Nexamp plans Jacksonville open house for proposed Black’s Lane solar field

A proposed 15-acre solar field along Black’s Lane moved into the public eye as Nexamp set an open house at Twisted Tree Music Hall, giving Jacksonville residents a first close look at a project just off Morton Avenue near the railroad tracks.

The location matters because it sits in an edge-of-town corridor where industrial uses, rail activity and nearby neighborhoods meet. That makes the project small enough to fit within Jacksonville’s built-up footprint, but large enough to raise practical questions about how much of the site will be visible from nearby roads, what construction traffic could look like on Morton Avenue and Black’s Lane, and how the land will be managed over the long term.

Jack Curry of Nexamp said the electricity from the project would go onto the grid and that Ameren customers could subscribe for credits on their power bills, with projected savings of about 15 percent. Nexamp says income-eligible households can qualify for a larger discount, up to 20 percent. The company also said it was in the long haul and not planning to build, sell and leave, a message likely aimed at easing the kind of skepticism that often follows renewable projects into small communities.

For Morgan County, the discussion does not begin from scratch. County rules say wind, solar and battery-storage facilities require an approved permit before construction, and the county adopted a Wind and Solar Energy Ordinance in 2023. Illinois also changed its law in 2023 to standardize county regulation of commercial wind and solar facilities and block counties from banning such projects outright, while still leaving local siting rules in place under the state framework.

The utility rules also shape the economics. Ameren says new net-metering customers after Jan. 1, 2025, receive only supply and transmission service credits for excess generation pushed to the grid. Customers who completed the required paperwork by Dec. 31, 2024, can keep full netting for 30 years. That difference helps explain why the timing of a project like Black’s Lane matters to households thinking about solar savings.

Nexamp said it would likely take about a year before subscriptions were offered to Ameren customers, so any benefit would come gradually rather than immediately. The company has pointed to other Illinois projects, including Jubilee Solar in Brimfield, a 3-megawatt site with more than 5,400 panels that it says is Illinois’ first public-school community solar project and is expected to offset Brimfield Community Unit School District #309’s energy costs by more than $22,000 a year.

At Tuesday’s open house, the biggest questions for Nexamp are the ones tied to daily life in Jacksonville: what neighbors will see from Morton Avenue, how the site will handle drainage and construction traffic, whether farmland use changes permanently, and what long-term tax and land-use impact the project would have if it moves ahead.