Every big solar farm you have driven past is wrapped in chain link, six to eight feet of it, running unbroken around the whole site. It keeps people away from live equipment, which is the point. It also shuts a door on anything that used to walk through, which is not the point but happens anyway.<\/p>\n
A project permitted in southern Oregon is going to leave that fence open on purpose in one spot.<\/p>\n
The Diamond Solar Project would put 406,000 panels on 1,560 acres of forest-zoned land at Diamond Lake Junction, where U.S. 97 meets Oregon 138 northeast of Crater Lake National Park. Chicago-based Invenergy is behind it: 200 megawatts of generation, 200 megawatts of batteries, and the company’s first solar-plus-storage site in the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n
Instead of one continuous array, the site is cut into two blocks with a 600-foot-wide gap running between them. No fence across it and no panels in it. It is there so deer and elk can keep reaching the water on the other side.<\/p>\n
Klamath County’s planning commission recommended approval at a joint hearing on October 28, and the county board read the final order into the record on December 16. What has changed since then is everything around the project. In June, Oregon opened a route that lets large renewable projects skip state siting entirely and go straight to the county that hosts them.<\/p>\n
The corridor did not come from a design contest. Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife asked for it.<\/p>\n
Jeremy Thompson, who served as the department’s energy coordinator while the Diamond proposal was being put together, told Columbia Insight<\/a> that staff were worried about two things at once: an obstacle dropped across a migration route, and a fence cutting animals off from water they were already using. Both deer and elk show up on that ground.<\/p>\n ODFW and Invenergy negotiated their way to 600 feet. The department publishes its own solar siting guidance<\/a>, updated in March 2024, which is the document that frames these conversations under Oregon’s renewable siting rules.<\/p>\n Testimony at the October hearing filled in the part that gets lost in the round number. The full opening is closer to 700 feet: roughly 600 feet of vegetated passage, plus a 50-foot cleared fire break on each side. So the number in the headline and the number a surveyor would measure are two different numbers, and only one of them has cover on it.<\/p>\n Around the rest of the site sits an eight-foot chain-link fence and a 30-foot cleared buffer for firefighting access. Roughly 1,300 of the 1,560 acres end up inside that fence. Alongside it, Invenergy has committed to a conservation parcel of about 1,900 acres east of the plant, meant to replace habitat the panels take.<\/p>\n Wildlife passages through solar farms are becoming a normal ask in Oregon, especially for the very large projects proposed in the north-central part of the state. Thompson said the department has worked with several companies on them.<\/p>\n Not one has been constructed.<\/p>\n Which means the 600-foot figure at Diamond is not a validated design. It is a negotiated one, and everyone involved knows it. ODFW’s position on the width was blunt: “The science isn’t sound yet on how wide that corridor needs to be,” Thompson told Columbia Insight.<\/p>\n The department wants to fix that with fieldwork. The plan is to put collars on deer and run game cameras once the plant exists, then find out whether animals actually use the gap or just avoid the whole area. That study has not started, because there is nothing yet to study. Construction is expected to run about 24 months with winter shutdowns, and Invenergy has pointed at 2029 for the plant being online.<\/p>\n Do the conversion and the gap starts to feel narrower than it sounds. Six hundred feet is about 183 meters. An elk walking down the middle of it is standing roughly 300 feet from a fence line on either side, with panels behind both.<\/p>\n That matters because the thing being measured is not whether an animal can physically fit. It is whether the animal is willing. Ungulates keep their distance from stuff that looks industrial, and the distance they keep is the whole question.<\/p>\n The broader research is not settled either. A 2025 review of solar’s effects on wildlife<\/a> lists habitat loss, fragmentation and altered microclimate among the impacts, and argues the field needs urgent work precisely because sites are going up faster than anyone is studying them.<\/p>\n There is some encouraging evidence at smaller scales. The Nature Conservancy has tracked small animals moving through wildlife-friendly fencing at a solar facility in North Carolina, where the fix is holes in the mesh rather than a corridor. We covered a related case earlier this summer, when an endangered kit fox moved into two California solar farms<\/a> and raised pups about as safely as the foxes outside the fence, and another where burrowing owls were relocated into a 10,000-acre Arizona complex<\/a> and bred successfully.<\/p>\n None of those animals weigh 700 pounds or migrate seasonally. And the results do not run one way: a University of Bristol team that studied 19 solar farms in southwest England found bat activity had collapsed<\/a> in the fields with panels. Small-species tolerance tells you very little about what an elk herd will do.<\/p>\n Here is why a corridor design from last autumn matters more now than it did then.<\/p>\n Governor Tina Kotek signed House Bill 4031<\/a>, which took effect on June 5, 2026. It creates a temporary exception to the requirement that large energy facilities obtain a site certificate from Oregon’s Energy Facility Siting Council. A project qualifies if it runs on solar, wind, geothermal or marine energy, is eligible for the federal renewable tax credits, files its local land use application by the end of 2028 and is in service by the end of 2030. Using it is optional.<\/p>\n The reason for the hurry is federal. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar projects had to begin construction by July 4, 2026 to keep the current credit treatment and a four-year window to finish. Miss that date and the facility has to be running by December 31, 2027, which for a 200-megawatt build is not a realistic timeline.<\/p>\n So county planning commissions in Oregon are about to be handed decisions that used to go to a state council with a dedicated wildlife review process. Klamath County is already the test case. Its planning department has been fielding energy applications since the Klamath River dams came out, and the largest is the proposed Klamath Falls Energy Center near Keno, an \u00d8rsted project of roughly 8,600 acres on Green Diamond timberland. Oregon’s Department of Energy issued its project order in May. In June, residents formed the Keno Wildlands Alliance to fight it<\/a>, citing fire, groundwater and displaced herds.<\/p>\n Diamond is the closest thing anyone in that county has to a worked example of how you build on forest land and still let the animals through.<\/p>\n One detail about the land is worth knowing before the corridor becomes a template.<\/p>\n Both the 1,560-acre project site and the 1,900-acre conservation parcel meant to offset it sit on ground owned by Shanda Group, the private investment firm founded by Chinese billionaire Tianqiao Chen and his family. Shanda is the second-largest foreign owner of land in the United States, and Chen holds close to 200,000 acres of forestland across Klamath and Deschutes counties.<\/p>\nNobody in Oregon has actually built one of these yet<\/h2>\n
So is 600 feet enough?<\/h2>\n
Oregon just moved decisions like this to the counties<\/h2>\n
The forest and the offset have the same landlord<\/h2>\n