Counties are blocking wind and solar across the US | Hacker News Reader

Counties are blocking wind and solar across the US

usatoday.com

27 pointsthelastgallon30 comments

As an outsider and long time observer of the USA, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that a collective madness has gripped your country and you are in a race to 'freedom' yourselves to oblivion.

Where are you from?

I'm not using a throwaway so you can find out by reading my comment history. I choose not to make it easy for you because this thread is not about my country, and whataboutism misses the point. Yes, my country has significant issues making the kind of inroads with renewable energy policy that we should have. And it's been due to crass politicking.

Insults me for supposedly using a throwaway account then complains about whataboutisms. It was a simple question.

Well, confirmation bias. You are looking for news that confirm your perspective. Meanwhile renewable energy continues to grow in the US like in most places globally:

https://electrek.co/2024/02/27/us-renewables-2023-solar-in-t...

I guess what the parent article alludes to, is increasing political balkanisation, which is what I'm seeing. Not just a tale of two America's, but of many. The consequence is an increasing inability to act in concert for the good of the whole. And it seems to be getting worse. This is just another data point. So while collectively, the renewable energy may be growing, the disparity of its distribution is (to my mind) yet another sign of the eroding viability of your country as a country (rather than as a collection of states or counties).

Like with every where else, it's hard to get a sense of what's going on thru media.

eg I live in Seattle. During the BLM / George Flyod related protests, corporate media reported the CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone) as an urban war zone. Meanwhile, locals were treating it like a block party, with arts, foods, baby strollers, etc.

While the online political slapfight continues to degrade (self radicalization and calls to violence), ever more people are stepping back (the actual doers) or checked out entirely (apathy).

As a US citizen, I tend to agree...

I get that there exist people who hate the noise and shadows of wind turbines. I've even seen some rare cases where the complaints were warranted since it literally caused a strobing effect in their houses throughout the day. I think a ban is a massive overreaction to these complaints, but I get it.

I don't get the solar bans, can someone please explain those to me? Even in the cases where it's just a land usage limit, why would anyone even ask for that? There is no way they banned it for no reason, there has to be something that motivated it right? But what about solar power could possibly have bothered anyone?? I'm not expecting Oil companies to be influencing county level politics here so there clearly is a nation wide pattern of individuals proposing these bans for some reason I'm not seeing.

It's because liberals like green energy and so conservatives must oppose it. It's an identity thing essentially; no more complicated than that. I've got a co-worker who lives in Bandera, TX where this is currently a conflict.

Same with things like IVF. No sane person should be against IVF. And yet here we are.

There are plenty of ways to annoy opposition without looking like an idiot, while these kinds of assumptions are convenient, they are usually wrong in my experience (or just a small piece of the picture). Especially in this case where a lot of those bans appear to be in blue counties...

All I can really speak to is the one I have experience with via my co-worker. He'll tell you that he gets on pretty well with his neighbors but he'd also tell you that they have many other ways of looking like idiots. For instance, they voted in a pussy-grabbing reality TV star for president.

Rich democrats are the same as Republicans except they don't agree on social issues. They want all the tax cuts + the benefits of wealthy living and the poors can have the wind farm eyesores. Same way poorer city centers subsidize the wealthy suburbs.

Poor people live near highways and would benefit from electrification with less air pollution, using that wind energy to provide cheap electricity for their cars (which will get significantly cheaper from here).

Yes they would but they also get the potential hit to property values that comes from having them nearby. Plus my point was that rich people like their scenic views and they also want the benefits of green energy (so they can act like they care) so whats to do? Place the equipment elsewhere.

Which blue counties? And what is the ratio of blue counties to red counties? Is it a correlated trend or just a one off you're referring to?

Identity politics and polarisation.

It turns out that defining your beliefs based on your identity rather than identity based on your beliefs is rather popular. Has been for a long time.

I can't make this up:

"Members of the public in Woodland, North Carolina, expressed their fear and mistrust at the proposal to allow Strata Solar Company to build a solar farm off Highway 258.

During the Woodland Town Council meeting, one local man, Bobby Mann, said solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not go to Woodland, the Roanoke-Chowan News Herald reported.

