Legitimating grid-scale solar: shaping Pennsylvania’s farmland as a renewable energy landscape

Farmland in the US is of great interest for grid-scale solar energy development. As developers enter leasing contracts with agricultural landowners, the governance of these processes is complex and evolving. There is a growing need to clarify the processes for negotiating solar leases, particularly with developers’ use of non-disclosure agreements and option contracts, and how these negotiations help legitimate and repurpose farmland as a renewable energy landscape. In this paper, we draw on recent scholarship of practices of legitimation—practices that cause the public and relevant governing authorities to recognize an activity as appropriate and enable it to proceed—to trace how legitimating practices for grid-scale solar leasing emerge and intersect and how they relate to and differ from historic legitimation practices within energy development, such as hydraulic fracturing. Situated in the US state of Pennsylvania, we use qualitative interviews and policy document analysis to assess how solar development has introduced new legitimations of power over energy transitions. We identify new nodes of intersecting legitimations that build on procedures and technical know-how of hydraulic fracturing, mitigating transparency among rural communities and hindering legitimacy through private developer–landowner relationships and decentralized municipal governance. While some of these new legitimations offer hopeful divergences for renewable energy transitions, others introduce new modes of obfuscation. With closer attention to how these nodes of power intersect and operate in practice, we also lay bare the mechanisms through which greater accountability can take shape.