I’ve seen some of the ones out in far west Texas. They’re amazing, you see this blue shimmer on the horizon that looks about the size of a lake and then when you eventually get close enough it turns out to be a huge solar array. There’s some smaller ones just south of dfw that I drive by when going hiking at a state park my wife likes. Still impressive but nothing like the giant farms in west Texas.
Texas also has a lot of wind power. I was driving though at night one time and there were turbines on either side of the road as far as could be seen. Thing is, they are tall so they have those red airplane warning lights on top - which would all flash at exactly the same time. A rather trippy thing to see.
Depending on which one, most of them don't have airplane warning lights. There have been extensive study, and if done right you can only light up a small number but because the lights are synchronized that is a better stay away indication than having a light one them all. (lights not synchronized is a disaster - too many lights to keep track of)
There's some wind power in south central Texas as well. I'd thought it was more of a west Texas sight, but you also see them going down I37 and I69E toward Brownsville.
Locally Michigan State is covering all their parking lots with solar panels. The added advantage is that since you're car is parked under them you don't have to clear the snow off.
But what I haven't figured out is if they have to broom them off after a snow or just wait until the sun melts it. By the time I am around in the afternoon time they are always cleared.
For panels in northern climates, if the tilt is fixed or just seasonally adjusted (i.e., not tracking the sun), we often will bias towards a bit more vertical tilt than mathematically optimal to encourage snow shedding.
Panels have a low albedo - they absorb a lot of energy. About 25% of that is turned into electricity, the rest heats the panel. So as soon as a corner is exposed to the sun, it tends to melt off the rest of the snow comparatively quickly.
No idea if anyone actually does this. In theory, you could forward-bias the panels with an external power supply. That should generate infrared light at the band gap, which should melt the snow.
It might be enough to just form a thin layer of water, so the whole mass of snow slides off.
This gets proposed a lot. The reason it isn't more frequent is due to the cost of the structure to hold the panels & risks of people running into them.
It would be great if these costs could come down. Parking lots, animal pastures & other areas could be protected & create energy at the same time.
Here is a large installation over surface parking at a VA medical center. I think it is just a matter of time before this becomes the standard everywhere.
Yes, many companies are doing this in their parking lots, even some govt buildings do this. My local library has panels setup over part of their parking lot for instance.
Go vertical. Vertical panels take minimal space, can replace fences (everywhere!), nothing to clean (wind cleans it), heat dissipates and increases production, flattens the duck curve and produces energy during peak demand (early evenings), increases the window of time unlimited free energy is available. Vertical panels provide shade (and this can be calibrated for different types of plants)
Vertical panels may even be stacked on top of one another. Considering how big a fan of solar panels this administration is, perhaps the Big Beautiful Border Wall can be built with vertical solar panels.
The title is a bit non descript, so the blog post is exploring
> a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS.
The arid and sunny west ware prime candidates for solar, yet the current administration is doing everything they can to further destroy any chance a future of being carbon neutral with cancellations of many projects.
TFG cancelled a fairly far along project to build 6gw of solar in the Nevada desert just a few days ago known as Esmeralda 7.
The ineptitude and grift of this administration will haunt this country for decades.
Looks like this is just misinterpretation of poor public communication by the BLM.
> UPDATE: The U.S. Bureau of Land Management responded to 8 News Now on Friday afternoon to clarify the meaning of a “canceled” notice on the Esmeralda Seven Solar Project. A decision to combine the environmental reviews for the seven projects is being changed to give each project the option of submitting their proposal separately. The BLM’s statement: “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada. Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
> The “Cancelled – Cancelled” notice on BLM’s NEPA website applies only to the environmental review stage. The entire project has not been canceled.
I think every engineer knows that all things come with trade-offs.
A great engineer, however, is able to readily admit when one option among others has a far, far greater set of costs than another, for the exact same benefit.
And if said engineer can't decide (for claim of ignorance), they mature to learn that the experience and knowledge of others is the best source for understanding the trade-offs involved to make a decision.
I think its pretty clear solar power has trade-offs. I think it's also obvious solar has far less negatives than all other power generating sources.
My experience has been that people living next to newly constructed solar farms are unhappy about living next to a solar farm. It is also my experience that this is a fringe opinion because a very low percentage of people live next to solar farms.
It is something I have noticed about the definition of 'eyesore' and it isn't just farmers. If it is something which is useful and new it is considered an eyesore. Like, say wind turbines. Yet older practical things which are no longer of use are considered pretty. Like say windmills. They also don't complain nearly as much about things which are 'established and ugly' like powerlines or coal power plants, the latter of which are replaced.
My best guess it is because it causes them existential dread by demarcating to them that there once was a time without the new feature. Now kids will be growing up always having there been the new feature. Thus highlighting their own inevitable death.
> Also, the rainfall. Some farmers go from morning to night never saying a word that isn't a complaint about the rainfall being wrong.
Yes. Some of them use proper rain gauges but some just complain about it. Basically none of them understand the difference between a point measurement and an areal average estimate.
