EDITORIAL: Clean energy meets heavy industry

The Charter Steel plant in Saukville is heavy industry—literally.

It processes more than 550,000 tons of steel in a year. Thousands of trucks haul in scrap metal and thousands of trucks haul it out as coils, bars and rods of steel. A workforce of nearly 700 operates massive electric furnaces and cooling towers that are as high as an eight-story building and use 10,000 gallons of water per minute in a sprawling plant on the northwest side of the village.

Charter has been there since 1978, relentlessly expanding as one of the country’s largest suppliers of steel for components of cars, trucks and agricultural machinery.

In those 45 years, complaints from the public about aspects of its operation deemed objectionable have been relatively few considering Charter’s enormous presence and unavoidable impact on the community.  

It is ironic then that some of the harshest criticism directed at the company recently concerns an expansion that will generate no traffic, make no noise louder than a household appliance, will be low to ground with no sky-blocking structures and will contribute to the common good as well as company profits. That expansion is an array of solar panels that will augment the millions of kilowatt hours of electricity needed to operate the plant.

A group of around 30 people attended a Town of Saukville Plan Commission hearing in September 2022 to oppose Charter’s plan to install the solar farm on 60 acres of land adjacent to its plant. The objectors cited concerns over noise, the impact on property values and what one neighboring property owner called the “ugliness” of the project.

Months later, the town, which has no authority to prohibit solar fields or impose restrictions beyond those that affect public health and safety, issued a conditional use permit for the project. Construction is expected to start this month.

The neighbors’ worries are understandable. They didn’t expect to see 30,000 solar panels next door instead of the open countryside they now have. Opposition to solar energy installations is common, despite the fact that even large-scale solar arrays hardly qualify as a nuisance.

In the Charter solar field, 6-by-3-foot panels will extend no higher than 10 feet off the ground. The sound they project will be 60 decibels or less—the noise level of conversation. The site will be surrounded by a seven-foot-high fence (not of the chain-link variety) and a six-foot berm will be created on the perimeter of the property. Much of the land will be seeded with pollinator plants.

All things considered, this is a beneficial land use. Charter’s $25 million solar energy investment is part of an encouraging international trend. Private and public investment in renewable energy is surging beyond expectations worldwide, amounting to more than $1.7 trillion this year alone, according to the International Energy Agency.

Solar and wind power are projected to overtake coal as the world’s largest source of electricity by 2025. In the U.S., 23% of all electricity will be produced by renewable energy this year and in many areas is now cheaper than gas, oil or coal.

Charter Steel’s power consumption is so great that its array of 30,000 solar panels can produce only 8% of its electricity.

Still, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, every year it operates it will eliminate the equivalent of 21,000 tons of the carbon dioxide that creates the greenhouse gases that are fueling global warming.

And in the battle against potentially catastrophic climate change, every ton of carbon kept out of the atmosphere counts.