There have been fears and battles in rural Colorado over putting solar power projects on agricultural land, as well as new county regulations, but so far large-scale solar arrays have eaten up less than 1% of farmland, according to an industry study.
Ground-mounted solar projects, at the end of 2024, covered 14,326 acres across 39 counties, a fraction of 1% of the state’s 30.2 million acres of farmland, according to study by the Colorado Solar and Storage Association, a trade group.
Utility-scale solar projects — with 1 megawatt of capacity or more — have drawn the biggest protests and covered 12,601 acres of land. In 2025, another 6,700 acres of solar projects were added, the report said.
“We kept hearing people say that renewable energy was causing really negative impacts in rural areas by eating up farmland. So we really wanted to see if that was true,” said KC Becker, the solar and storage association’s CEO.
The study concludes that while Colorado is losing farmland and farms — the number of farms dropped by 7.3% or 2,873 between 2017 and 2022 — solar development is not the biggest threat.
Ten counties — Baca, Prowers, Otero, Crowley, El Paso, Huerfano, Cheyenne, Conejos, Elbert and Weld — accounted for 90% of the 1.6 million acres of farmland lost between 2017 and 2022. Solar projects accounted for less than 1% of the loss, the study said.
Between 1972 and 2000, 2 million acres were converted to rural subdivisions in Colorado, the report said.
“Farmland isn’t being lost to renewable energy, it’s being lost to suburban sprawl,” Becker said.
Most solar moratoriums have been lifted
Nevertheless, when solar developers have turned up in rural counties with plans for utility-scale solar farms, covering hundreds of acres, there has been concern and pushback.
In Delta County, an 80 MW array on 475 acres was blocked by the county commission until the developer, Guzman Energy, reworked the plan to include grazing sheep and an irrigation system.
Opposition on Wright’s Mesa, in San Miguel County, was so stiff against a 100 MW solar and battery installation on 640 acres that the developer abandoned the plan. In La Plata County, a proposed project covering 1,900 acres also was canceled in the face of opposition.
A dozen counties imposed solar moratoriums while they worked on solar land use regulations and at least three are still in effect. Thirty-nine counties have adopted solar land use regulations.
Prompted by the local pushback, the legislature passed a bill in 2024 directing the Colorado Energy Office and the Department of Natural Resources to evaluate local government permitting processes. An early draft of the bill included moving permitting of solar projects to the state.
The Colorado Energy Office surveyed solar developers and some county and municipal officials about the impact of local rules and concluded that “procedural hurdles, community opposition, land use concerns, and regulatory gaps can impact projects.”
The survey, released in October, listed nine solar projects that had been rejected or withdrawn and the complex regulatory situation in Colorado remains, Will Toor, the Colorado Energy Office executive director, said.
“I think the highly variable policies that you see across the state that we saw in that report remain,” Toor said. “I believe that there’s still a wide variation across the state.”
The energy office survey, however, was criticized by county and municipal officials as being too selective in who was surveyed.
“It seemed antagonistic to counties for no clear reason,” Kelly Flenniken, executive director of Colorado Counties Inc., said at the time.
A 2025 report by Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University found at least 459 counties and municipalities across 44 states had adopted “severe local restrictions” on siting renewable energy projects.
The Columbia report highlighted actions by Mesa, Montrose, Rio Blanco and San Miguel counties that halted or delayed projects.
An analysis done for the energy office estimated that to meet the state’s 2050 clean energy goals, Colorado will need 12,000 MW of large-scale solar, which will need 60,000 to 80,000 acres.
Even adding another 80,000 acres of solar would still give all the projects a footprint of a little more than a tenth of a percentage point of all land in the state.
Nearly 90% of the ground-based installations are located in eight counties — Adams, Alamosa, Denver, Arapahoe, Crowley, El Paso, Logan, Pueblo and Weld — with 15% in the Denver metro area.
The report did find that in some counties solar development was concentrated on agricultural land. In Adams County, 90% of the 756 acres of solar development was on agricultural land, as well as 75% of Weld County’s 757 acres of development, 60% of the 359 acres in Larimer County and nearly 100% of the 213 acres in Las Animas County.
About 46% of Colorado’s 66.3 million acres is designated as farmland — cropland, pasture and irrigated land — but not all of that is farmed, Becker said.
“It’s not all productive,” she said. “Maybe it’s been out of production for a while. … We don’t grow food on all that acreage. … Still in all we are talking about a teeny-tiny amount of land.”
A 4-acre solar field sits above the softball complex at Colorado State University, Pueblo on Jan. 20, 2019. The facility provides more than 10% of the power used by the campus. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun).Hence then, the article about solar power taking only tiny fraction of colorado farmland despite fears industry study shows was published today ( ) and is available on Colorado Sun ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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