to… a March, 2023 interoffice memo.” That memo existed but reality had disproven its predictions long before he referenced them. The Borough signed a contract to buy electricity with renewable energy credits (RECs) for 8.17 cents per kWh in September 2024, and we started paying that rate in December 2024. The Solar Power Purchase Agreement will start at 7.6 cents per kWh with RECs. This difference may seem small, but the PPA contracts for over 300 million kWh across all purchasers, so correctly presenting both PPA and grid prices really matters. On Dec. 3, 2024, when Councilman Portney claimed “right now we’re paying… a cheaper rate,” grid rates were higher than the initial PPA rate.
He could admit this mistake and ask forgiveness. He hasn’t.
Instead, Councilman Portney followed up with an op-ed that continued to mislead. He wrote, “the Borough could generate a significant majority (nearly 1.7 MW or 63%) of its annual energy consumption if it builds solar panels on municipal property.” We should install solar on borough-owned rooftops to lock in low prices, but we’ll likely need around 1.7 MW in addition to the PPA. The Borough’s energy consumption is not just electricity. We spend lots of money on fossil fuels to power our municipal vehicles and heat our buildings. Converting these to efficient electric vehicles and heat pumps will eliminate this fossil fuel use and reduce our total energy demand, emissions and costs, but our electricity usage will increase. Installing 1.7 MW of solar will only generate a minority of our total energy consumption. It is misleading to imply otherwise.
Councilman Portney also repeats the fossil fuel deception that pits solar against agricultural land. Solar and farming can co-exist. Sheep have been grazing under UAJA’s solar array next door in College Township for years. The main limiting factor for this is a lack of shepherds. Hopefully, people interested in raising livestock will seize this new business opportunity. Research is also finding effective ways to grow crops under solar panels. That usually requires that panels be mounted higher up with more spacing, or even vertically, so it is unlikely to happen with the PPA solar array, but it is possible with other solar farms in the future.
The most important fact to remember is that housing sprawl is the main reason we’re losing agricultural land. The American Farmland Trust produced a detailed report on this in 2020 and USDA’s Census of Agriculture backs it up. The 2022 census shows Pennsylvania had just over 7 million acres of agricultural land left in 2022, down over 750,000 acres from 1997. If that land was used for solar it could produce more electricity than our entire state currently uses. In reality, less than 1% of Pennsylvania’s electricity currently comes from solar, and most of this land has become residential sprawl.
In the State College area, we have many real-life examples of housing replacing agricultural land, like The Yards and the former Harner Farm property. Although these are located outside of State College Borough, many of their residents likely commute here for work or school. Updating our zoning to allow more homes here is a first step toward improving housing affordability and the strongest action the Borough can take to preserve farmland. This can also increase our tax base and decrease the distance workers commute, reducing the emissions, traffic and municipal expenses created by longer-distance driving. The zoning rewrite has been my top priority since I was elected. I’ve expressed my disappointment to Borough Council and staff that it was delayed, and will continue to fight to get it done this year.
Jimmy Carter understood the value of solar. He famously installed panels on the roof of the White House and championed solar’s potential. Back then it was new and wildly expensive, but research he helped fund has made solar the cheapest way to generate electricity in the world. Today’s barrier to solar adoption isn’t the price of the panels, but misinformation about them. Misinformation is driving localities in Pennsylvania to create laws that add so much red tape to solar that they effectively ban it, limiting the freedom of both farmers and residents to benefit from this life-changing technology.
Misinformation was able to sway elections in 2024, but it’s a new year now and we can choose a different path. I’m proud to have the support of current Council President Evan Myers and previous Council President Jesse Barlow for the content of this op-ed. They agree that we’re all in this together and we need everyone on board to productively move forward. That includes Councilman Portney – but the first step is for local elected representatives like him to correct their misleading statements so we can move forward together in honesty. We should honor the memory of Jimmy Carter by committing to truth and integrity right here in State College.
