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

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

[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: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.

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.