Wind & Solar Leasing on Land in Person County, North Carolina

A 920-acre denial and a 2021 moratorium -- the starting point

Person County's solar story has a specific, dated flashpoint: in August 2021, the Board of Commissioners unanimously denied a special-use permit for a proposed 920-acre solar farm in the southeast part of the county, and at the same time established a moratorium on large-scale solar projects. A 920-acre single project is a genuinely large footprint -- more than a square mile -- and a unanimous denial at that scale signals the board found the county's existing solar-siting rules (or the specific proposal) inadequate rather than simply objecting to one developer's plan.

That 2021 action set the template for how Person County has approached utility-scale solar since: real developer interest exists (the county's flat farmland and long-standing Duke Energy transmission infrastructure make it attractive), but county government has been willing to pause and rewrite the rules rather than let projects proceed under whatever the existing ordinance said at the time.

Still being rewritten as of late 2025

That regulatory rewrite was still underway years later: in January 2025, Person County held a community meeting on solar's local impact as part of a broader research-based effort to help North Carolina counties address community concerns about utility-scale solar development. Later that year, the county scheduled a public hearing for October 6, 2025 on a Person County Solar Ordinance Text Amendment -- and the developer Cypress Creek Renewables requested that hearing be postponed to allow more time to engage with the community, a request the county accommodated.

That sequence -- a 2021 denial and moratorium, a 2025 community-impact meeting, and a solar ordinance amendment still working through public hearings and developer-requested delays as of this page's last review -- makes Person County's solar-siting rules a genuinely moving target rather than a settled framework. This page cannot tell you, and does not guess, whether the Solar Ordinance Text Amendment has since been adopted, further delayed, or withdrawn, since this research pass could not confirm the current 2026 status.

What to check before signing a Person County solar lease

• Whether the Solar Ordinance Text Amendment has been adopted since October 2025, and if so, what siting standards, acreage limits, setbacks, or special-use-permit conditions it imposes -- confirm directly with Person County Planning & Zoning rather than relying on an older ordinance version.
• Whether any county-wide moratorium or project-size threshold (recall the 920-acre proposal that was denied in 2021) currently applies to your parcel's acreage, since a large single-project footprint has already drawn a unanimous denial here once.
• Whether the developer proposing your lease has engaged with the county's community-input process, given that at least one developer (Cypress Creek Renewables) has already had to request additional community-engagement time on the pending ordinance rewrite -- a project moving ahead without that engagement may face the same resistance the 2021 proposal did.
• Standard solar-lease terms independent of the local regulatory fight: lease length and renewal terms, decommissioning and panel-removal financial assurance, interconnection queue status with Duke Energy, and whether the offered acreage and boundary match your actual parcel lines and any existing easements.