Simon Solar is the end result of a process that began in 2011, when Ivey was trying to heat his pool with alternative energy.
The 250-acre plot of land in Social Circle was owned and farmed by Ivey’s grandparents in the 1940s.
An existing Georgie Power substation on the land was one factor that prompted Ivey to build the solar farm.
With an established access point, Ivey could pump enough clean energy back into the system to power 7,000 homes annually.
Ivey emailed a bid to Georgia Power and the Georgia Professional Standards Commission in September 2011.
The power purchase agreement with Georgia Power was signed in 2011 on December 19—the same date Ivey’s grandfather bought his land 76 years prior.
The price at which Georgia Power buys Ivey’s energy is confidential for competitive trade purposes.
Steve Ivey is also a musician. His production company, IMI, enabled him to fund the solar panel project.
According to the company’s website, Simon Solar is in the planning stage of development of a ten megawatt solar farm in Mississippi.
Agriculture still drives much of Georgia’s economy, but workers on one of the state’s newest farms harvest energy, not peaches or peanuts.
A former cotton farm in Social Circle, about forty-five miles east of Atlanta, has been converted to Simon Solar, one of the largest solar farms in the United States. Steve Ivey, whose family has owned the land since the 1930s, has covered 150 of its 250 acres with panels that can produce approximately thirty megawatts of energy—or enough to power 4,130 homes for a month. Georgia Power is buying the electricity generated from the farm under a twenty-year power purchase agreement.
This article originally appeared in our July 2014 issue under the headline, “Catching Rays.”
