San Diego County Approved Starlight Solar While Still Writing the Rules for It

The notice arrived in the mail in September 2025. San Diego County was beginning an environmental review of a 588-acre solar and battery-storage facility proposed for the Empire Ranch, land inside Boulevard's planning area. Thomas Wall read it and wrote back, submitting comments on battery-fire risk, groundwater, and wildlife. He talked to neighbors. He brought what he'd found to a planning group meeting in April 2026. On September 16 he drove an hour west to the county administration building downtown and told the Board of Supervisors, "We're fully opposed to this project and we do not give our consent." The supervisors approved it unanimously.

Boulevard is an unincorporated community of roughly 360 people in eastern San Diego County, less than a mile from the Mexican border. It has no city council and no authority to pass ordinances of its own. Decisions about what gets built there are made in the building Wall drove to, and residents take part through a volunteer planning group whose recommendations the county is free to set aside.

What the supervisors approved will sit in Boulevard: up to 100 megawatts of solar generation and a 217.4-megawatt, 868-megawatt-hour battery-energy storage system, among the largest battery installations the county has permitted. The electricity goes to SDG&E customers across the San Diego region. The batteries, the construction traffic, the cleared acreage, and whatever risk a facility this size carries stay with the people who live next to it.

Energy infrastructure has always worked that way. What distinguishes Starlight is the sequence: the county approved it before finishing the rules written to govern projects like it.

The ordinance that wasn't ready

For more than two years the county had been drafting a zoning ordinance for battery-energy storage. It would establish where these facilities can go, how they're classified by size, how far they must sit from property lines, and what financial guarantee a developer must post to cover eventually tearing the thing out and restoring the land. A public-review draft came out on August 13, thirty-four days before the Starlight vote. Public comment was still open. County staff told KPBS they hoped to bring a finished version to the Planning Commission and supervisors sometime in spring 2027.

Starlight was not approved into a regulatory vacuum, and the distinction between what existed and what didn't matters. After the Gateway Energy Storage fire in Otay Mesa burned for seventeen days in May 2024, the county adopted fire-code amendments and safety guidelines for lithium-ion facilities requiring hazard analysis, modeling of how smoke would travel, emergency-response plans, and periodic testing. Those were in place by April 2026.

Missing was the land-use half: where these facilities belong, how big they can be relative to what's around them, and what uniform setback and removal standards apply countywide. The draft ordinance sorts projects into tiers by size. At 868 megawatt-hours, Starlight lands in the top tier, which would require 100-foot setbacks from lot lines, screening, noise and lighting limits, a decommissioning plan, and financial assurance — a bond, letter of credit, or trust — sized to the estimated cost of removal and restoration.

The county's minute order says the ordinance will apply only to applications submitted after it's adopted. Starlight's application came first. That single line of administrative language does a lot of work: it means the standards the county spent two years developing, in response to precisely the concerns Boulevard raised, will not reach this project unless the county separately writes comparable terms into Starlight's own permit conditions.

The project did get a decommissioning condition of its own, according to East County Magazine. The bond amount, how it's calculated, whether it gets updated as costs change, and who enforces it aren't confirmed in the publicly accessible record. Whether that condition matches what the ordinance would have required is a question nobody can answer until the ordinance exists.

How far away the electricity is

A county approval is one step in a long sequence: financing, a buyer for the power, a grid connection, construction permits, building, testing, commissioning. Each step has its own schedule and its own way of falling through. Starlight's two phases sit in very different places along that sequence.

Phase I, 20 megawatts of solar and 17.4 megawatts of storage, has a power-purchase agreement with SDG&E, meaning a signed contract to buy the electricity at a set price. It also has an interconnection agreement, the technical and legal arrangement for physically plugging into the grid. The developer's consultant told KPBS that Phase I might break ground "in about a year," and the environmental review estimates twelve months of construction. Hold those estimates and Phase I delivers power around fall 2028.