I come from rural Michigan and everyone in the areas where the turbines are complain about it. Its the view or its the sound. The former sure, the latter I haven't heard it myself but I don't go home anymore. It is also the only new investments made in the area in 50 years in any which way shape or form.
When they first started, they had to build the infrastructure and stations to collect the power to transport it from the turbines. My mom rented out some rooms of her house to make some cash when that went on for maybe 2 years in total. There was a lot of work and money coming into the area for a moment, but now the only people making money are the farmers who own the land the turbines sit on.
It's always a trip to see a view you have seen for 40 years but with the turbines there in the background. Slowly, these rural areas are losing vital services one by one. The specialists stop coming to the hospital, even on rotation. The dentists and optometrists retire out and unless someone growing up there has a passion for teeth and genetically modified corn then the roles get pushed out to the bigger cities, 30-45m away.
I wonder if the noise becomes a lesser concern once the turbines reach a certain size? I was in Iowa a couple of years ago and the sight of the turbines near the freeway was truly something, but I don't think I could hear them when I stopped to take a look.
Not just the fans. The transformers, inductors, chokes, capacitors, etc can get extremely noisy as well. I have to plug my ears when I walk by the switchgear at my local Walmart's EV install because it is so loud.
Any system that relies on high rate of change of current over time is prone to these issues. Look at the prevalence of coil whine in gaming PCs and workstations now. The level of noise scales almost linearly with current up until you saturate the various magnetic cores. In a multi-megawatt installation of any kind that relies upon inverters, it is plausible that these electromagnetic acoustic effects could cause meaningful habitat destruction on their own.
Traditional synchronous machines (turbines) do not have this issue, but they are not something you want to live next to for reasons on the other end of the acoustic frequency spectrum. Infrasound from a turbine can travel for miles, especially during transient phases of operation. There were a lot of complaints on social media during the commissioning of a new natural gas generator unit in my area last year.
Please. You won't hear it even a couple hundred meters away.
As for habitat destruction, wildlife _loves_ the shade under solar panels. So much that you need to be careful where you step because rattlesnakes also love (to eat) the wildlife.
Moreover, unlike mines and coal power plants, solar plants are mostly build-and-forget installations. They can be completely unmanned, with only occasional visits for maintenance and panel cleaning.
I'm quite happy to live next to a 4kw "farm" because without it I would have had to run a $25k easement to get power to the property where i live.
I'm less than $8k in on the solar part of this and it's been more reliable than my neighbor's grid power.
But maybe my enjoyment of the panel set is also a "fringe" opinion. I know folks that live near larger installations with less direct impacts and they seem to have fewer feelings about those plants.
I can understand not wanting to live close to wind turbines but I don't understand the issue with living next to a solar farm since the panels just sit there silently.
Lots of people dislike change. Neophobia is a thing, and it's not particularly uncommon.
The good news is, they'll rapidly adapt to each new solar farm; the bad news is, they'll forget about all the ones they're used to by the time comes to expand — I've seen anecdotes of the same thing happening with power lines, where people were upset that some proposed new ones would ruin the view, the person proposing them said they wouldn't be any different from the current ones, and the complainers said "what current ones?" and had to have them pointed out.
The only problem that I kind of understand are the huge fences surrounding the farms. Because copper thefts are a big problem for them, it is quite common to have 3m high fences all around, which is obviously more gated community like than a monoculture field. And of course, it depends on how the farm is run. Solar farms can be ecological heaven if managed properly, unless growing weeds are just killed of with round-up every few months. Everything else seems more pretended problems, like inverter fans that may just be placed in the middle and should barely be hearable from 100 meters away.
Well its not silent those panels go into MPPTs that produce noise when high amps are flowing through them to charge batteries if they don't direct export , if they direct export then there is noise from inverters to convert DC->AC
"My experience is that people whose homes have burned down are unhappy that their homes burned down. It is also my experience that this is a fringe opinion"
Seeing them feels dystopian. I actually don't think that opinion is so fringe. There were lots of environmental protesters when the solar farm near us went up. The valley was rich in low shrubs and wildlife, and even some forest was leveled. A multi billion dollar energy company destroyed it to pick up their share of the free government funding while powering less than 2% of homes.
Sure, it's better than a gas refinery or some other things you could find yourself living next to. But let's not ignore what's bad about our current solutions.
Speculation: The biggest reason for solar farms often being unpopular with locals is that, socially, they feel like dystopian giga-scale machines. Serving some far-away, unfriendly power. Utterly disinterested in the welfare, or even lives, of the local populace.
Vs. almost any other business (farm, mine, oil drilling, warehouse, whatever) would both hire far more local people, and interact far more with the local community.
Is it intentional that you're listing export-based business as "local" while that solar farm probably does supply the town? It's a beautiful contrast either way.
All the businesses produce fungible commodities, and feed those into distribution systems ~10000X larger than the town. So, socially, it does not matter where any given ear of corn, gallon of milk, or watt of electricity ends up.
