Summit Ridge solar project turns Morgan County farmland into habitat, power

The biggest change east of Cemetery Road near Meredosia is not the 4-megawatt output. It is the fact that 29 acres of former Morgan County farmland, spread across a 72-acre parcel north of Beauchamp Lane, no longer grow crops and now sit under twin solar arrays instead.

Morgan Solar 1 and Morgan Solar 1B make up the project, a pair of community solar fields in Section 22, Township 16 North, Range 13 West. Summit Ridge Energy says it has operated the site since 2021, and the power flows through Ameren’s utility grid as part of Illinois Shines, the state’s Adjustable Block Program for photovoltaic distributed generation and community solar.

For Morgan County, the promised payoff is mostly financial. Summit Ridge says the project brings property tax revenue to the county, construction work, and long-term lease income for the landowner over the next few decades. What the company has not broken out is how those tax dollars will be distributed among the local institutions that feel the benefit most directly, including schools, fire protection and other public services.

The project’s second claim is environmental, and this one is backed by monitoring and state authorization. The site sits on sandy soils near the Illinois River, habitat for the state-threatened Illinois chorus frog and the regal fritillary butterfly. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources approved an incidental take authorization and conservation plan for those species after the plan was submitted June 21, 2019, and accepted as complete November 19, 2019.

Summit Ridge says the land beneath and between the panels was seeded with a native short-grass prairie mix that includes violet species and nectar-producing wildflowers, with no annual tilling or herbicide application. In July 2025, environmental consultants reportedly found multiple adult regal fritillaries foraging on milkweed inside the arrays, along with sand milkweed, other butterflies, bees and additional pollinators. Spring 2024 acoustic monitoring reportedly recorded chorus frog calls on 32 of 34 days between March 9 and April 6, signaling an active breeding population.

The Morgan County project was developed by Pivot Energy and later taken over by Summit Ridge. It arrives at a time when Illinois has more than 5,665 megawatts of operating solar capacity, according to the Illinois Solar Map, putting this Meredosia site inside a much larger statewide shift from row crops to panels, leases and prairie habitat.