The soon-to-come solar plant, which will be located at the foot of Valley Hill just north of Highway 82, could mean Carroll County could see a substantial increase in revenue. During Monday’s meeting at the Vaiden courthouse, Tax Assessor/Collector Wilton Neal said he spoke with Jack Smith, his counterpart in Lamar County which also has a solar plant half the size of the one that will be built in Carroll County.
Neal said Smith told him when the company who built the solar plant came to Lamar County, they did what’s called an “in lieu of” the regular taxes that the company would have paid, as a tax exemption.
“Jack Smith said they receive $1 million off of their plant,” he said. The plant in Lamar County is also a power purchase agreement where Cooperative Energy, the co-op that owns Delta Electric, harvests its power for as one of its generational assets.
Neal said in terms of Carroll County, if the county decided to do the same thing, 30 percent of that goes to the school district and the other 30 percent goes to the county itself, and that’s only if Renewable Energy Systems comes to the county and asks for an exemption.
“They get $1 million off the plant?” Supervisor Jim Neill asked.
“Yeah, that’s what he told me,” Neal answered.
Neill wanted to know how Carroll County would benefit from the plant being built at the base of Valley Hill. He asked Neal to see how it would increase the assessed value of the county.
Neal said the county is currently assessed at $86 million and could jump up to $100 million but no one knows the amount of the acquisition. He said he didn’t know the plan was finalized until he read it in the The Conservative.
“They’d asked me to create maps for them a while back and I did,” he said. “That’s the last I’d heard of it.”
Supervisors learned a little more about the development after David O’Bryan with Delta Electric and Angela Curry with the Greenwood-Leflore County-Carroll County Economic Development Foundation spoke to the board Monday morning.
O’Bryan said the development has been in the works since 2016. He said the Cooperative Energy board received a request for qualifications and received 20 proposals from different companies for different sites. One of those sites was Carroll County. The Carroll County site beat out all of the proposals.
“It stayed at the top of the pack,” he said. “At one point, it kind of stalled out, but I told them to double down because we needed this plant. It’ll be a great thing for the county.”
O’Bryan said the board voted on the Carroll site Sept. 19 and made it public Sept. 24. He said the site was economically viable and a power purchase agreement was made between the co-op and RES to use all of the power produced at the 652-acre plant that will house over 300,000 solar panels.
He said there is a smaller solar plant in Greenwood that is fixed. He said the data is collected in real time at the plant in Greenwood.
“When the sun shines, you can see it ramp up, and it stay in a straight line,” he said. “But, when there’s a cloud in the sky, you can see it go up or down.”
He said the difference in the plant that will be in Carroll County is the panels will track the sun, and it will generate more power overtime. 0’Bryan said the plant will produce a direct current and then the power will turn into alternating currents that the company can use.
“The great thing about the solar plant is it’s next to the transmitter that’s not far from the line,” Curry said.
Curry said she believes that’s what may have made the site attractive because of the transmitter.
“It’ll be a good thing for our consumers as well as the taxpayers,” O’Bryan said.
Neill also asked O’Bryan if members would see a decrease in their monthly bills. O’Bryan said member bills will remain unchanged adding because of fracking and the decrease in natural gases, Delta Electric lowered the rate in 2017. He did say he doesn’t foresee bills getting higher either.
“I’ve been waiting on a day like this, I think we all have,” Curry said. “We’ve seen other deals like this come along but they never come through. But, this one thankfully worked.”
Neal said once he has numbers, he’ll be able to give those numbers to the board as more details about the plant unfold.
