Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
How about because being surrounded by solar farms is about as aesthetically pleasing as being surrounded by parking lots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
Exactly.
How many have even been "down east" North Carolina? I find acres of PVs no less appealing to look at than acres of tobacco, dilapidated barns and silos, rusting mobile homes, chicken or pork processing plants, or mega warehouses. If it was either soybeans or PVs, that's one thing. But it's often just idle fields or something worse, like tobacco or enormous distribution warehouses. Has the town ever limited cell phone towers or rotting vehicles permanently planted in front yards?
“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.
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?
All those black or blue solar panels aren't 100% efficient, while they convert 1/5 of the sun's energy they absorb into electricity, the remaining 4/5 is emitted as heat. It nearly like taking those fields and paving them with asphalt, it is going to heat up the local area. Solar panels make sense on areas that are already black like a roof, but taking large undeveloped areas and installing panels you are just creating a large heat island. Let's not forget the reflections they make in latitudes further north where they are angled such that they reflect light into neighboring homes. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
TFA says they *would* take a 4th solar farm, but the "photovoltaic panels were proposed just 50 feet from residential homes, and the project was too close to State Route 258 leading into town." The developer is going to increase the easement distances and resubmit.
Farmers don't make real money for anyone but the owner and few select ag services business individuals.
You nothing about agriculture if that's what you think. Most farmers are very well off. Especially after the commodity prices of the last 8 or 10 years.
I come from a farming community in the Midwest (mostly corn, soybeans, and livestock). The only farmers who are well off in my home town are those who inherited land. Farmland is incredibly expensive. According to Iowa State University the cost of growing corn is $887 per acre in 2015. This comes to $4.79 per bushel @ 185 bushels per acre.
Of that cost, $37 goes to farmers (4%) and $312 goes towards cash rent or equivalent (35%). Seed, fertilizers, and other additives make up another $386 (44%).
It is painfully obvious the only people making money off farming are the land owners and seed/fertilizer/herbicide/etc providers. Just like the GP said.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
[North Carolina has] installed a massive amount in the state (to the point where they are running into problems with lack of storage during peak sunlight).
North Carolina has on the order of 1,100 MW of PV installed (source. Duke Energy Progress (NC + SC) has a peak summer load of 13,232 MW for planning purposes. Duke Energy Carolina (NC + SC) has a peak summer load of 18,691 MW. The combined load -- because Duke Energy and Duke Progress (in North and South Carolina) are now a single jointly operated system -- is 31,923 MW. See 2013 DEP IRP Table 3-A and 2013 DEC IRP Table 3-A (pdfs). Duke has roughly 36,000 MW of generating capacity (Tables 8-D, row 5), of which ~15% is combustion turbines (Charts 8-E). CTs are fast ramp, and Duke has roughly 5,400 MW of CTs -- far more than enough to easily integrate 1,100 MW of PV distributed across its system. Duke Energy operating in North Carolina should have absolutely no trouble integrating the 1,100 MW of solar PV operating in the territory, on time scales of sub-second, 15 second, 5 minute, 15 minute, hourly, and daily operations. As Duke continues to retire coal units and build CTs and combined cycle (CC) gas plants, its ability to integrate PV will only increase.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
So for a change, family farms are actually more economically viable than large new upstart businesses operating as factory farms?
Depends on what you mean as "more economically viable." If a farmer is making $150,000 per year farming, but could be making $130,000 per year if he retired and rented his land out to a factory farming operation, is it really economically viable for him to remain a farmer? If he loves the job (like my father did) then more power to him. But in that case the farming is more of a hobby, while being a landlord (to himself) is his primary profession.
Factory farms make up for the low margins with scale. They don't make more money per acre than a family farmer other than through better practices their extra scale allows them to do. Like larger combine heads, computer driven tractors, better research into increasing crop yields, etc.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Actually, the arguments that PV solar, as currently deployed in the USA, are largely a "government boondoggle" and "highly inefficient" are two really valid accusations with merit.
IMO, like so many things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I invested in PV solar for my own house, at considerable expense. So no, I'm not a "hater" of the technology. But the only reason you see so much solar adoption right now is the artificial construct the government created to sweeten the economics of doing so.
Right now, the company that installed my panels, as well as many of their competitors, are campaigning aggressively to make sure the Federal tax break for solar doesn't expire by the end of 2015, as it was originally scheduled to do. That's because it amounts to a full 1/3rd. of your total installation cost that's received back as a tax credit. People like me who buy one of these systems typically do so with the help of a "bridge loan" that's given for an amount roughly equivalent to this tax credit, with 0% interest for 1 year. The "plan" is, you'll use the loan to help cover the up-front cost of your installation, and then pay the bridge loan off before any interest is due on it, using your Federal tax refund you get the next year.
Some states give back $1,000 or more, as well, as part of a solar rebate program or state tax credit. Typically, these rebates have a few hoops to jump through to qualify, including providing proof that you paid off the cost of your PV solar installation in full.
If these credits disappear, the typical consumer who buys one of these systems is looking at shelling out approximately $34,000 for a system that might not even offset more than 60-70% or so of their total electric usage. At that point, it really becomes a questionable purchase. Because yes, they can probably run numbers and projections in Excel and crank out a spreadsheet that shows it will save you tens of thousands of dollars over its 25-30 year average lifespan. But a LOT can happen in 25+ years. Will you be living in the same place? Will a new technology come along that drives the kilowatt hour cost of electricity way down? Will the system's inverter(s) fail outside of warranty (or the company who made them goes out of business), adding thousands to your total cost of operation?
Oh, and surely some people will bring up the additional "money maker" for having solar ... the solar reclamation credits (SRECs) issued in some states. Well, again, these are more artificial government constructs because they simply penalized the power companies in those states for not producing above a certain percentage of power from "green sources". In turn, the power companies get to purchase these SRECs to make up for their shortfalls, and that money goes back to people with PV solar installations, based on how much power the systems generate per quarter.
I receive the SRECs in my state, and I'd say a typical check is around the $450-525 range. So sure, nice to receive those and they help make a better economic case for purchasing the system. But there's no guarantee what an SREC will be worth down the road. The more people who install solar, the more people there are generating SRECs in that state, and there are only so many a power company needs to buy to be compliant. Early adopters of solar typically got the best deal with SRECs, back when they were worth a lot more than today.
In that case the correct solution is to make a good offer to buy the land rather than block land owners from exercising their property rights.
Pretty sure that only one State in the Union offers honest-to-goodness property rights, and it certainly isnt North Carolina. Its Texas.
"His name was James Damore."
Farmers are some of US richest people. They make millions of dollars ...
Farming is not lucrative. Inheriting farmland is lucrative. There are different classes of farmers. The ones who inherited large amounts of land are often very well off, just like everyone else who inherits millions of dollars from their parents. The farmers who rent farmland are almost never wealthy. Rich farmers could be more accurately labelled as rich real estate owners.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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"?