For farmland owners
Why we will tell you a solar lease won't happen on your land
· AgriTerra · For owners in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa
Type your address into most land tools and you get an exciting number: what a solar or wind developer might pay to lease your ground. It is a great number to show. It is also, for a lot of parcels, a number no developer will ever actually offer, because the project behind it cannot be built where you are. Our report is built to catch that and say so. This is the last piece in our series on how we get to a number you can trust, and it is about the numbers we take away.
Read this first
This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice. An energy lease is a long-term contract with real legal and tax consequences that turn on your own situation. Talk to a qualified attorney or advisor before you sign anything, including a letter of intent.
The uncomfortable part of the business
Here is the incentive problem, stated plainly. A land report that shows you a large renewable-lease number has every reason to show it and none to tell you the project can't be built. The big number is what gets shared, screenshotted, and remembered. The caveat that no developer would actually sign it is the boring part, and boring parts get dropped. So the dream number survives, and the reader walks into a negotiation, or a family decision, anchored to income that was never real.
We think that has it exactly backwards. The exciting number is the easy part; any tool can print what an acre of sun is theoretically worth. The service, the thing worth paying for, is the demotion: the report telling you, with its reasons, that this particular lease is not going to happen here, so you should plan around the income your land can actually earn instead. A report that will never say no cannot be trusted when it says yes.
The anatomy of a demotion
The clearest way to explain this is with a real one. In June 2026 we audited our own product and found a report that got it wrong, and fixing it is what this whole gate exists to do. Details are anonymized, but the facts are the report's.
Case study
An 84-acre grain farm in a Lake Erie county
On paper it looked great. The parcel carried a strong wind-resource rating, and the modeled wind lease came in at a solid mid-band estimate, high enough that it would have been the single best income scenario on the report, ahead of anything the land earns from grain.
In reality it could not be built. The nearest transmission line a project could tie into was 37 miles away. The county had zero projects in the interconnection queue, meaning no developer had shown any intent to build there. And new utility-scale wind is hard to permit across most of Ohio outside a narrow corridor. Any one of those is a serious problem; together they mean no one is building a wind farm on that ground in the foreseeable future.
The old report recommended the wind lease anyway. It saw a strong resource and a big number and led with it. The rebuilt system does the opposite: it demotes the wind scenario, states the transmission distance and the empty queue as the reasons in plain language, and re-recommends the income the land can actually earn today. We found this failure in our own product, and rebuilt the gate so it can't happen the same way again.
One honesty note about that last sentence, because it matters for how much you should trust the fix. The gate reduces bad recommendations; it does not predict the future. It cannot promise a project will get built, and it cannot promise one never will. What it does is refuse to put income on your report that the known facts, distance, queue, policy, and the federal credit rules, say you almost certainly cannot collect right now.
What the gate actually checks
A demotion is never a hunch. It is one of four specific checks failing, each with a source. Here is each, in plain language.
Check 1
Distance to transmission
A utility-scale project has to move its power onto the grid, so distance to a suitable transmission line is a first, hard screen. As a rough rule, land more than five miles out is a serious problem, and our report demotes the energy scenario there. The honest caveat is that closeness is not the whole story: being next to a line does not mean the substation has room to accept new power. Interconnection capacity at the point of connection, not line adjacency, is the binding constraint, and we say that wherever the transmission signal appears.
Check 2
The interconnection queue
Before a project can be built it has to get in line to connect to the grid, in a public queue. An empty local queue is a strong signal that no developer is trying to build near you; a full one is a signal of interest, and no more than that. The base rates keep it honest: historically only about 13 percent of the capacity that entered these queues from 2000 through 2020 had actually reached commercial operation by the end of 2025, and the median wait from request to operation now runs more than five years (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up, 2026 edition). So we treat queue presence as a signal, never a promise, and an empty queue as a reason to demote.
Check 3
County and township siting policy
Since 2025 and 2026, the binding constraint on many parcels is not the grid at all; it is local law. A county or township that has restricted or banned utility-scale solar or wind can stop a project cold, no matter how good the resource. This is where a national tool goes wrong most often, and it is genuinely local, so we cover it state by state. The deep dives: Ohio's SB 52 township siting and the CAUV recoupment invoice, Indiana's county-by-county patchwork and the property-tax jump under solar, and Iowa's wind new-build collapse and the shift to repowering. Where a county's restriction is documented, we demote; where it is unsettled or township-specific, we attach a prominent warning to verify your own parcel rather than pretend to certainty we don't have.