If your next door neighbor worked on the production line at a tire factory, how much would it change your social relationship with him if half of those tires were being exported, or sold to manufacturers of ICE cars?
Or - maybe you're an introvert, or live in a place where it's normal to have no social relationships with your neighbors. If so, try talking to somebody who has lived in a small farming community. It is a very, very different world.
Every new construction is always unpopular with locals. Farms smell. Businesses produce traffic and emit noise. Oil and gas annoy people for miles around with flaring. Heck, even pro-social ventures like pubs serving the local populace get complaints from other members of the local populace. This only gets mitigated by the social factor after something has existed for a long time.
Personally I like seeing renewables, big or small, cleanly producing energy for us to use. It's a small pro-social signal about environmental responsibility.
Texas is about as red as it gets and leads the nation in renewable energy including solar. Red or blue, if the gov can setup a situation where renewable energy is profitable then nature will take its course.
There's a very specific reason (or quirk) as to why Texas leads the nation in renewable energy -- ERCOT. Basically, 90% of Texas' electric load is serviced by in-state assets, and they have very few interconnections to the rest of the grid. The electricity dispatch curve is priced on the margin, on the cost to operate the last-fired generator (natural gas), and ERCOT has moved to grow solar as a way to reduce prices.[0]
ERCOT has also had a number of spectacular -- and costly -- failures.
Yup, my home state of Idaho also has a shockingly green energy portfolio. All of the PNW is like that because it's on a shared grid that has been primarily powered by hydro for as long as I've been alive.
And still, we've seen a massive amount of green energy installed here. Both windmills and solar farms.
I lived in texas before & the first time I saw massive wind farms alongside oil pumps was in texas.
wind turbines are wonderful things to look at. but yeah some of those were constructed in the years there was a "blue" admin n I guess market forces took over too.
I don't disagree about it being politicized, but if you look at the states with the highest amounts of renewable generation, your second sentence is not supported. There is a LOT of wind energy in Republican-led states in places where wind makes sense.
It's lovely to see actual data swat away ideological mosquito bite sniping points.
The curious thing is that so many of these kinds of claims can be disproven in literally seconds to minutes in any debate, yet they persist.
Certain tendencies aside, republican and conservatives types aren't utter idiots and do know how sidestep some rally talk to serve their own benefit if they think it's practical, profitable and useful.
Not to mention that many conservatives love the field of off-grid prepping to this day and would certainly know about the value of solar, wind, hydro and any other robust renewable power technology. You're not going to build a coal plant or an oil refinery next to your deep-woods Utah cabin.
Yeah, in Oconto county Wisconsin, residents are all up in arms about a solar farm going up. It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money. The arguments against it are "this destroys farmland", "who will clean the snow off of it in winter", "I don't like how it looks", "static electricity will kill the crops around it", "it will raise the temperature of the surrounding area", "you can't recycle fiberglass so it's bad", etc.
> It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money.
What money? Power bills won't go down. The solar panel factories aren't in that county. The installers will be brought in from out of state contractors.
This is something I don’t really get. There’s always concern around change of course. But tending to renewables sounds so much nicer than fossil fuel issues. Like clearing snow off the panels doesn’t sound fun exactly, but it is outdoors… realistically for these giant fields of panels it should be a fairly mechanized process, so somewhat low impact… compare to black lung or, whatever, petrochemicals causing your tap water to catch fire.
> Corn destroys farmland & requires very high fertilizer & pesticide inputs, plus extra fuel to to apply all those - ask any old farmer but this one has a lot of sources
Also solar farms can easily be hidden. They don't need to be next to a public road way and you can put trees around them. They're also great for dual use land with small animals &/or certain crops.
There are both red states and blue states in places in the US that are good for solar power (rural, lots of sun). The sunny American southwest with huge amounts of empty desert land good for solar arrays includes the states of California (blue), Arizona (red), Nevada (toss-up), New Mexico (blue), and Texas (red). And the party that a state's population prefers in presidential elections isn't stable over mutli-decade time periods, but this doesn't change suitability for solar energy production.
Of course, as others have pointed out Texas is helping with renewables.
On the other hand, at the federal level Republican admins tend to cut renewable subsidies and that sort of thing.
Red states have a lot of open space and ought to be ideologically in favor is loose regulations; it would be kind of nice if Republican national politicians would fully embrace cronyism and identify renewable subsidies as an easy way to give money to their supporters. “Oh we did the environmental survey it turns out we should plop down a bunch of subsidized renewable installations in Red states.” Plenty of room for pork and might actually help the country as a side effect…
I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete.
Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.
It’s likely more to do with population density. Middle America is a lot less dense. If you look both Florida and Georgia have solar installs and are “red” states
Looking at, say, wind energy, the top 4 states are all red states. Their cumulative amount handily is more than the next so many states.
That's absolute energy. If you want to go by percentage of energy that is wind, it's the same - the top 4 are red states. In fact, 7 of the top 10 are:
It really is absurd how expensive our energy is across the state. Meanwhile Virginia gets electricity for 15 cents a kwh.
