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.
> They also don't complain nearly as much about things which are 'established and ugly' like powerlines or coal power plants
I like industrial architecture and some plants inspire awe but post-war coal plants are as ugly and boring as it gets. Older ones look much better in my eye and I’m glad that some buildings are preserved after the stations are shut down.
> 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 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.
The turbines I saw in Iowa weren't loud enough to drown out distance sounds of the highway. I didn't hear them at all, but I guess there's also tinnitus to be contended with...
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.
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.
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.
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.
In theory I wouldn't mind living next to nuclear.
I say in theory, because we've seen too many times when someone cuts corners, or has deadlines or poorly trained staff on site, that when things go wrong, they can sometimes go very very wrong.
I live within 10 miles of one which entitles me to annual evacuation instructions and a free iodine pill kit to keep at home in case of an accident. Other than that, we get great fishing in the cooling lakes.
When I visited one (decommissioned one in Ignalina, Lithuania where they filmed Chernobyl series) they said the radiation levels are higher than neutral/ambient, but lower than in city because all the concrete is slightly radioactive.
Yeah, that is my understanding too. Usually the inside the plant the radiation is lower than many other industrial places too. But my concern is when things go wrong (like flooding in Japan) the radius of which it can effect can be quite large and take a long time to recover.
I'm pro nuclear power, but I couldn't resist the pop culture reference. And it's good to remember what can go wrong when people's fallibility interacts with a powerful technology.
(Dialog from a memorable Call of Duty level based on Pripyat, Ukraine, near Chernobyl)
I mean sure, nuclear is very interesting but the cost right now is so sky high vs renewable that it's a massive uphill battle to even consider it. Then factor in the negative public perception and waste disposal issues and that hill you have to fight up just became a vertical wall. Solar and wind are low cost and high return. Maybe one day it will make sense but today it does not.
The plant I'm talking about was built in the 1950s though. I wouldn't build a new one today for the reasons you state, but having lived near one I'd do it again.
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.
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.
Idk, maybe 3mm wire of 15cm grid size vs. 6mm wire in a <=5cm grid. But I have never seen a big deer farm, that is probably also not so nice to have right next door. But what do I know, here in Scandinavia, you have the right to roam pretty much everywhere, makes countries with too many fences seem claustrophobic.
I filmed a solar farm the other month for an energy company and they had sheep amongst the panels keeping the grass down. The main infrastructure, like you said, was positioned centrally so there was no sound at all at the perimeter.
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
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.
Yes, but the relevant comparison for the residents isn't to a coal plant, it's to the undeveloped field that the solar arrays replaced.
Depending upon their other priorities, they may be upset about the loss of hunting access as well. Understandably, people putting up solar arrays don't want people firing guns in the middle of their arrays.
We have to make power somehow and they all want to use said power. It mostly just boils down to nimbyism at the end of the day. They are just unaware of (or don’t care about) areas like cancer alley where we dump all our mining/refining/processing/etc. in an already impoverished area that can’t push back the same way wealthy neighborhoods with social status can.
If I were to hazard a guess every person complaining would happily suffer the 'consequences' of a solar farm not being near their neighborhood.
It really should be a no brainer compromise to zone solar as industrial so they're not near where people live. There's in practice infinite amounts of land you can get zoned like this. Living to electrical noise sucks in a way living need next to a wind farm doesn't.
I mean you're not wrong, if I measured the sound with a microphone I bet an air conditioner would be twice as loud but at the same time I'm sure that air conditioner would also be louder than the electrical buzzing you hear when you live near the big wires. But here's the thing, arguing over whether or not the sound is tolerable (or worse having some government agency full of people who will never live next to these things declaring it tolerable) I think is the wrong battle to be fighting which is why I think it's a no-brainer compromise.
You won't have to hear it, you won't have to look at it except as way off in the distance, you won't have to worry about whether or not your buddy's farm is gonna get taken over by one when they run into financial troubles. Out your backyard you get to look at mostly pristine farmland and wilderness. During this time where there's political will and capital to just ban them outright I think this relatively small concession will make folks not put up too much in a fight as long as it's kept out of sight out of mind.
I have an air conditioner and I have solar panels. The air conditioner is not merely twice as loud. My air conditioner is 70 dbA and the solar panels are certainly below 30 dbA because I have never heard them make noise. The difference is multiple orders of magnitude.
"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"
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.
Get rid of the ethanol mandate. Replace those acres of corn with solar panels and an understory of native plants. One likely biased source I read a while back said that about 1/3 of this land would be sufficient to power all the cars and trucks in the US if they were all EVs.
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.
Not all deserts are sand dunes. Many are very rich in plant and animal life and can be excellent for certain crops, given some basic irrigation. A great many are in cold climates. If you saw what they call a desert when there's money on the table, I would venture to guess you'd side with the environmental groups that opposed the location I was referring to. I have no doubt.
What I mean is that solar is good, and I support using it in a lot of places. But it's also open to bad decisions like everything else, so I try not to be a zealot about it. It's not the end all perfect cure for energy and it doesn't save the environment in all cases. Just in many.
