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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.
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.
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.
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
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"?