Notably, the municipal power companies mostly are far lower. It's PG&E and SoCal Edison who are that high, because they're shoving the costs of doing 75 years worth of deferred system maintenance all at once onto current ratepayers instead of their investors taking the hit. It's too bad that there wasn't a viable legal framework whereby the investor-owned utilties' shareholders could be wiped out as they deserved to be, and the utility infrastructure transferred to municipal ownership. Around PG&E's bankruptcy there were rumblings, but Sacramento couldn't figure out how to do it, so they propped them up and created a Wildfire Fund paid for by ratepayers to keep bailing them out.
Pretty unlikely. Solar is built on cheap land with low demand, and if the land isn't sold then the power is free so why wouldn't you sell it? No matter how high the taxes are, free money is free money. Aside from making it totally illegal it is very hard to reduce the incentive to sell power.
On top of that the subsidies for solar installations are mostly frontloaded, since the costs are frontloaded. Annual tax breaks are transferrable, so they get sold at the beginning of the project to offset investment cost, lowering interest payments. Even removing tax breaks would not make existing installations less profitable.
Yes, it would be absolutely irrational and indefensible to block people from building solar farms where there is a straightforward commercial case for doing so. Unfortunately, "irrational and indefensible" is exactly what this administration is: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...
I work in the industry. Removing the tax breaks is having a material impact because we look at after tax cash flow. Next year installations are going to reduce meaningfully.
You are right it makes sense but that hasn’t stopped them from gutting all sorts of sensible programs both energy-related and otherwise regardless of the stage of investment/development. Have we forgotten about Musk and his mob already?
This administration is openly touting “beautiful clean coal” (doesn’t exist) for powering servers. Renewables are yet another front where people are divided based on politics. It has little to do with efficacy or practicality. I still have family members convinced that offshore wind power is mass-killing whales because of Carlson.
>The following month, the president said his administration would not approve solar or wind power projects. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” he posted on Truth Social. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”
Realisitically, solar is dead in America and China is the undisputed worlds #1 solar superpower. The US might hook up a few little projects here or there, but functionally the US is in full retreat on solar, cedeing the industry and technology to China.
Unless it gets outlawed, which I suspect is something Trump might do or attempt as part of his campaign in favour of fossil fuels and/or to own the libs/China.
I'm also not clear how cheaply the US could make its own PV in the event of arbitrary trade war (let alone hot war) between the USA and China.
(The good news there is that even in such a situation, everyone else in the world can continue to electrify with the panels, inverters, and batteries that the USA doesn't buy, but the linked article obviously isn't about that).
I’ve seen some of the ones out in far west Texas. They’re amazing, you see this blue shimmer on the horizon that looks about the size of a lake and then when you eventually get close enough it turns out to be a huge solar array. There’s some smaller ones just south of dfw that I drive by when going hiking at a state park my wife likes. Still impressive but nothing like the giant farms in west Texas.
Texas also has a lot of wind power. I was driving though at night one time and there were turbines on either side of the road as far as could be seen. Thing is, they are tall so they have those red airplane warning lights on top - which would all flash at exactly the same time. A rather trippy thing to see.
Depending on which one, most of them don't have airplane warning lights. There have been extensive study, and if done right you can only light up a small number but because the lights are synchronized that is a better stay away indication than having a light one them all. (lights not synchronized is a disaster - too many lights to keep track of)
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Yeah, western Kansas is like that now too. A whole lot of wheat fields, wind turbines, and nothin' else.
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There's some wind power in south central Texas as well. I'd thought it was more of a west Texas sight, but you also see them going down I37 and I69E toward Brownsville.
Solar panels == shade. Any companies deploying solar in this manner (parking lots, pedestrian trails, bus benches, etc..)
Locally Michigan State is covering all their parking lots with solar panels. The added advantage is that since you're car is parked under them you don't have to clear the snow off.
https://ipf.msu.edu/about/news/solar-carport-initiative-earn...
But what I haven't figured out is if they have to broom them off after a snow or just wait until the sun melts it. By the time I am around in the afternoon time they are always cleared.
For panels in northern climates, if the tilt is fixed or just seasonally adjusted (i.e., not tracking the sun), we often will bias towards a bit more vertical tilt than mathematically optimal to encourage snow shedding.
Panels have a low albedo - they absorb a lot of energy. About 25% of that is turned into electricity, the rest heats the panel. So as soon as a corner is exposed to the sun, it tends to melt off the rest of the snow comparatively quickly.
Unless it's borderline melting, brooming is not enough, you'd have to move the snow away or berms would form quickly.
No idea if anyone actually does this. In theory, you could forward-bias the panels with an external power supply. That should generate infrared light at the band gap, which should melt the snow.
It might be enough to just form a thin layer of water, so the whole mass of snow slides off.
This gets proposed a lot. The reason it isn't more frequent is due to the cost of the structure to hold the panels & risks of people running into them.
It would be great if these costs could come down. Parking lots, animal pastures & other areas could be protected & create energy at the same time.
Here is a large installation over surface parking at a VA medical center. I think it is just a matter of time before this becomes the standard everywhere.
