North Carolina Town That Defeated Solar Plan Talks Back (newsobserver.com)

mdsolar writes with news that city officials in Woodland, North Carolina have taken issue with being ridiculed by the internet and want to set the record straight. According to the article: "Usually what happens in Woodland stays in Woodland, a town 115 miles east of Raleigh with one Dollar General store and one restaurant. But news of the Northampton County hamlet's moratorium on solar farms blew up on social media over the weekend after a local paper quoted a resident complaining to the Town Council that solar farms would take away sunshine from nearby vegetation. Another resident warned that solar panels would suck up energy from the sun. As outlandish as those claims seem, town officials say the Internet got it wrong."

Comments

Surrounded?

[DogDude]

They didn't want to be surrounded by solar farms? Why not? That still doesn't make any sense.

Re:Surrounded?

[cirby]

Because solar farms, while really cool-looking from the air, look like miles and miles of supporting hardware from ground level.

The plan is basically "turn a farm community into an island surrounded by several square miles of industrial plants." People move to the country to get away from such things, it's not surprising that they're resisting having their property values trashed because someone decides to take a bunch of government cash to build the darned things.

Re:Surrounded?

[bws111]

This may surprise you, but different people find different things pleasant to look at. Some people LIKE looking at acres of tobacco, dilapidated barns and silos, etc. You can even buy artwork of such things. Some people LIKE to look at big cities, other people think they are as ugly as ugly can be. Who are you to be deciding what the town should or should not be looking at?

Re:Surrounded?

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't want to be surrounded by solar farms? Why not? That still doesn't make any sense.

Probably the same reason that people don't want to be surrounded by acres of parking lots or gravel-covered industrial zones.
People who live in small towns often consider nature to have a beauty worthy of preserving.

I am totally amazed at the fuckwits on slashdot that are shrieking "they hatez the solar because they rednecks" when this town probably has more solar energy panels installed than almost any other town in the country.

some people think they're an eyesore

[Ionized]

I don't agree, but they are certainly entitled to their opinion, and if they want to block a FOURTH solar farm from being built around their two horse town, I really don't think we have any room to bitch.

How many solar farms does YOUR town have? less than 3 per 800 people, I imagine.

Re:some people think they're an eyesore

[mrchaotica]

I wish my town had three per 800 people! Since I live in a major city, that probably means every roof would have solar and we'd be supplanting coal for a pretty big fraction of our power usage.

Re:some people think they're an eyesore

[TWX]

Only thing that I could see being negative about solar farms is if they displace either too much natural wilderness, or they displace too much area used for recreation or other personal use. Obviously there would be strong objections, for example, if someone wanted to ring Walden with solar. If someone's personal Walden is in the area where the solar farm is being installed, or if there are real ecological issues with the density then I could see reasons for objecting.

On the other hand, given the environmental issues caused through the burning of Carbon to make power, I have my doubts as to the potential for real ecological damage compared to the status-quo.

Re:some people think they're an eyesore

[Tailhook]

This characterization that "the Internet" got it wrong is such a lie. This was a deliberate shaming of honest brokers by media savvy enviro-bullies because someone had the temerity to push back before they found themselves marooned in a glass hell. The Internet was lied to by these assholes and you, dear reader, need to be keeping score about who the bad guys in this really are; you're being lied to and soon their going to be around your town, bullying you out of whatever land you happen to care about.

But the meme is out there now, and it will resonate forever in the libtard echo chamber; stupid 'muricans think solar panels will suck up all the sun........

Re:some people think they're an eyesore

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, why do you have to ruin your totally valid argument with a word like libtard? Gee, right wingers must be totally free of this kind of media manipulation, right? I mean, everything Fox News says is totally legit, and 100% free of rabble rousing, right? How about, just treat your fellow countrymen decently, as your fellow countrymen because that's the right thing to do.

Re:some people think they're an eyesore

[Macman408]

One way this is a bad thing is applicable whether it's domination by solar farms or anything else; it's a lack of diversification. It's a similar problem faced by the cities of Cupertino and Mountain View in California. Cupertino is dominated by Apple, and Mountain View is dominated by Google. Both of these cities want to be favorable to their respective companies, who pay massive amounts of local taxes. On the other hand, if something goes poorly - for example, Apple hits hard times again and shrinks rapidly - then they're suddenly left with a huge hole in their budget, large numbers of unemployed citizens, and all the resulting downstream issues from that.

The solar business isn't quite so fickle, but it's still reasonable to not want to be boxed in by solar farms. For example, if the companies that maintain them go out of business, or if the maintenance costs of the solar farm exceed the price they can get for the power, the town might suddenly be surrounded by thousands of acres of unmaintained waste. I imagine that these farms will bring a few permanent jobs to the area for maintenance - a quick google shows that a solar farm can create a few hundred temporary construction jobs, followed by 10-15 permanent maintenance jobs. In a town of 800 residents, where maybe half or so are working (ie not students, retired, or family caretakers), then having 40-60 jobs all in the same industry is a pretty big percentage of your workforce, and it can have a pretty big effect if they all suddenly go away.

So it's not unreasonable to limit the expansion of a single industry in a small focused area.

Claim it isn't the whole story but quotes true?

[JoshuaZ]

So they claim it isn't the whole story, which seems fair. North Carolina in general has been very good about solar, and they've installed a massive amount in the state (to the point where they are running into problems with lack of storage during peak sunlight). However, the primary backlash was not so directed at the town as much as that one had many different people in the town saying really stupid things. Let's not forget that one of them was a retired science teacher. From the original article that started it all: http://www.roanoke-chowannewsherald.com/2015/12/08/woodland-rejects-solar-farm/:

Jane Mann said she is a local native and is concerned about the plants that make the community beautiful. She is a retired Northampton science teacher and is concerned that photosynthesis, which depends upon sunlight, would not happen and would keep the plants from growing. She said she has observed areas near solar panels where the 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 that solar panels didn’t cause cancer."

It sounds to me like this backlash is mainly pretty deserved. Even if they had legitimate reasons to say no to this new solar, it is clear that those were not the reasons articulated by the people in question.

Basically NIMBYs and BANANAs running amok

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The zoning board meetings are where the NIMBYs and BANANAs rule the roost. Someone turned over the rock and all these creepy crawlies are running away on seeing daylight. Since no one ever bothers to follow these meeting they use any handy excuse they can think of. Even now other than saying "internet" is wrong, they are not denying that the used the reported reasoning to deny the zoning permit.

Try again

[s.petry]

Contrary to your statement "They never told us WHY it got rejected." they clearly stated WHY. It is the 4th solar farm in the same small town of 800 people. It further states that the reason power companies want to build in these areas is because they can acquire land from not so wealthy people on the cheap, taking advantage of the financial situation many families are in (largely due to corporate influence on Agricultural business and economics at a much larger scale). It also discusses a professor who believes this causes long term damage to the agricultural industry.

Since I actually did read TFA, it makes me wonder who actually started the disinformation campaign.

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses!

[WillAffleckUW]

Actions not Words.

Climate Change is NOW, boys and girls, and it cares nothing about your excuses. Nothing like 100 miles of Carolina coastline being inundated during an every 2-3 years "100 year storm" to give you deniers a wake up call ...