Three 2-thousand acre sites in the Golden Triangle in east-central Mississippi are under contract for solar power production facilities. “They represent about $550-million in capital investment. Two are in Lowndes County, one is in Clay County right now. We’ve got two more, one working in Oktibbeha and another working in Clay and another one working in Lowndes,” Golden Triangle Development Link CEO Joe Max Higgins told SuperTalk Mississippi in an interview on The Gallo Radio Show.
The solar farms are being built by Origis Energy, and will come online starting in the fall of 2022. They’ll mean millions of dollars in tax revenue, though they aren’t big job creators. But Higgins believes they’ll help draw other industries and manufacturing. “That’s the Amazon’s of the world, the Google of the world. Even some of the manufacturers that we’re working are wanting to use green power. We’ve identified sites that we don’t think we’ll use in the future for industrial development, and have worked with solar companies to develop those,” Higgins explained.
In his view, the arrival of solar facilities are complements to manufacturing and industry rather than competition.