Lat, Lon: 29.701864, -95.388646
https://maps.app.goo.gl/N7U4EmUVQsFG6gfZ8
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The other main obstacle to solar construction anywhere is grid permitting.
> risks of people running into them
Curious how people run into solar panels. I wonder how many ER visits say "I ran into a solar panel"
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They also light on fire occasionally
China is doing a lot with combining solar and fish farms.
Yes, many companies are doing this in their parking lots, even some govt buildings do this. My local library has panels setup over part of their parking lot for instance.
Is it economically viable (pays itself)? It looks simple, but designing a shade is no small feat.
I looked once into solar covers for EV charging spots and it would provide like 5% of energy, not worth the hassle.
For parking the convenience is definitely worth it, but economically I don't think supermarkets care that much.
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Go vertical. Vertical panels take minimal space, can replace fences (everywhere!), nothing to clean (wind cleans it), heat dissipates and increases production, flattens the duck curve and produces energy during peak demand (early evenings), increases the window of time unlimited free energy is available. Vertical panels provide shade (and this can be calibrated for different types of plants)
Vertical panels may even be stacked on top of one another. Considering how big a fan of solar panels this administration is, perhaps the Big Beautiful Border Wall can be built with vertical solar panels.
Very much enjoy this guy flexing his setup his always interesting articles
Half flexing and half avoiding answering questions about what he ran it on
The title is a bit non descript, so the blog post is exploring
> a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS.
The arid and sunny west ware prime candidates for solar, yet the current administration is doing everything they can to further destroy any chance a future of being carbon neutral with cancellations of many projects.
TFG cancelled a fairly far along project to build 6gw of solar in the Nevada desert just a few days ago known as Esmeralda 7.
The ineptitude and grift of this administration will haunt this country for decades.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/feds-appear-to-canc...
Looks like this is just misinterpretation of poor public communication by the BLM.
> UPDATE: The U.S. Bureau of Land Management responded to 8 News Now on Friday afternoon to clarify the meaning of a “canceled” notice on the Esmeralda Seven Solar Project. A decision to combine the environmental reviews for the seven projects is being changed to give each project the option of submitting their proposal separately. The BLM’s statement: “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada. Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
> The “Cancelled – Cancelled” notice on BLM’s NEPA website applies only to the environmental review stage. The entire project has not been canceled.
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/massive-esmeralda-s...
There seems to be a decent counter argument about the size & impact to local environment. https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/massive-esmeralda-s...
I do not have a side as I don't know enough.
I think every engineer knows that all things come with trade-offs.
A great engineer, however, is able to readily admit when one option among others has a far, far greater set of costs than another, for the exact same benefit.
And if said engineer can't decide (for claim of ignorance), they mature to learn that the experience and knowledge of others is the best source for understanding the trade-offs involved to make a decision.
I think its pretty clear solar power has trade-offs. I think it's also obvious solar has far less negatives than all other power generating sources.
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Where are all these "environmentalists" when it's coal mines and oil pipelines?
My experience has been that people living next to newly constructed solar farms are unhappy about living next to a solar farm. It is also my experience that this is a fringe opinion because a very low percentage of people live next to solar farms.
Having farmers in the family, I can confirm they are unhappy about living next to anything other than what they grew up next to.
Also, the rainfall. Some farmers go from morning to night never saying a word that isn't a complaint about the rainfall being wrong.
It is something I have noticed about the definition of 'eyesore' and it isn't just farmers. If it is something which is useful and new it is considered an eyesore. Like, say wind turbines. Yet older practical things which are no longer of use are considered pretty. Like say windmills. They also don't complain nearly as much about things which are 'established and ugly' like powerlines or coal power plants, the latter of which are replaced.
My best guess it is because it causes them existential dread by demarcating to them that there once was a time without the new feature. Now kids will be growing up always having there been the new feature. Thus highlighting their own inevitable death.
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> Also, the rainfall. Some farmers go from morning to night never saying a word that isn't a complaint about the rainfall being wrong.
Yes. Some of them use proper rain gauges but some just complain about it. Basically none of them understand the difference between a point measurement and an areal average estimate.
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I come from rural Michigan and everyone in the areas where the turbines are complain about it. Its the view or its the sound. The former sure, the latter I haven't heard it myself but I don't go home anymore. It is also the only new investments made in the area in 50 years in any which way shape or form.
When they first started, they had to build the infrastructure and stations to collect the power to transport it from the turbines. My mom rented out some rooms of her house to make some cash when that went on for maybe 2 years in total. There was a lot of work and money coming into the area for a moment, but now the only people making money are the farmers who own the land the turbines sit on.
It's always a trip to see a view you have seen for 40 years but with the turbines there in the background. Slowly, these rural areas are losing vital services one by one. The specialists stop coming to the hospital, even on rotation. The dentists and optometrists retire out and unless someone growing up there has a passion for teeth and genetically modified corn then the roles get pushed out to the bigger cities, 30-45m away.