Jane Mann, a retired science teacher, said she was concerned the panels would prevent plants in the area from photosynthesizing, stopping them from growing.

Ms Mann said she had seen areas near solar panels where plants are brown and dead because they did not get enough sunlight.

She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her solar panels didn't cause cancer."

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-town-re...

Those are all valid concerns. /s

Well, it turns out, John Taylor Gatto was right.

Probably identity politics mixed with stupidity. My neighbor is paranoid over excessive radiation. She kept badgering the power company when they switched over to wireless meters. She talks about all the radiation you'd get if you got solar panels. Once they get cheap enough, Im getting them....thats going to be an adventure.

> I'm not expecting Oil companies to be influencing county level politics here...

Why not? Because that's exactly what they're doing.

If I had to steelman a county's solar ban... Solar production is intermittent / unreliable. And hydrocarbon power plants are the county's backbone.

> solar bans

Important to note than most of these bans are about large-scale utility level solar installations. We're talking multi-million dollar, multi-decade industrial operations over many acres. Not putting a few PV panels on a roof. It's light industry and has significant environmental impact. Less impact than a coal plant for the same amount of power capacity, but still a non-zero local cost to pay. Why wouldn't you have a say in an industrial facility built next door?

It's well within the rights of every local community to do that calculus for themselves and have at least a chance of appeal - otherwise you risk a world where a privileged class of decision makers can literally bulldoze the homes of citizens in the name of "progress". Yes it's happened before (see the history of the US interstate system, power grid, water infrastructure, etc) which is why communities are now leveraging their ban-power instead of getting bulldozed.

>Less impact than a coal plant for the same amount of power capacity

For the same amount of "power capacity", you are talking about covering an area multiple times bigger in PV panels. The health impact is reduced to zero, but the environmental impact is ball-parks bigger making it a non-zero trade-off.

I am a big renewables fan and there is some truth to this. Utility-scale solar installations are not, today, low-touch operations. You need inverters, often you need a substation with a transformer to e.g. 69 kV. You need to level ground to make them feasible to maintain for decades. You might need a reactive compensator.

The comparison to coal is where you lost me, though. The coal plant and corresponding emissions will kill hundreds of people in your county over the years.

The other thing to consider is that if your power prices become local (as they can be in Texas), you can really benefit from negative energy prices in the afternoon. I mean the economics are terrific, honestly.

Not sure what you're on about re: coal. I literally said solar has "less impact than a coal plant", so we seem to be in agreement.

You know what really causes a strobing effect in my living space? Road Traffic.

Day AND night.

Unless you moved in knowing this would happen, I would largely agree that complaints about lights beaming into your house are warranted, and deserving of some attention. Like how it's not unreasonable for the government to put up sound barriers around new highways passing by neighborhoods. I would not agree that the correct remediation is banning cars on the other hand...

Meanwhile solar isn't much different than having a bunch of boxes in your backyard, why would people care about this kind of thing? I get that the nitpickers are always gonna pick things, but what exactly are they picking when it comes to solar? Based on the replies so far, it's mostly due to local superstition, which is interesting in it's own way I suppose... but I guess it's more likely the boring answer perrygeo mentioned: that communities simply fear new developments in general, and banning solar is simply a means to an end.

In otherwise good explainers, USA Today buries the lede:

Transition to renewable energy is being thwarted by astroturf campaigns underwritten by the usual suspects (eg Koch) and electrical utilities.

Obviously.

"Utilities are lobbying against the public interest. Here's how to stop it." [2023-02]

"In this episode, utility watchdog David Pomerantz discusses all the ways that utilities use ratepayer money to lobby against the clean-energy transition — and what regulators and policy makers can do to stop it."

https://www.volts.wtf/p/utilities-are-lobbying-against-the

"The right-wing groups behind renewable energy misinformation" [2022-04]

"Across the country and the internet, there are hundreds of conservative think tanks, groups, and individuals working to stir up community opposition to renewable energy with misinformation and lies. With virtually no public scrutiny, they have secured state-level policies restricting renewable energy siting in dozens of states."

https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-right-wing-groups-behind-renewab...

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