The country roads around Springfield are lined with solar energy collectors in the form of cornfields. Here and there are newer and more efficient solar collectors in the form of photovoltaic panels being built alongside of them as rural Illinois transitions from a food-based economy to an energy-based economy. And here and there folks are complaining about it.
One of those collectors is, or will be, Whisper Walk, a 20-acre solar farm to be built adjacent to a small residential subdivision at the north end of Lenhart Road in New Springfield. The prospect did not please its new neighbors. The Sangamon County Board recently sided with complaining neighbors and said no to the project 15-8 even though the planning commission staff and the county’s Zoning Board of Appeals had said yes.
The vote won’t stop the project, however much it might have hurt the feelings of the developer. Under current state law, the only way to stop the Whisper Walk project would be to rezone as residential all land in a 1.5-mile strip surrounding a metastasizing Springfield, as District 7 board member Craig Hall has proposed. But even if the board goes all motte-and-bailey and pushes solar farms farther into the hinterland, those farms just end up on somebody else’s roads. An alert County Board therefore ought to be considering how to make these things palatable to the neighbors everywhere.
The Lenhart Road project’s across-the-fence neighbors worry about property values. Everyone else, it seems, resents the loss of rural character. But what, exactly, do people object to? A solar farm is an “industrial” use of land but panel arrays generate no noise or emissions. More people, I suspect, are offended by their looks. Arrays of solar panels might not pollute and they are quiet, but they are ugly even by the standard of an exurban Illinois whose iconic objects are the rusting pickup and the prefab metal shed.
Ever solicitous, Sangamon County’s solar-farm ordinance requires that solar farmers provide “vegetative screening” between their arrays and sensitive eyes. Such a screen is to consist of “a continuous line of native evergreen foliage and/or native shrubs and/or native trees and/or any existing wooded area and/or plantings of tall native grasses and other native flowering plants.”
De-uglifying solar farms would require something more than a scraggly row of arborvitae and something less than a full-blown agrivoltaic meadow. Local nurseries could easily provide the expertise needed to plan, plant and maintain these faux hedgerows but energy companies would have to hire them and the county would have to monitor the results – a lot to hope for.
A bigger problem than the complexity of merging landscape and energy installation is the stinginess of the county’s requirement. At present, solar arrays are to be obscured (the term of art is “visual softening”) only from “non-participating residences.” You can see why driving out west of Thayer to the Double Black Diamond array, the biggest one east of the Mississippi. Because the developers had the sense to site the farm where there are no nearby residences, the Double Black Diamond is exempt from the screening requirement. Close-mown and weed-free, the visual effect of this nearly 4,000-acre power factory is Prison Camp; if one of those panels tries to make a break for it, it’ll be shot before it gets to the road.
It’s not only the next-door neighbors who ought to get the benefit of plantings that soften this grim scene but anyone who drives up and down county roads. Were the screening requirement made comprehensive and applied to the arrays as seen from any vantage point, it could improve our little corner of the world in terms of aesthetics and ecological diversity in ways that are good for the energy economy, good for the neighbors and good for the larger public and do so at the expense of the world’s energy companies.
Unfortunately, de-uglifying the solar farms risks stirring new complaints about uglifying Sangamon County. At maturity a screen of native plants will look like Illinois prairie and that is not something many residents of the Prairie State want. Prairie is messy and violates the obsessive, even fetishistic tidiness of the grain farmers who set the standard in landscape hereabouts, a standard that is matched by the golf-fairway look of suburban lawns.
When folks think “rural character,” they don’t see stands of prairie dropseed. They see corn and soybeans. If the County Board wants a popular and enforceable landscaping standard, it should redefine corn as a native plant appropriate for use in screening industrial interlopers. The firm pushing the Whisper Walk project agreed to push its arrays back from the road by 200 feet – that’s room enough for 80 rows of corn. Now that would be a visual barrier. (Not only couldn’t you see through it, you couldn’t even drive through it.) No need to harvest it, either, just leave it up all winter.
Mr. Krohe wrote about another energy harvest from the Illinois countryside in 2010 in “Harvesting Electricity.” [https://www.illinoistimes.com/news-opinion/harvesting-electricity-11445241/] Somebody had to do it.
This article appears in July 9-15, 2026.