I wonder if the noise becomes a lesser concern once the turbines reach a certain size? I was in Iowa a couple of years ago and the sight of the turbines near the freeway was truly something, but I don't think I could hear them when I stopped to take a look.
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I had to google it and apparently the complaints are:
Ruin the view,
Lower property values,
Habitat destruction,
Noise from inverter fans
> Noise from inverter fans
Not just the fans. The transformers, inductors, chokes, capacitors, etc can get extremely noisy as well. I have to plug my ears when I walk by the switchgear at my local Walmart's EV install because it is so loud.
Any system that relies on high rate of change of current over time is prone to these issues. Look at the prevalence of coil whine in gaming PCs and workstations now. The level of noise scales almost linearly with current up until you saturate the various magnetic cores. In a multi-megawatt installation of any kind that relies upon inverters, it is plausible that these electromagnetic acoustic effects could cause meaningful habitat destruction on their own.
Traditional synchronous machines (turbines) do not have this issue, but they are not something you want to live next to for reasons on the other end of the acoustic frequency spectrum. Infrasound from a turbine can travel for miles, especially during transient phases of operation. There were a lot of complaints on social media during the commissioning of a new natural gas generator unit in my area last year.
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> Noise from inverter fans
Please. You won't hear it even a couple hundred meters away.
As for habitat destruction, wildlife _loves_ the shade under solar panels. So much that you need to be careful where you step because rattlesnakes also love (to eat) the wildlife.
Moreover, unlike mines and coal power plants, solar plants are mostly build-and-forget installations. They can be completely unmanned, with only occasional visits for maintenance and panel cleaning.
People object to any construction whatsoever.
I'm quite happy to live next to a 4kw "farm" because without it I would have had to run a $25k easement to get power to the property where i live.
I'm less than $8k in on the solar part of this and it's been more reliable than my neighbor's grid power.
But maybe my enjoyment of the panel set is also a "fringe" opinion. I know folks that live near larger installations with less direct impacts and they seem to have fewer feelings about those plants.
Who enjoys living next to a power plant of any kind?
Of all the kinds of power plant, a solar farm has to be the least intrusive.
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Me- it's much cheaper to have panels than it would have been to run power to my property and I put them in a place with minimal aesthetic impace.
I can understand not wanting to live close to wind turbines but I don't understand the issue with living next to a solar farm since the panels just sit there silently.
Lots of people dislike change. Neophobia is a thing, and it's not particularly uncommon.
The good news is, they'll rapidly adapt to each new solar farm; the bad news is, they'll forget about all the ones they're used to by the time comes to expand — I've seen anecdotes of the same thing happening with power lines, where people were upset that some proposed new ones would ruin the view, the person proposing them said they wouldn't be any different from the current ones, and the complainers said "what current ones?" and had to have them pointed out.
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The only problem that I kind of understand are the huge fences surrounding the farms. Because copper thefts are a big problem for them, it is quite common to have 3m high fences all around, which is obviously more gated community like than a monoculture field. And of course, it depends on how the farm is run. Solar farms can be ecological heaven if managed properly, unless growing weeds are just killed of with round-up every few months. Everything else seems more pretended problems, like inverter fans that may just be placed in the middle and should barely be hearable from 100 meters away.
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Well its not silent those panels go into MPPTs that produce noise when high amps are flowing through them to charge batteries if they don't direct export , if they direct export then there is noise from inverters to convert DC->AC
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Because they are not silent. Or sometimes are not. Inverters do have quite large fans.
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Maybe the guy who cleans them complains loudly, or the squeak of his 4' squeegee is annoying.
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Didn't Schelling have the answer to this?
Would you like to share with us what it is they say makes them unhappy about it specifically?
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"My experience is that people whose homes have burned down are unhappy that their homes burned down. It is also my experience that this is a fringe opinion"
Like what?
Is a solar farm being built nearby as bad as your house burning down? I didn't think the property value would change that drastically...
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Seeing them feels dystopian. I actually don't think that opinion is so fringe. There were lots of environmental protesters when the solar farm near us went up. The valley was rich in low shrubs and wildlife, and even some forest was leveled. A multi billion dollar energy company destroyed it to pick up their share of the free government funding while powering less than 2% of homes.
Sure, it's better than a gas refinery or some other things you could find yourself living next to. But let's not ignore what's bad about our current solutions.
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are the homes that were burned down by solar farms in the room with us right now?
Speculation: The biggest reason for solar farms often being unpopular with locals is that, socially, they feel like dystopian giga-scale machines. Serving some far-away, unfriendly power. Utterly disinterested in the welfare, or even lives, of the local populace.
Vs. almost any other business (farm, mine, oil drilling, warehouse, whatever) would both hire far more local people, and interact far more with the local community.
Is it intentional that you're listing export-based business as "local" while that solar farm probably does supply the town? It's a beautiful contrast either way.
All the businesses produce fungible commodities, and feed those into distribution systems ~10000X larger than the town. So, socially, it does not matter where any given ear of corn, gallon of milk, or watt of electricity ends up.
