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As Efrem Jernigan surveyed the young men attending a solar installation training session on his plot in Sunnyside, he spoke about his dreams for the land nearby.

The 240-acre former city dump across Reed Road did not look like much. Stunted trees covered the property and tires littered the edges.

Someday soon, however, private developers hope to build the largest urban solar farm in the United States on top of land that has long stood as a monument to environmental racism. Jernigan wants to make sure locals wear the hardhats.

“I'm the guy from Sunnyside that wrote a proposal to put this community to work,” he said. “So, if you came to my training and didn’t get a job, I’m going to be pissed off.”

Twenty months after Mayor Sylvester Turner held a press conference celebrating state approval of the massive solar farm, construction has not yet begun. The city’s top development official says he expects a groundbreaking within months.

In the meantime, community leaders and the city hope to resolve a lingering challenge: making sure local residents reap the benefits of the solar farm, along with private investors. The city has yet to finalize a community benefits agreement along the lines of the pact tied to the Ion District in Midtown.

Sunnyside was promised jobs, an agricultural hub and clean power at a discounted rate. The question is how to get there.

An ugly history

Without producing a single electron, the solar farm in Sunnyside has drawn national attention as an example of how the United States could transform its 450,000 brownfields – polluted properties that have been abandoned by previous owners.

The site of the proposed 52-megawatt facility has a long, ugly history. In the 1930s, city leaders selected Sunnyside as the site for a large municipal landfill.

The placement was no accident, Texas Southern University professor Robert Bullard later documented. All five of Houston’s city dumps were in Black neighborhoods.

In 1967, a neighborhood boy who had wandered into the dump drowned in a ditch. Sunnyside residents took to the streets to demand the closure of the dump and a related trash incinerator.

The city eventually gave in to their demands. That did not mean, however, that Houston went on to invest in Sunnyside. Over the decades that followed, the poorly maintained dump site was one more sign of neglect in an area that suffered from high crime.

Jernigan, who was born and raised in Sunnyside, said he remembers taking trips to the landfill with his father to drop off trash. He also recalls how a neighborhood with an area once known as “Black Wall Street” for its concentration of Black-owned businesses in the 1960s slipped down the economic ladder.

These days, there are many signs of investment along newly renovated Texas 288. Yet, too few Sunnyside residents are employed in the freshly built warehouses and distribution centers, Jernigan said.

In 2018, he was part of a large team that submitted a proposal to an international competition for building a solar farm, agricultural hub and training center on the dump site, while creating a community trust to oversee a share of the profits.

The Turner administration embraced the idea. In 2021, City Council approved a 30-year lease of the dump site to New York-based BQ Energy, which was acquired a year later by an investment company called CleanCapital.

City Council approved an updated lease this summer. In that agreement, the developer agreed to hire 10 percent of its workforce from training programs like the one hosted by the South Union Community Development Corporation, of which Jernigan serves as board president. At least half of those employees must live in south and southeast Houston ZIP codes.

A former petrochemical worker, Jernigan said he became interested in offering training in Sunnyside because he rarely saw other Black people in the energy industry.

On a recent Friday morning, Charlie Smith was learning the ropes – literally. An instructor from the nonprofit Green Careers Texas taught him and seven other students how to strap on a safety harness and use it to clip into ropes at job sites.

Smith, a 17-year-old homeschooled student, said he is interested in finding a job in the solar industry like the ones that may sprout up across the street soon. He hopes locals will get some of the jobs.

“It’s very important. Because it’s our community, after all,” Smith said.

Once the solar farm is operational, the developers are required to produce an annual report every year showing whether they have fulfilled their employment promises. Jernigan said he has his own scorecard.

“About 95 people have been trained to work here. If 95 people are working here a year from now, we’ll call that a success,” he said.

Rent money

Although the jobs requirement is written into the developer’s lease, many other details have yet to be hammered out.

Once the solar farm is operational, the developers are required to send a $200,000 annual rent payment to the city. That money is meant to return to locals, under the supervision of locals. So far, the city does not have a written plan for distributing money.

“What we have here is a negative in the community, of 250 acres of a former landfill that lay fallow and has been a problem for the community. So, we went into this with the view of how do we turn that positive,” said Andy Icken, chief development officer for the city of Houston. “Most of 2023 has been getting TCEQ approval to put a solar farm in there.”

Some of the Sunnyside residents who pitched the project, including longtime neighborhood advocate Sandra Massie Hines, have set up a nonprofit intended to act as an oversight organization for the money.

Hines said the group has yet to reach an agreement with the city on what is known as a community benefits agreement, but she is still optimistic.

“I know God is in the picture, because I know this is something I have been asking for, as a way to bless the people with the utilities and the jobs,” Hines said. “We're on the way.”

Icken said the next step in the community benefits agreement process is reaching out to residents at community meetings.

“There’s a dollar amount defined. What we need to do is to translate that. How is that going to be put into the community?” he said.

Building the ag hub

Much of the project’s fate now lies in the developer’s hands, but six acres of city-owned land north of Bellfort Avenue have been reserved for an agricultural hub in a neighborhood plagued by food insecurity.

From the start, the people who dreamed up the project imagined it would include a hydroponic farm, beekeeping and training in urban agriculture.

Jeremy Peaches, a Sunnyside native and urban farmer, has set up what amounts to a prototype at the East End Maker Hub.

Under racks of glowing purple lights, Peaches and collaborator Robert Harding grow crops. Both were listed as project contributors during the international competition. They say they are eager to proceed with their futuristic vision of “closed loop” farming that reuses waste products.

Nevertheless, the pair say they were caught off guard in July when the city issued a request for information asking for proposals for the agriculture hub.

Peaches and Harding submitted one response. Jernigan, who has separate plans, decided to wait on the final bidding process.

The city released that solicitation because it needed to create a “level playing field,” Icken said. He hopes to issue a more formal request for proposals by the end of March.

With the prospect of a protracted procurement process ahead, Peaches said he wishes the city had prioritized the locals demanding better food options and the Black entrepreneurs eager to serve them.

“The community never asked for solar. They asked for the agriculture,” Peaches said.

Icken, the development official, said the city had to separate the agriculture and solar projects to make them easier to develop.

“Believe me, the solar farm is complicated enough. We didn't need to further complicate that,” he said.

A promise of power

Another selling point of the solar farm was that it would provide power to locals at a discount. In addition to the main, 50-megawatt array, the developers plan to first build a two-megawatt community solar array.

Officials involved in the project said they plan to offer electricity at reduced rates to low-income residents and senior citizens. The array will not feed power directly to locals’ houses, however. Rather, their energy utility will give them a credit for the power produced on the array.

CleanCapital originally promised to begin work on the community solar array by the end of 2023. That deadline has been extended as the project seeks funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, Icken said.

Despite the delays, CleanCapital’s chief development officer said in a statement that the project is moving forward after permit reviews “that took longer than we budgeted.

“Normal challenges associated with the higher interest rates that are present now are also being overcome,” Paul Curran said.

The company’s new deadline for beginning construction is March 21. Before that time, Icken said, developers hope to hammer out how locals can tap into solar power.

Matthew Popkin, an expert on landfill and community solar at the Rocky Mountain Institute, said program design “dramatically influences who can participate, and how comfortable they are participating.”

Despite the question marks lingering over the program, Popkin said it could represent a beacon to other communities when it is completed.

“Houston is not the only city with a landfill, and certainly not the only one with a brownfield,” he said. “A lot of communities are trying to figure out how to advance an equitable energy transition, and this is one part of that solution.”

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