Check 4
The federal tax-credit vintage
The 2025 federal energy law sorted every wind and solar project into buckets by when it began construction, and a new lease option signed today backs a project that no longer gets the federal credit, which makes it less likely to be built and slower if it is. Every energy scenario in our report now carries that vintage note, so a new-option number is read in the right light. The full explainer: what the 2025 federal energy law means for your farmland.
A demotion reframes the number, it does not delete it
This is the part people miss. When the gate demotes an energy scenario, it does not erase the resource estimate. It moves it and relabels it: this is what the sun or wind on your ground would be worth if a project came, and here is the specific reason we would not plan on it today. The report keeps the income your land can actually earn now right there alongside it. The estimate is still there for the day the facts change; it just stops masquerading as money you can count on.
Why saying no is the product
The demotion is the same discipline as the rest of how we build a report, pointed at energy. A state average never gets to wear a county label, because that would claim a precision the data doesn't have. And a lease no developer would sign never gets to wear a recommendation, because that would claim a reality the ground doesn't support. Both rules cost us the more exciting version of the answer, and both are the reason the answers we do give are worth acting on. You can read the confidence-tier thinking behind all of it on our methodology page: how we check whether a lease can actually be built.
That discipline has a companion on the pricing side. Two of our posts make the case that the right number for your lease is not whatever the neighbor signed: what to charge for a solar or wind lease, and why it is not whatever Dave got, and what a developer leaves out when they call a number market rate. Those two say do not trust the comp. This one says the harder version of the same idea: sometimes the honest answer is that no lease is coming at all, and no comp changes that.
What to do with a demoted scenario
If your report demotes a solar or wind lease, the practical answer is usually the calm one: keep the land working at its best current use, and treat the energy option as a maybe-someday rather than a plan. Two things are worth remembering. First, these inputs move. County ordinances get adopted and repealed, moratoriums lift, and the grid picture shifts, so we re-check the policy and feasibility inputs on a schedule, and a scenario that is unrealistic this year can turn realistic later. Second, if a real offer ever does land in your mailbox, the number is the last thing to weigh, not the first, and the standing advice does not change: have a qualified attorney or advisor read the full lease, option, or letter of intent before you sign it. Ohio State University Extension's Farm Office energy-law library is a good, free place to start reading, and the equivalent programs at Purdue and Iowa State cover their states.
The rest of the series: the landowner solar leasing guide, wind turbine lease rates, what the 2025 federal energy law means for your farmland, the Ohio CAUV recoupment invoice, the Indiana property-tax jump under solar, and the Iowa wind repowering shift. On pricing a lease you are actually offered: why the number is not whatever Dave got and what market rate leaves out.
Common questions
Why would a land report tell me a solar or wind lease will not happen on my land?
Because a big lease number that a developer would never actually sign is worse than no number. When transmission is too far, the local grid queue is empty, the county restricts the project, or the federal tax credit is gone, we demote the energy scenario and explain why, rather than let it sit on the page as your top income line. A demotion is not a verdict on your land. It is us refusing to plan on income you probably cannot collect.
What makes a solar or wind project unlikely to get built where I am?
Four things we check, any one of which can move an energy scenario down: how far your land is from a transmission line a project could actually connect to; whether the local interconnection queue shows any real demand; whether your county or township restricts utility-scale solar or wind; and whether the project behind a lease can still get the federal tax credit after the 2025 law. The resource on your land, the sun or the wind, is only the first of those, and it is rarely the one that decides it.
Does a demoted energy scenario mean my land has no value?
No. A demotion never deletes the resource estimate. It reframes it: this is what the sun or wind on your ground would be worth if a project came, and here is why we would not plan on it today. The report keeps the income your land can actually earn now, usually continued production, right there alongside it. Grids and county rules change, so an option that is unrealistic this year can become realistic later.
How far from a transmission line does a solar or wind project need to be?
As a rough screen, our report treats land more than five miles from suitable transmission as a hard problem for a utility-scale project and demotes the energy scenario. Even close adjacency to a line is not a green light: being next to a wire does not mean the substation has room to accept new power. Interconnection capacity, not line distance alone, is the binding constraint, and we say so wherever the transmission signal appears.
If a lease was demoted, could it become possible later, and should I still see a lawyer?
Both. County siting rules and the grid picture move, so we re-check these inputs on a schedule and a scenario can change when they do. And on any real offer, yes: this article is general information, not legal or tax advice, and an energy lease is a long-term contract. Have a qualified attorney read the full document, including any letter of intent, before you sign.
See the honest read on your own parcel
Pin your parcel for a free instant read: soil, water, and the energy and market options, each with its source, the date we read it, and the policy check that says whether a lease could actually be built. Want the sourced, shareable version? That is the Decision Report, priced per parcel; you can see a sample report first.
Launch Scout