Comment by paulnpace
7 hours ago
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.
> 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.
Farmers will always have reason to complain about rain.
Farmers need rain, but there is never a perfect time for it to rain. There is always something they need to do that can't be done because it rained. If rain was 100% predictable months in advance farmers would just plan to not do those things on rain days (rain days often last a couple days because things need to dry), but it isn't and so they often are in the middle of something that cannot be interrupted when rain interrupts them.
Of course the other problem is sometimes it doesn't rain and then they can get all the jobs done above - but because there is no rain nothing grew (well) and so the harvests are bad...
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.
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.
Nuclear is a good candidate - they take up a lot less land mass for the amount of power generated. I used to leave near one, and when my neighbors where asked where it was most pointed instead to a coal power plant many miles away.
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On the other hand an old-school power plant has relatively tiny footprint compared to the same output solars.
Many old school plants also rely on dams and provide massive ponds. Which sucks during construction when some people have to move. But in my experience after several decades people are pretty happy to live next to those massive ponds. If I'd have to pick living next to a massive lake which allows boats/yachts/etc (which is not so common in my whereabouts) with a plant on the other side of that lake vs. lake-sized solar plant... Former does sound better.
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.
People object to any construction whatsoever.
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.
That human psychology eventually adapts to tolerate enshittification is probably the main reason we have enshittification.
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.
How is that fence any different than the 3m high fence the deer breeder down the road has?
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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
But is it honestly enough to notice if you live half a mile a way? Couldn't they just put up sound damping like the oil rigs do?
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Maybe the guy who cleans them complains loudly, or the squeak of his 4' squeegee is annoying.
You say that in jest, but it happens.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987251/Charges-aga...
https://www.theroot.com/atlanta-garbage-man-sentenced-to-jai...
Because they are not silent. Or sometimes are not. Inverters do have quite large fans.
This is a very frivolous argument against solar farms given the amount of noise and other pollution emanating from regular farms.
Farm-scale irrigation is not silent.
Crop Dusters are not silent.
Combines and other tractors are not silent.
Burning fields are both not silent and release a tremendous amount of sooty smoke that spreads far beyond the boundaries of a farm.
Farms make a lot of noise.
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Compared to literally every other way of generating power, they are relatively silent and unobtrusive. They also don’t poison the air around them which is pretty neat.
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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...
No, but I was trying to illustrate the absurdity of dismissing these as 'fringe' opinions, simply because they only apply to the segment of the population that are actually going through it.
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.
What do you propose instead?
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Seeing a big solar farm out in the desert does feel cyverpunk’esque/dystopian in a way. I suppose it’s the juxtaposition of new technology with the harsh natural beauty of a desert.
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