'It's got nasty': the battle to build the US's biggest solar power farm in Pulaski county, Indiana

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15. Why they chose this spot in Indiana

the area has flat, sandy ground ideal for solar and is a meeting point for two vast electrical grids, called MISO and PJM, that service tens of millions of Americans and will allow Mammoth to dump converted sunlight into both of them for consumption.

In July 2019, Cohen was introduced to a farmer named Norm Welker. Welker’s land, Cohen said, was “right on the bullseye, exactly where you’d want to be.” Transmission lines run through Welker’s fields in Starke county and, crucially, Welker himself has been unsentimental about turning away from half a century of planting and harvesting corn on this land.

As for the financial incentive for the owner of that land...

Welker’s 1,075 acres in Starke county will be leased for the next three decades at $1,000 an acre a year. “It’s five times what I’d make through corn,” he said. “It’s crazy money.”

And a good point to boot...

To Welker, solar is an evolution of farming rather than a betrayal of it. He already harvests the sunlight for his crops, he reasons, and considers fears of food shortages by taking land out of production overblown given that 40% of all US corn is already mashed up for another form of energy – ethanol,