In the movie “Star Trek: First Contact,” Capt. Jean-Luc Picard wrestles with an invasion by an alien species known as The Borg. He vows to fight back. “We’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats,” he declares in a famous monologue. “They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!”

Mecklenburg County officials see themselves as the Starfleet captain and solar farms as the alien invader. County planners are working on an ordinance that would ban utility-scale projects in the county. Small solar projects, such as rooftop solar for a house or a business, would still be allowed.

The proposed ordinance, which seems set to sail through, runs about 10 pages but can best be summed up by Picard’s climactic declaration: “The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!”

This ordinance was first reported in the ironically named weekly newspaper The Mecklenburg Sun, but it has statewide implications because this comes against a backdrop of rising concerns that a) Virginia needs a lot more energy because data centers are driving up the demand and b) even without increased energy demands, Virginia may still have trouble meeting its renewable energy goals under the Clean Economy Act because rural localities are becoming increasingly resistant to solar projects.

Mecklenburg is not the first Virginia locality to try to turn away solar — at least 10 other counties have outright bans or severe restrictions on solar. Others don’t have formal bans but have simply rejected all or most of the solar projects that have come before their boards of supervisors. Mecklenburg is simply the latest. However, Mecklenburg is also large — at 625.48 square miles, it’s the ninth-largest county in the state. It’s also smack in the middle of Southside Virginia, which has become the state’s center for solar development. All that adds up to a lot of land that would be blocked from potential solar development under this ordinance.

A few weeks ago, Cardinal hosted four top state legislators — two from each party — in Roanoke to deliver a briefing on the recent General Assembly session. One of those who spoke was Senate Minority Whip Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, who said that Cardinal helps tell Southwest and Southside about the rest of the state — and tells the rest of the state about Southwest and Southside. This is one of those cases where we’ll try to explain this situation to two different audiences.

Virginia’s political divide is also a geographic one. That’s often the case these days, when Democrats are weak in rural areas and Republicans are weak in many metros, but here’s how that plays out with this issue: The state legislators most keen on promoting solar don’t have to worry about solar projects landing in their districts, so they may not appreciate the depth of feeling that some people — not all, but some — in rural areas are developing against solar.

From what I’ve seen, the opposition doesn’t really have anything to do with the more typical arguments over energy — whether renewable energy is better or worse than whatever alternative you want to measure it against — but instead holds that solar farms are basically ugly and turn a rural landscape into an industrial one. I try to avoid the phrase “solar farm” because, while that’s the accepted industry term, many people in rural areas see that as Big Solar propaganda — these aren’t “farms” in the traditional sense, they’re basically industrial projects, no matter how many sheep you have grazing under the panels. (Or cattle, as Cardinal’s Matt Busse has reported.) For a more detailed, and nuanced, account of why Mecklenburg County has turned against solar, see the accompanying statement from the county administrator. Among the issues he cites are environmental problems at some of the county’s sites; he share some photos and reports from the Department of Environmental Quality as evidence.

According to the Virginia Solar Database, a nifty tool developed by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia to track solar development, Mecklenburg has approved four utility-scale projects — of 40 acres, 60 acres, 330 acres and 700 acres, or 1,130 of the county’s 400,307 acres. That’s 0.2% of the county’s total acreage, most of it around Chase City.

To be fair, Mecklenburg has faced the prospect of a lot more solar. The Virginia Solar Database shows six projects that have been denied — of 35, 65, 489, 493, 500 and 800 acres, so that’s 2,382 acres of solar that didn’t happen. Even if they all had, that would have amounted to 0.8% of the county’s total acreage. 

That figure gives some sense of how little solar it takes to trigger a reaction. 

Some other localities in Southside have far more solar. Halifax County, just to the west, has 14 solar projects totalling 3,425 acres, with the biggest being 841 acres.

Pittsylvania County, one more county over to the west, has 17 projects totaling 11,540 acres, with the biggest being 3,040 acres — more than the entire solar acreage in all of Mecklenburg.

Charlotte County, on Mecklenburg’s northwest border, has even more solar — only nine projects, but they total 26,428 acres.