Phase II is the rest of it: 80 megawatts of solar, 200 megawatts of storage, the overwhelming majority of the project. It has no executed power-purchase agreement and no interconnection agreement. Its electricity, in the consultant's words, "has not been sold." Before it can operate it needs a buyer, a studied and approved grid connection, financing, and roughly eighteen months of construction. Across both phases the work involves clearing about 561 acres and moving an estimated 350,000 cubic yards of earth. There is no defensible date for when Phase II might send power anywhere, because the things that have to happen first haven't happened.

What fire response looks like in Boulevard

Boulevard's fire concerns get summarized as a community relying on volunteers. The situation is more specific than that.

County Fire Station 47, about 1.2 miles north of the project site, is staffed by career CAL FIRE personnel under contract with the county, with reserve volunteers supplementing. It's a professional station. Professional staffing doesn't change the geometry of covering 588 acres from one point. Wall's concern at the September hearing was about what happens inside that geometry: a battery incident throwing off a toxic plume while residents have limited ways out of Boulevard.

The environmental review's drive-time modeling sketches the shape of the site relative to that one station: roughly 83 project acres reachable within five minutes, 287 within ten, 145 within twenty, and 54 acres past twenty minutes. The model assumes the crew is available. It doesn't account for the engine already being out on another call, or how long a hazardous-materials team takes to get to Boulevard from wherever it's based, or how fast anyone could set up an exclusion zone around drifting smoke.

Starlight's design includes six 10,000-gallon water tanks, a 100-foot fuel-modification zone around the batteries, and emergency access routes. A fire services agreement obligates the developer to pay $117,800 for Phase I and $882,200 for Phase II when building permits issue, then annual payments of roughly $13,600 and $92,000 respectively, rising 2 percent a year for the life of the project.

The agreement lets the fire district spend that money supporting emergency services for the project and the wider service area. It doesn't say what the money buys — no additional staffing at Station 47, no battery-specific equipment, no training hours. The dollars are committed and the capacity they're supposed to produce is undefined, which leaves open the question that matters to Wall and his neighbors: whether anything purchased with those funds would be close enough to help during a plume event.

Benefits directed but not delivered

The supervisors attached two kinds of community benefit to the approval.

They directed the developer to pursue the Disadvantaged Communities Green Tariff through San Diego Community Power before construction begins. The premise is straightforward and appealing: Boulevard residents get discounted electricity from the project next door. The existing version of the program, Solar Advantage, gives qualifying low-income customers a 20 percent bill discount tied to renewable generation. Eligible projects generally have to fall between 500 kilowatts and 20 megawatts and sign a twenty-year contract with Community Power. Phase I is already under contract with SDG&E. Phase II is far too large. The current solicitation's procurement timeline runs into mid-2027, followed by state regulatory approval and then customer enrollment, and nothing in the public record shows Starlight has submitted an offer. A benefit was directed toward a mechanism the project doesn't presently fit.

The developer also described a direct community-benefit package, though the two local accounts don't match. KPBS reported $1 million up front and approximately $7 million when Phase II begins. The Union-Tribune reported $903,579 toward renovating Boulevard's resource center plus a separate formula of $22,114 per megawatt, totaling roughly $6.2 million. The descriptions may overlap. They don't reconcile. The signed agreement, which would identify who receives the money, what triggers payment, who can enforce it, and what happens if Phase II never gets built, hasn't been made publicly available. Two days after the vote, nothing had been paid.

What other host communities have negotiated

No template governs what a rural community gets when a utility-scale energy project moves in next door. Documented cases give a rough sense of the range.

Jacumba Hot Springs, California, about 5.5 miles east of Starlight, hosts the JVR Energy Park, 90 megawatts of solar and storage. Community input produced bigger setbacks from the highway and a park. A $4 million benefit package was released in October 2025, with $3.8 million placed in an endowment at the San Diego Foundation. As of January 2026, a needs assessment to determine how that endowment actually gets spent was still in progress. The money reached an institution. Whether and how it reaches households is a separate process still running.

