HILLSDALE — Hecate Energy officials intend to file an application with the state to begin the company’s solar project in Copake but gave a soft date for the filing and said they have been transparent with the community about their plans.
Hecate Energy held an informational open house Tuesday at the Hillsdale Firehouse about the latest developments involving the proposed Shepherd’s Run solar project.
Staff members and those familiar with the project were able to answer questions and hear comments from attendees as they toured the room and looked at information about different aspects of the project.
“I think it went really well,” project developer Alex Campbell said. “I think there’s still a lot of stuff that we can present, as far as information goes, to make things a little more clear, but we got great feedback on things we can work on and the dialogue is very constructive and that’s the important thing.”
The most important item Campbell said he heard was about the screening effort. According to information from the open house, the project is going to use vegetation to soften or screen views of the facility.
“The large feedback that I received was, hey, let’s try and do a better job on the screening, even though our screening plan right now is incredibly robust, we still have some work to do,” Campbell said.
A planting plan has been prepared for the project which used native, naturalized and non-native shrub and tree species. According to information from the open house, evergreen trees are used to provide screening and native shrub species are selected for wildlife value and visual interest.
“I think the most important thing that I heard as feedback was that we should work more on the actual screening effort,” Campbell said. And that’s something that we have been working on since we met with Sensible Solar on Nov. 16 and then the town on Nov. 18. That was feedback that we received from them and we were not able to integrate the new design and visual screening efforts that we had agreed to do for this open house because it was such short notice.”
Hecate plans to submit an application to the Office of Renewable Energy Siting on or about Jan. 31, 2021. Campbell said he spoke with a number of people at the open house about this.
Sensible Solar, a collation of community members opposed to the project in its current state, held a meeting earlier this week. Speakers at the meeting encouraged the public to urge Hecate to hold off on filing their application with ORES in order to have more time to review suggestions from the group about the project.
“Our Notice of Intent to file our application at the end of January, is an intent, not a hard date,” Campbell said. “It’s part of a regulatory process that is in place to really put a pathway forward for projects to submit an application. It does not mean that we are submitting our application on that hard date.”
Hecate submitted their first notice of intent last summer, and has not submitted an application with ORES yet Campbell said.
“We’re still gathering input for project improvements,” Campbell said,” But more importantly the submittal of the application is not the end of our public involvement. In many ways it’s the formation of the beginning because then there’s a public comment period.”
Hecate has made a number of changes to the proposed project Campbell said. Since July 2020 the acreage size for the project inside the fence of the project has been reduced from 480 acres to the current size of 220 acres.
“Many of our plans are in draft form, and we’re not trying to withhold anything,” Campbell said. “We’re just planning, we’re working on various iterations just as we have with our design that has shrunk in size four times at this point.”
Hecate will continue to post information on their website as they have it Campbell said. He explained it is important for people to use their site a resource and moving forward there will continue to be a lot of information posted on it.
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Hecate gives soft date for filing, vows transparency - Hudson Valley 360
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