Worthington’s voters didn’t try to halt large-scale solar because they doubt the climate crisis. They were trying to protect a watershed, a floodplain and open farmland. The attorney general’s office struck down their moratoriums as legally too vague and insufficiently justified.
I’m sympathetic. The instinct to guard the Westfield River and the town’s fields is sound, and nobody wants a working landscape paved over with panels. But the very project that alarmed Worthington points to the way out. The array proposed at 190 Ridge Road is agrivoltaic: the panels are elevated so the field beneath them stays in agricultural use. The land does double duty: power above, farming below.
That matters, because land is the most serious local environmental trade-off solar entails. It burns no fuel, fouls no air, and does not spike bills when fossil-fuel markets lurch. Land used twice is land protected.
The residents had a fair reason to want the time to write real siting rules before more projects moved forward. That was the strongest part of their case. But the moratoriums were drafted too loosely to survive review, and a pause that gets voided buys no time at all.
The better path is the one Article 7 reached toward: a solar overlay district that steers arrays toward suitable ground, paired with dual-use designs like Ridge Road’s that keep a field in production while it generates power. Bundled into a defective moratorium, the overlay went down with it. Written on its own, it has a much better chance. A town can do that work quickly. Speed matters, because a transition stalled one local pause at a time is no transition at all.
The way to protect both the landscape and the future isn’t to halt solar, but to decide where it belongs. On that, the neighbors anxious about their energy bills and the neighbors anxious about a warming valley want the same thing.
Sue Donaldson
Northampton