Comment by ourmandave

4 months ago

I had to google it and apparently the complaints are:

Ruin the view,

Lower property values,

Habitat destruction,

Noise from inverter fans

4 comments

ourmandave

Reply
bob1029  4 months ago

> 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.

  • cyberax  4 months ago

    Inverter coil whine is high-pitched, so it gets attenuated nearly instantly. Fan noise gets absorbed into the background just as the wind noise does.

    I was on many solar farms, and the only ones that I could hear from the distance were the ones that had classic substations nearby. The 60Hz transformer sound can be heard for quite a distance.

cyberax  4 months ago

> 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.