A former expanse of timberland in Lambert County, South Carolina, will soon host the state’s largest utility-scale solar project. By the end of 2025, solar developer Silicon Ranch will bring a 200 megawatt solar farm online and add another 50 megawatts the following year.
South Carolina’s sunny skies and swaths of open land make it an ideal location for generating energy from the sun, yet it has little solar compared to its neighbors. The state ranks 19th for total installed solar capacity in the country, while North Carolina ranks fourth, Georgia ranks seventh and Virginia comes in ninth.
But as South Carolina anticipates a massive increase in energy demand in the coming years, some utilities are turning to solar as a way to build out energy quickly and cheaply. Solar is “the nearest term, lowest cost solution to get new electrons into the grid,” said Reagan Farr, co-founder and CEO at Silicon…
