A state legislator who represents Western Coventry is questioning the need for a bill before the General Assembly that seeks to encourage renewable-energy projects, such as the solar-energy farm proposed for his own district.

Rep. Nicholas Gorham, R-Coventry, said the bill introduced by his colleague, Rep. Ray Sullivan, D-Coventry, appears to benefit the private developer that wants to build the solar farm, and the town of Coventry, which would get lease payments of $200,000 a year.

But those benefits would come at the expense of all other electricity customers in Rhode Island.

“It’s a very creative way to finance a project that has no financial viability in this area,” Gorham said. “The data that I’ve seen show we are in the one of the worst parts of the United States to produce solar energy.”

Allco Renewable Energy, of New York, has offered to build a 90-acre, 8-megawatt solar farm on the former Picillo pig farm, a 100-acre tract of town-owned land. An eight-acre portion of the farm was declared a federal Superfund pollution site in the 1980s.

But company officials said this week that the project would proceed only if the state passed legislation that would ensure the developer that it would be able to sell its electricity at a fixed price over a long period.

The company appeared at the State House on Tuesday with Sullivan to support his bill. The Rhode Island Renewable Energy Sources Act would require dominant electricity and gas utility National Grid to enter into contracts for at least 20 years to buy the electricity generated by renewable energy sources in Rhode Island, such as solar and wind projects. The bill also sets the rates that National Grid would have to pay. It would have to buy locally produced solar energy, for example, at 48 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is more than five times the rate National Grid pays under its current standard offer contracts. The extra costs would be passed along to all electricity customers in Rhode Island.

Supporters of solar energy refer to this type of legislation as a “feed-in tariff,” in which governments set the price of renewable energy to rates close to what it costs to produce it. These laws also require the local utility companies to buy this power, up to a certain limit, at these fixed prices.

The theory behind this approach is to spur renewable-energy projects by ensuring that developers will profit from the sale of electricity.

Christopher L. Whitman, president of Allco Solar, says these feed-in tariffs are common in European countries and have resulted in the explosive growth of renewable energy in countries such as Germany.

Sullivan, the bill sponsor, said it would also help the economy by creating new “green-collar” jobs.

In the United States, only California has passed a feed-in tariff, but Whitman said several other states were considering them.

Gorham said he was tired of the tax breaks and subsidies that the General Assembly has made recently, and he sees this bill as another subsidy.

“It’s a proposal that will cost the ratepayers of National Grid an awful lot,” he said.

Gorham likened building a solar farm in Coventry to planting an orange grove there.

“I suppose if you required Tropicana to buy oranges, as a matter of law, from a grove at the Picillo farm, they’d buy them and someone will build the grove,” he said. “But it’s the taxpayers who ultimately paid more for the juice.”

“I’m keeping an open mind about it. But all the data I have seen show this is not the kind of place you would locate a solar-energy production facility,” he said.

“I’m all for alternative sources of power. I think [Governor Carcieri] is making a concerted effort to introduce wind energy and other things into our energy lexicon here in Rhode Island, which is laudable.”

“We shouldn’t embrace an idea simply because it’s alternative energy. It has to be something that makes sense and I’m not convinced yet that this makes sense,” Gorham said.

tbarmann@projo.com