You’ll notice I’m measuring all these projects by acres, not megawatts. Those focused on energy count the power output, but if you’re living in one of these communities, and don’t like solar, the megawatts don’t matter, their sheer mass does.

I must stress that the opposition to solar is by no means universal. Solar is fascinating politically because, at some levels, it splits both left and right. Some environmentalists worry about land use and runoff. Some conservatives see this as a property rights issue — if some farmer wants to lease his land to a solar project, he ought to have that right. In some ways, the main opposition to solar may be liberal in philosophy even if it’s coming from those who are conservative politically — the notion that local governments should be able to regulate viewsheds. That’s high-falutin’ stuff for a political science class, though. What matters is that on the ground, a lot of people just don’t want solar in their neighborhood, just like many people in a suburban locality might not want a Walmart next to them.

This is where those local concerns become a statewide issue: The Clean Economy Act mandates that Virginia’s power grid go carbon-free by 2050. That means we’re going to need a lot more solar energy. It may mean a lot more wind and nuclear, too, but wind energy has proven difficult to build in Virginia. Dominion Energy has an offshore wind farm under construction off the coast of Virginia Beach, but we still have no on-shore wind. Both Dominion and Appalachian Power are exploring small nuclear reactors — Dominion at its existing North Anna nuclear station in Louisa County, Appalachian at its Joshua Falls substation in Campbell County — but nuclear also takes a long time to build. Solar, by contrast, is easy to build, which is one reason we’re now seeing so much of it, even if it is less efficient than other forms of energy because solar can’t generate power at night and power generation drops on cloudy days. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)

The challenge with the Clean Economy Act is that this is a statewide goal that relies on local governments to carry it out, and the local governments that need to do this — rural ones, the ones with the land for energy projects — are not always disposed to do so because they have a different set of constituents than the ones who elected the legislators who passed the law. And those constituents simply have different priorities. 

Right now, about 7% of Virginia’s energy comes from solar. That’s 7% more than it used to be just a few years ago, but if 7% solar generates this more pushback, what’s going to happen if we try to take that percentage higher, much higher — not 7% but let’s envision, say, 70%? 

Let’s be clear: The Democrats who control the General Assembly are getting worried.

The Clean Economy Act was passed at a time before anyone in the legislature really understood that the growth of data centers was going to drive much of the demand for electricity — or what kind of resistance there would be to solar projects in many rural areas. Republicans are eager to change or do away with the act but for Democrats, the law has become an article of faith and attempts to tinker with it are met with the skepticism often reserved for heretics. However, with each solar project that gets defeated at the local level, the harder it becomes to meet the targets.

“If we don’t get clean energy built it’s not going to be a sustainable law,” says state Sen. Schuyler Van Valkenburg, D-Henrico County. “Right now we’re not really trying to get there and that’s a problem.” 

In the most recent General Assembly session, Democrats introduced multiple bills to try to speed up solar development. All those failed, amid fears about restricting the ability of local governments to control land-use decisions. Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville and the sponsor of the main bill, SB 1190, insisted that his bill wouldn’t have done that, but it failed anyway after two Democrats with significant numbers of rural voters in their districts opposed it. (See my previous column on this.) The concern in some quarters is not the specific language of a current bill, but that such a bill would become the vehicle for turning recommendations today into mandates tomorrow. Without mandates, though, are we really going to be able to meet those Clean Economy Act measures? It’s starting to look doubtful.

Deeds warns that actions like the one Mecklenburg is taking are politically counterproductive. “Policies like that are going to drive legislation to take that kind of authority away from local government,” he told me by text message.

That’s why what Mecklenburg County is doing is so important. This isn’t just a local ordinance, it’s a message to Democrats in the General Assembly that here’s a rural area that’s had enough and is drawing a line. Don’t be surprised, though, if Mecklenburg finds itself being held up as an example of why local governments can’t be trusted to manage state energy policy.

This month marks the 250th anniversary of Patrick Henry’s famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech. Cardinal is telling the stories behind Virgnia’s role in American independence in our Cardinal 250 series. Our next Cardinal 250 newsletter goes out today and features stories on Henry’s speech as well as the story of James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved man who served as a spy for the French general and took his name. You can sign up for any of our newsletters below: