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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

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Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the town square of a charming 1000 year old French village. You see cobblestones yes, but do you see any solar panels?

Putting the panels in a less visible area is a smart move to avoid conflict with the neighbors. In places with a lot of land like west USA it probably does not matter so much.

We have our share of NIMBYs in the Western USA too, though it's more often about wind farms (large and noisy). Our solar farms tend to be out in the sparsely-inhabited deserts anyway, where not a lot of people live. But then we have to evaluate for endangered species and tribal burial grounds and coordinate across several layers of government and different funding & tax rebate sources. It's not easy to actually build a facility...

That's the main difference with France indeed! We have strong regulations over landuse that allows you to build infrastructure over constructible areas (often located around city center). For this type of large-scale projects you will need to go deeper the countryside but we don't have much desert areas here. You'll always end-up close to housing area or historical monuments.

That sounds like b**** to me. There's a parking lot right in the middle of Saint-Bonnet-le-Château.

I would be perfectly content to put PV on rooftops in a place like that, or let others do so, if I lived there.

I own an apartment in the UK, and inquired about putting PV on the roof. There were two reasons why the answer was "no": (1) leasehold, (2) conservation area.

Theoretically, the neighbours who installed satellite dishes (tiny ones!) were in violation of the latter, though in practice nobody seemed to care.

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