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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."
Tendentious article in local paper generates an Internet and social media lynch mob that gets all the important facts wrong.
How about because being surrounded by solar farms is about as aesthetically pleasing as being surrounded by parking lots.
Only when done wrong. There are dozens of solar farms near me and I barely see them. The great thing about solar farms is 50 foot of trees at the edge of the property completely hides them from ground level.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Which explains why offshore wind farms are so popular in liberal Massachusetts, eh?
These projects have a huge NIMBY aspect to them - they're great on paper, but when somebody wants to build one next to YOUR swimming pool, it becomes a problem. And you know what? That's okay! People are ALLOWED to have, and express, differing opinions in America, despite your clearly superior knowledge of what's good for everybody.
I bet this town, with 3 solar farms already operating, is a hell of a lot "greener" than your backwoods shithole, you Facebook-account-having fuckstick.
Since they already have three solar farms, I guess they are probably well familiar with what they look like, and have decided they don't want a fourth one in that spot.
“How would you and your family like to live in the middle of a solar farm, surrounded on all four sides?” said Lane
Um, a heck of a lot?
Solar farms are silent, nonpolluting, and provide jobs. It's hard to think of a better neighbor than that. Maybe I could work there and walk to work. Sounds awesome. Please build one next to my house, then another one other side.
Ultimately, he said, the Strata Solar project was not doomed by irrational fears. The photovoltaic panels were proposed just 50 feet from residential homes
Oh noes! FIFTY FEET! That's super close! He'd better do something, or else pretty soon people might start attaching solar cells directly to their homes!
I think the internet got this one right.
...having their property values trashed
There is no existing value to trash. That's why the companies want to install solar farms there.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
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.
But big solar has already passed this off as fear from simple ignorant people. And many folks right here on /. were happy to eat that clickbait without any real thought. So, lets stick with the big solar's story, after all, when it comes to solar, any means is justified, including belittling people, misleading articles, and keeping the facts to a minimum .
It's true that the panels aren't 100% efficient. What energy doesn't go out over the wires either gets absorbed, reflected, or grounded. Grounded? Yes, you could heat up the metal frames and that heat could find its way into the ground, which is usually a pretty good heat sink. That's probably negligible though. Much of the heat would get transferred to the air. Some would get reflected back--even though the panels are dark in visible light, infrared might be another matter.
The real devil is in what the panels replace. You have to compare the panels to what they're replacing. Another poster said putting the panels in the desert would make things cooler. If you're covering sparse vegetation and hot rocks with panels, and taking out some energy in the form of electricity that makes sense.
North Carolina isn't desert though. They're going to put those panels over land that probably used to be either woods, pasture, or fields full of some agricultural product. Plants can cool things down in a number of ways that might be more effective than the removal of energy in electrical form by panels. Aside from that, if the electricity is consumed locally it's a zero-sum game.
I'm sure there are some more fine points I'm missing here; but the main point is that the equation is a bit more complicated than just a simple thermodynamic analysis of the panels.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
'This characterization that "the Internet" got it wrong is such a lie.'
Are you pushing the blame away from those who may have got it wrong onto someone else? It is everyone's own responsibility to verify the information they have is as correct as possible.