How is this different from >50% of farm land in the US growing corn for ethanol or corn or soy for export?
If your next door neighbor worked on the production line at a tire factory, how much would it change your social relationship with him if half of those tires were being exported, or sold to manufacturers of ICE cars?
Or - maybe you're an introvert, or live in a place where it's normal to have no social relationships with your neighbors. If so, try talking to somebody who has lived in a small farming community. It is a very, very different world.
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Every new construction is always unpopular with locals. Farms smell. Businesses produce traffic and emit noise. Oil and gas annoy people for miles around with flaring. Heck, even pro-social ventures like pubs serving the local populace get complaints from other members of the local populace. This only gets mitigated by the social factor after something has existed for a long time.
Personally I like seeing renewables, big or small, cleanly producing energy for us to use. It's a small pro-social signal about environmental responsibility.
(my pet local hate, recently remediated after years of complaints from a twenty mile radius: Mossmorran flaring by Exxon-Mobil https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-5... )
The beginning of Blade Runner 2049 was a succinct depiction of the eternal struggle between Big Solar and the local grub farmers.
the sad thing about this data is how politicized clean energy has become.
the blue states have a lot of energy solar - while the red ones are sparse. the red ones get a lot of sun while the blue ones don't.
Texas is about as red as it gets and leads the nation in renewable energy including solar. Red or blue, if the gov can setup a situation where renewable energy is profitable then nature will take its course.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/texas-tops-us-states...
There's a very specific reason (or quirk) as to why Texas leads the nation in renewable energy -- ERCOT. Basically, 90% of Texas' electric load is serviced by in-state assets, and they have very few interconnections to the rest of the grid. The electricity dispatch curve is priced on the margin, on the cost to operate the last-fired generator (natural gas), and ERCOT has moved to grow solar as a way to reduce prices.[0]
ERCOT has also had a number of spectacular -- and costly -- failures.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
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Yup, my home state of Idaho also has a shockingly green energy portfolio. All of the PNW is like that because it's on a shared grid that has been primarily powered by hydro for as long as I've been alive.
And still, we've seen a massive amount of green energy installed here. Both windmills and solar farms.
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Indiana has one of the largest wind farms in the world and is so red it practically glows...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler_Ridge_Wind_Farm
We also have a ton of solar. We could be doing much better as we also have an enormous amount of coal plants.
Renewable energy is profitable
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I lived in texas before & the first time I saw massive wind farms alongside oil pumps was in texas.
wind turbines are wonderful things to look at. but yeah some of those were constructed in the years there was a "blue" admin n I guess market forces took over too.
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I don't disagree about it being politicized, but if you look at the states with the highest amounts of renewable generation, your second sentence is not supported. There is a LOT of wind energy in Republican-led states in places where wind makes sense.
Their first sentence could be called into question by that, not the second. The second specifies solar.
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It's lovely to see actual data swat away ideological mosquito bite sniping points.
The curious thing is that so many of these kinds of claims can be disproven in literally seconds to minutes in any debate, yet they persist.
Certain tendencies aside, republican and conservatives types aren't utter idiots and do know how sidestep some rally talk to serve their own benefit if they think it's practical, profitable and useful.
Not to mention that many conservatives love the field of off-grid prepping to this day and would certainly know about the value of solar, wind, hydro and any other robust renewable power technology. You're not going to build a coal plant or an oil refinery next to your deep-woods Utah cabin.
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Yeah, in Oconto county Wisconsin, residents are all up in arms about a solar farm going up. It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money. The arguments against it are "this destroys farmland", "who will clean the snow off of it in winter", "I don't like how it looks", "static electricity will kill the crops around it", "it will raise the temperature of the surrounding area", "you can't recycle fiberglass so it's bad", etc.
> It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money.
What money? Power bills won't go down. The solar panel factories aren't in that county. The installers will be brought in from out of state contractors.
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> "who will clean the snow off of it in winter"
This is something I don’t really get. There’s always concern around change of course. But tending to renewables sounds so much nicer than fossil fuel issues. Like clearing snow off the panels doesn’t sound fun exactly, but it is outdoors… realistically for these giant fields of panels it should be a fairly mechanized process, so somewhat low impact… compare to black lung or, whatever, petrochemicals causing your tap water to catch fire.
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You could ask them why they grow so much dang corn then?
> 1/3 of corn is used for fuel - https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...
> Corn raises temp & humidity - https://extension.illinois.edu/news-releases/corn-fields-add...
> Corn destroys farmland & requires very high fertilizer & pesticide inputs, plus extra fuel to to apply all those - ask any old farmer but this one has a lot of sources
Also solar farms can easily be hidden. They don't need to be next to a public road way and you can put trees around them. They're also great for dual use land with small animals &/or certain crops.
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>> "who will clean the snow off of it in winter"
Not sure why they are whining. Sounds like job creation to me!
There are both red states and blue states in places in the US that are good for solar power (rural, lots of sun). The sunny American southwest with huge amounts of empty desert land good for solar arrays includes the states of California (blue), Arizona (red), Nevada (toss-up), New Mexico (blue), and Texas (red). And the party that a state's population prefers in presidential elections isn't stable over mutli-decade time periods, but this doesn't change suitability for solar energy production.
