In Justice, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, a community solar array has been deployed on the roof of a Public Storage facility. Village mayor Krzysztof Wasowicz is otherwise wary of solar—he worries it consumes farmland and enriches China—but he is fully behind this project, which uses existing commercial space without taking agricultural land.
Meanwhile, Illinois's ambitious plan to convert old coal plant sites into solar and battery farms has stumbled. The state's Coal to Solar and Energy Storage Initiative was created five years ago to speed clean energy deployment, but it has turned out to be a bust, according to Canary Media. The program has struggled to produce the projects it was designed to encourage.
The two stories present a stark contrast: one shows how solar can expand in unexpected, low-impact locations, while the other underscores how difficult it can be to repurpose large industrial sites. They do not directly conflict, but together they illustrate the uneven progress of solar development in Illinois.