Conservation Nebraska Surveying Nemaha County Residents on Solar Power Attitudes

A statewide conservation group is knocking on doors and sending text messages across Nemaha County to gauge how residents feel about large-scale utility solar development, as the county continues working to adopt its first zoning regulations.
Kristen Janssen, program manager with Renew Nebraska, said the outreach began with a text-message survey asking residents to rate their feelings about solar power on a scale of one to 10.
“That’s just to get an initial feeling of how people feel,” Janssen said. The organization plans to follow up with door-to-door conversations, a method known as deep canvassing, to better understand residents’ specific concerns.
Janssen said Conservation Nebraska does not advocate for or against any individual solar project.
“As a conservation organization, we obviously support green energy, but only if it works for the individuals and for the communities,” Janssen said. “We don’t think that there should be a blanket statement for supporting every single project.”
The group also opposes blanket county bans on renewable energy projects, she said, arguing each proposal should be reviewed on its own merits.
Lindsay Mouw, Renew Nebraska program director, said the organization’s broader goal is to help fill a knowledge gap for residents and elected officials navigating an unfamiliar technology.
“Most of these technologies, this type of energy, is very new to rural communities,” Mouw said. “Our main goal is just to help bridge that knowledge gap by providing experts who have knowledge on zoning or on conservation efforts with projects.”
Nebraska has no statewide standard for siting solar projects, leaving zoning decisions to individual counties. Nemaha County is among a handful of Nebraska counties that have not adopted zoning, though local officials have been working on regulations
Without statewide zoning rules, solar developers must apply for a conditional use permit at the county level, then go through a separate review by the Southwest Power Pool, the regional body that oversees grid interconnection, Janssen said. Projects also pass before the state’s Power Review Board.
Janssen said the most common concerns raised in other counties where the group has canvassed are the loss of farmland from agricultural production and the visual impact of solar arrays. She said many residents mistakenly believe landowners are forced into leasing land for solar development.
“They’re signing those leases willingly. They’re not being forced into it,” Janssen said, adding that landowners typically retain ownership of leased land rather than selling it outright.
Mouw said lease payments can provide farm families with income amid increasingly uncertain commodity markets, in some cases allowing a family member to return to the farm or providing retirement income farmers might not otherwise have.
Mouw also pointed to Nebraska’s nameplate capacity tax, which is levied per megawatt of installed solar capacity and returned in full to the host county. She cited a rate of $3,518 per megawatt, meaning a 250-megawatt project could generate close to $1 million annually for local government. According to the Nebraska Department of Revenue, the tax requires facilities to pay a nameplate capacity tax in place of personal property tax on depreciable tangible personal property used directly in generating electricity using wind, solar, biomass, or landfill gas as the fuel source. In total, Nebraska counties received over $12.5 million in revenue in 2024 based on information from the Nebraska Department of Revenue website. 
Conservation Nebraska expects to have a clearer picture of community sentiment in Nemaha County in the fall, Janssen said. She described the canvassing effort as informal information-gathering rather than formal research, intended to help the organization identify which topics need more public education.
“If we have a lot of questions coming up about certain topics, we know that maybe that’s something we should try to find experts to speak on,” Janssen said.