Of course, as others have pointed out Texas is helping with renewables.
On the other hand, at the federal level Republican admins tend to cut renewable subsidies and that sort of thing.
Red states have a lot of open space and ought to be ideologically in favor is loose regulations; it would be kind of nice if Republican national politicians would fully embrace cronyism and identify renewable subsidies as an easy way to give money to their supporters. “Oh we did the environmental survey it turns out we should plop down a bunch of subsidized renewable installations in Red states.” Plenty of room for pork and might actually help the country as a side effect…
> renewable subsidies
I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete.
Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.
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my red state is full of solar, so you may want to double check whatever sources you are using, as they seem dubious at best and biased at worst
It’s likely more to do with population density. Middle America is a lot less dense. If you look both Florida and Georgia have solar installs and are “red” states
Eh?
Looking at, say, wind energy, the top 4 states are all red states. Their cumulative amount handily is more than the next so many states.
That's absolute energy. If you want to go by percentage of energy that is wind, it's the same - the top 4 are red states. In fact, 7 of the top 10 are:
https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/wind-generation-by-...
I haven't looked at solar, but it doesn't seem there's a clear divide.
The blue ones generally have a lot of people and need a lot more energy
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Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. We're trying for something different here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Tell that to South Dakota's wind farms?
What is the argument against it? I've never heard any logical reasons beyond hating the Left.
It's like hating bikers, why? The same people that have pickup trucks and swerve to intimidate bikers, seem to hate solar energy. But why?
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The price of electricity in blue states has sky rocketed.
Electricity in SF is now more than $0.50/kWh OFF peak.
It is certainly not a coincidence that CalISO has contracted with the most solar generators.
It really is absurd how expensive our energy is across the state. Meanwhile Virginia gets electricity for 15 cents a kwh.
Notably, the municipal power companies mostly are far lower. It's PG&E and SoCal Edison who are that high, because they're shoving the costs of doing 75 years worth of deferred system maintenance all at once onto current ratepayers instead of their investors taking the hit. It's too bad that there wasn't a viable legal framework whereby the investor-owned utilties' shareholders could be wiped out as they deserved to be, and the utility infrastructure transferred to municipal ownership. Around PG&E's bankruptcy there were rumblings, but Sacramento couldn't figure out how to do it, so they propped them up and created a Wildfire Fund paid for by ratepayers to keep bailing them out.
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This will change under the policies of the current U.S. administration.
Pretty unlikely. Solar is built on cheap land with low demand, and if the land isn't sold then the power is free so why wouldn't you sell it? No matter how high the taxes are, free money is free money. Aside from making it totally illegal it is very hard to reduce the incentive to sell power.
On top of that the subsidies for solar installations are mostly frontloaded, since the costs are frontloaded. Annual tax breaks are transferrable, so they get sold at the beginning of the project to offset investment cost, lowering interest payments. Even removing tax breaks would not make existing installations less profitable.
Yes, it would be absolutely irrational and indefensible to block people from building solar farms where there is a straightforward commercial case for doing so. Unfortunately, "irrational and indefensible" is exactly what this administration is: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...
I work in the industry. Removing the tax breaks is having a material impact because we look at after tax cash flow. Next year installations are going to reduce meaningfully.
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You are right it makes sense but that hasn’t stopped them from gutting all sorts of sensible programs both energy-related and otherwise regardless of the stage of investment/development. Have we forgotten about Musk and his mob already?
This administration is openly touting “beautiful clean coal” (doesn’t exist) for powering servers. Renewables are yet another front where people are divided based on politics. It has little to do with efficacy or practicality. I still have family members convinced that offshore wind power is mass-killing whales because of Carlson.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
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Federal funding for solar farms will stop but private funding will continue because solar electricity is the the cheapest source right now.
It's more than just funding. There's a lot of regulatory hurdles and desire to use federal lands that will also be killed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...
>The following month, the president said his administration would not approve solar or wind power projects. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” he posted on Truth Social. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”
Realisitically, solar is dead in America and China is the undisputed worlds #1 solar superpower. The US might hook up a few little projects here or there, but functionally the US is in full retreat on solar, cedeing the industry and technology to China.
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Unless it gets outlawed, which I suspect is something Trump might do or attempt as part of his campaign in favour of fossil fuels and/or to own the libs/China.
I'm also not clear how cheaply the US could make its own PV in the event of arbitrary trade war (let alone hot war) between the USA and China.
(The good news there is that even in such a situation, everyone else in the world can continue to electrify with the panels, inverters, and batteries that the USA doesn't buy, but the linked article obviously isn't about that).
I am still receiving advertisements from solar companies that want to put panels on farm land. They pay around $3-$4k an acre
Per month or year? And what region?
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Like monthly? Yearly?
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Downvoted and yet plenty of support for the statement in the responses.
(And I didn't even say in which direction it would change, or exactly what will change.)
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