Baker, California is the site of Soda Mountain, 300 megawatts of solar and 300 of storage, approved by the California Energy Commission in April 2026. An agreement promises $500,000 to Baker Valley Unified School District for a sustainability learning center, payable only after the decision becomes final and unappealable, permits are in hand, financing closes, and the contractor gets notice to proceed. None of those conditions had been confirmed met.

Salome, Arizona hosts Centennial Flats, 500 megawatts of solar and 267 of storage, sited outside any fire district at all. The Arizona Fire & Medical Authority approved an out-of-district agreement covering plan review, inspection, and emergency response for an annual subscription fee. At least part of the project now appears in federal operating records.

Sussex County, Virginia permitted Cabin Point Solar, 75 megawatts, with conditions written into the permit itself: 200-foot setbacks from residential parcels, a 50-foot vegetated buffer, training for fire-rescue crews, and a removal bond that gets adjusted periodically as costs change. A separate siting agreement adds roughly $4.2 million for county capital needs including public safety and broadband.

Where communities came away with specifics — a numbered setback, a bond with an update schedule, a named fire agreement, an endowment with an identified recipient — they got them by negotiating before or during permitting, not after. Even then, delivery lags approval by years, and some of what was promised stays conditional on milestones the developer hasn't reached.

Seven facilities within eight miles

Starlight is not arriving in empty country. The county's own cumulative-project inventory lists at least seven existing, approved, or proposed energy facilities within about eight miles:

• The completed Tule Wind project, 0.1 mile north
• A proposed 200-megawatt battery facility, 0.2 mile north
• An approved 74-megawatt solar project, 2.4 miles north
• An approved wind project with up to 60 turbines, 2.8 miles northeast
• JVR Energy Park, 5.5 miles east
• A completed 20-megawatt solar project, 7.7 miles east
• A proposed 60-megawatt solar project, 2.2 miles southwest

Two major transmission lines and several substations cross the same ground.

Susan Fogle, a Boulevard resident, told the September 16 hearing she supports renewable energy but objects to industrial development landing repeatedly in rural communities because the land there is open. County staff acknowledged that strong sun, wind, elevation, and nearby high-voltage lines have pulled proposals toward the Mountain Empire area for roughly two decades. The county also noted that it hasn't designated the area as a renewable-energy zone, doesn't decide which private applications get filed, and wasn't legally required to study the region's projects together as a group. So each one gets reviewed on its own, while the same 360 people absorb all of them.

What Boulevard's year of participation produced

Anthony Ralphs, a Boulevard Planning Group member, told the Union-Tribune that past development taught residents projects go forward over local objection while the affected community sits outside the safety conversation. That's an accurate description of the mechanics, not a complaint about them. The county evaluates individual applications against whatever rules are on the books the day the application lands. Starlight's landed before the zoning ordinance. The ordinance, by its own terms, won't reach backward. Boulevard participated in every forum the process offered and the vote against its position was unanimous.

The Back Country Community Alliance for Responsible Development told KPBS it intends to sue. The county filed its notice of determination on September 18, opening a thirty-day window for a challenge under the California Environmental Quality Act. Whether litigation changes anything is unknown.

The gap between the approval and what it promises remains wide. The larger phase has no buyer and no grid connection. The discounted-power benefit points at a program the project doesn't currently qualify for, and the direct payment has been described in two incompatible dollar amounts with nothing disbursed. The fire-services money is committed but unattached to any named capacity. And the ordinance built to standardize protections for communities like Boulevard arrives after the project that prompted it.

Wall spent a year learning how the county works: reading environmental documents, organizing neighbors, presenting at planning group meetings, making the drive downtown. Afterward he told KPBS the outcome was disappointing despite the amendments the board attached. Then he went home, where the approval was two days old and his questions about battery fire and groundwater sat exactly where they had been.

He said Boulevard does not give its consent. Consent was never one of the gates. The process asked for comment, and comment is what it collected, and the record will show that Boulevard was heard at every stage. More rural communities will host this infrastructure while the rules governing it are still in draft. Boulevard's year of participation shows how little distance separates a fully exercised right to take part from having no say at all.