
Guest Column by Steve Kline, Chesapeake Bay Journal
We Need Solar Energy, But Should It Trample a Town’s Master Plan?
My love for the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore started in Chestertown, Maryland. I used to visit each fall for the Chestertown Wildlife Exhibition & Sale, and it was one of my favorite weekends of the year—skeins of migrating Canada geese passing noisily overhead, a little bit of autumn in the air. That celebration of wildlife art was a fixture on Chestertown’s fall calendar from 1965 to 2012, and it was my first exposure to the magic of Chestertown.
As with so many Eastern Shore towns, that magic comes from the close interplay of vista and village. Just a stone’s throw from your favorite bookstore, you can enjoy the rural countryside in full by paddling Radcliffe Creek, cycling a scenic byway or photographing combines as they bring in the harvest.
Around the same time I was making those trips to Chestertown, not quite 20 years ago, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy was working with Chestertown, Kent County and a professional planning firm to create the Chestertown Greenbelt Master Plan. The master plan was meant to encompass the future of the Clarke-Hopewell Farm, described by Chestertown Mayor David Foster as “our only real opportunity for expansion of Chestertown.” The nearly 500-acre farm, northeast of Chestertown’s historic downtown, is one of the last remaining sizeable undeveloped tracts within the town’s planning boundary.
This was just before the Great Recession. Real estate was booming, and there were plenty of questions about how development would shape the future of Chestertown and the entire Eastern Shore. Hence the master plan, developed with strong input from the community, to ensure that future development of the Clarke-Hopewell Farm would be an “organic extension of the historic fabric of the town,” an effort to replicate in Chestertown’s future what had worked so well in its past.
One of the questions asked at the inevitable community workshops during the process: “What defines the character of Chestertown and should be reflected in this new part of town?”
Responses included: “historic … small town feeling … neighborhood feel … walkable … life on a human scale.” Those words do a nice job describing what works about Chestertown. The master plan hews closely to these ideas, providing a flexible and iterative development program designed to “accommodate much of the growth of the town and the county over the next 50–100 years.” The plan includes hamlets and villages, each of which incorporates mixed-use buildings, civic uses, and neighborhood greens.

But instead of human-scale hamlets and mixed-use neighborhoods, what now seems poised to occupy the Clarke-Hopewell Farm is a 45-megawatt utility-scale solar array. The array will send power straight to the grid, keeping lights on and computers buzzing in homes and businesses and data centers as far away as Illinois. And all of this has been planned despite clear and formal opposition from Chestertown and Kent County.
This change came about because the solar developer, a subsidiary of a massive Canadian-based asset management company, petitioned for and was granted a Certificate of Public Convenience and Need (or a CPCN) from the state of Maryland. What does that mean? Well, it’s essentially a permission slip from the state, allowing the solar developer to simply ignore time-tested and well-understood local land-use decisions.
This “preemption,” as it’s called, is being done in the spirit of addressing the challenge of climate change head-on, for which the state has adopted aggressive renewable energy generation goals. But in its rush to site solar power, the state has tilted the playing field. Parcels close to our towns and designated growth areas deserve careful attention, responsible land use and close examination.
In Chestertown’s case, the state is trampling the town’s best-laid plans and taking off the table a parcel that was meant to accommodate well-planned growth for the next 50 years or more. Instead of public parks, community orchards, apartments that young people can afford and easily bike from—instead of trees, a café, playgrounds, gardens, a barbershop or cottages—we’ll have solar panel, solar panel, solar panel. More than 140,000 modules.
Solar panels do not need fertile soil. They do not need to have their hair cut and they do not bike to class in the morning. There are many other places solar fields can go. Where else is Chestertown supposed to go? There are not many other spaces the rest of Chestertown can grow into. At least not without contributing to what the Greenbelt Master Plan describes as the Eastern Shore’s “auto-oriented suburban sprawl, which threatens to erode its rural character.”
In the race to site solar power as quickly as possible, the Eastern Shore looks increasingly attractive. But we must have balance, a level playing field, some way to say, “Here or here, but not there.”
Many of our open acres are best at producing food, and they should remain in agriculture. Other acres, located nearest our towns, are best suited for new neighborhoods. Some spots are well-suited for solar generation. But when we write a new set of rules that favor solar energy over all other land uses, there is no balance.
Rather than allowing Chestertown to “grow harmoniously … slowly and methodically as to maximize the efficiency of its land use,” as the Greenbelt Master Plan so eloquently states, we will allow our land to be “rapidly digested.” The Eastern Shore will lose.
Steve Kline is president and chief executive officer of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy. This article was originally published November 1, 2024 on bayjournal.com. It was distributed by the Bay Journal News Service. The author’s views do not necessarily reflect those of the Chesapeake Bay Journal.
We know Chestertown, Maryland well. I know that farm. I know that rural road into town, This is a terrible idea – both because it is valuable farmland – and it is protected as such, next to a scenic, historic village. No reason to build a utility plant there – other than some political-economic expediency