It looks like Parkes Shire will be getting a solar farm in the near future. How do other council’s currently categorize them? Does it depend on whether the land is solely used for the solar farm or is used for mixed purposes ie solar farm & agricultural farming and what the dominate use of the land is?
Not sure of any other Council’s that may have solar farms being built in their areas so Parkes may well be the first one in NSW.
I think you would need to treat solar farms in a similar manner to the way that wind farms are categorized and rated.
There is a previous post under the Categorisation subject regarding the rating of wind farms so that may be able to assist you in determining the best way forward with this issue.
We have one under construction in Mid-Western and we have categorised the land as Business. In our case, basically the whole of the property will be solar panels and any gazing of livestock that might be happening on the land would be secondary to the electricity generation.
Hi All, we here at Berrigan Shire have our first solar farm under construction at the moment, the above replies have been very helpful with the categorisation, however, I’m interested in at what stage do you update the categorisation, i.e, approval of DA, Commencement of construction, completion of construction, commencement of new financial year (goodwill gesture)??
In our case, we’re quarterly rating so we changed it from the start of the quarter after the project approval was issued. We were aware that construction had started straight away so were comfortable making the category change at that point.
Had construction not started, we probably would have waited because the dominant use of the land wouldn’t have changed.
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