A request to Wake County for a rezoning outside Zebulon to allow a solar farm is becoming more common, and that’s good. Clean energy is a good crop, and goodness knows one needed by neighborhoods and businesses alike. In this case, Chad Ray of Zebulon is going before the Wake Board of Adjustment this week so he can put 15 acres of his land in solar farming.

He needs that in order for an energy company he won’t name to turn the property into a solar farm, whereupon it will sell the energy produced to Progress Energy. The farm, Ray said, would produce enough solar power for more than 200 homes.

Ray isn’t alone. Solar farming is growing, one might say, around Wake County. Consider just how far this “movement” has come since the notion of solar energy first came to be understood. Then it was regarded as cutting-edge, sometimes mysterious stuff. Now, people understand it and accept it as a preferable alternative to the other, more risky forms of energy production.

Let the sun shine in. Let the panels work. Let there be light ... in more ways than one.