At first I questioned your assertion, but after reading the most recent FAA AC revision (https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...) I found:

13.5.3 In most cases, not all wind turbine units within a wind turbine farm need to be lighted. Obstruction lights should be placed along the perimeter of the wind turbine farm so that there are no unlit separations or gaps more than 1/2 SM (0.80 km) (see Figure A-26). Wind turbines within a grid or cluster should not have an unlighted separation or gap of more than 1 SM (1.61 km) across the interior of a grid or cluster of turbines

Iowa too. Gives me something to look at when driving through

I did a presentation on this in college back in 2008...the math was good even back then as far as electricity payback and other benefits.

And solar has gotten way cheaper since then. It's a no-brainer.

People drive into buildings all the time. Like it's actually like over a hundred per day sort of thing in the US. Happens really frequently here in Canada as well.

If you include stuff like stop signs, light poles, mailboxes, and fences its probably in the several thousands. Fixed object collisions are super common.

If you put solar panels in parking lots, you're adding a lot of posts to the parking lot to hold them that weren't there before. People are going to crash into those posts in parking lots often.

For example, light posts constantly get bumped in parking lots.

To hold your solar panels you need really strong posts that can both hold them and get bumped into by vehicles. Especially in the USA where you have giant vehicles & tight parking spaces.

This all adds to the cost before you even get to electricity storage & transmission.

Drivers hit structures all the time.

I've never done the math, but I've seen Walmarts start putting solar panels as cover in their parking lots.

Interesting that just sharing a link of the trade-offs got a bunch of down votes when I didn't even take a side.

Maybe it was a misunderstanding of my intentions to purely share information based on your reply.

If you don't mind, please help me understand. Did it come across as anti-solar in general? That's how I'm interpreting your reply.

The article, which I wonder if anyone read, argues local environmental concerns based on the giant size of the solar farm. One of those things was mountain sheep that migrate across the lands. This would be creating a wall of sorts. Another was Native American archeology. What I'm ignorant of is if any of these issues were addressed at all & what the impact is.

In a general sense, I'm a huge fan of solar farms. I think they make more sense than using land to plant corn for energy, which funny enough also got me down votes here.

People in cities are voting that rural people should bear the cost of getting power to the cities.

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

> 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.

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...

> Some of them use proper rain gauges

OOOhh is there a device I can get that tracks this for home?

The big ones can be really loud. As the blades get longer, tip speed becomes truly impressive.

I think it's just fud and nimbyism, I live very near a bunch of large windmills and I cannot hear them at all.

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.

So bury them? Is that not feasible for some reason?

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.

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.

That human psychology eventually adapts to tolerate enshittification is probably the main reason we have enshittification.

How is that fence any different than the 3m high fence the deer breeder down the road has?

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.

The solar farm I live near has a 5 foot tall fence.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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.

What do you propose instead?

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.

This sounds very specific to your experience and viewpoint developed via whatever small farming community you have experience of.

I've had six decades around rural communities, mostly in Australia, often in far flung parts of the world, there are few here that feel solar farms are dystopian giga-scale machines, mostly they think of them as dual use for pasture and additional guaranteed farm income.

Raised panels make the moisture retention better, increase the nutritional value of the ground cover and makes for better wool - all positives.

What's their argument against interconnects though?

Especially as you install more wind and solar, capturing (or sending) generation across a wider geographic area should regress-to-the-mean production and consumption better without turning on peaking plants that may be on for only hours a year. Or get natgas generation from areas where the natgas infra hasn't frozen solid.

It makes fantastic sense in Texas too because air conditioning is such a high portion of demand. Clean energy production reaches its peak at midday when everyone has their AC going flat out.

For what it's worth Oregon and Washington are pretty much at the bottom of new renewable installs: https://www.propublica.org/article/oregon-washington-green-e...

Idaho Power’s local generation is quite clean. But…during the summer in Idaho, almost a third of energy comes from Wyoming and Utah where coal is still a substantial part of generation.

Renewable energy is already profitable.

Yeah, but if hindering it is an excellent way of pandering to your fossil fuel donors while at the same time "owning the libs", to hell with it!

If you can use free energy to power your pumps to bring out that oil that just means there's that much more profit in the dinosaur juice

Oh, that's fair point, except solar isn't relatively sparse in a lot of Republican led states too. Texas, Florida, North Carolina all have a relatively decent amount of solar, and Arizona does too which is... mixed?

And solar does show up in red states. I am not sure how this short administration would have had an impact on it. I don’t agree with the politicization of it but I suspect this has more to do with the parent energy grid and any constraints due to geography. Without a doubt I would expect the Midwest to have more.

Indeed. I live in a pretty red state, and have lots of red or red-leaning family and friends, and practically nobody I know is "anti-solar" or even considered it a political stance. I do run into more anti-windmill though, but the reason is clearly that nobody likes looking at them across the landscape (windfarm in SE Utah was controversial for this point). Also in the southwest solar is often not favored because some amount of water is used to clean the dust off, and water scarcity here in the SW US is starting to finally creep into peoples' minds.

I'd imagine a lot of the lack of solar farms in the rural midwest and southwest is due to land use conflicts with ag and ranching. I don't have data to back that up though, just a hunch.

The contractors that build it and the jobs to maintain them.

Power bills will go down. Solar electricity is by far the cheapest form.

The process really is as simple as "libs want it so it must be bad". Everything else is a rationalization after the fact.

PV panels are typically angled to catch the sun better, and they're smooth and dark... snow slides off by itself if the sun is shining (and if the sun isn't shining, you aren't losing much by having the panels covered).

It's a fair concern. There's a solar install up in northern WI that is part of a microgrid and basically doesn't generate energy in winter due to the amount of snow they get. The lack of solar output is offset by nat gas generators.

Oconto County averages between 4 and 5 feet of snow every winter. You need pretty heavy duty equipment to move that much snow out of a large field.

Most of Wisconsin doesn't actually get that much snow, though.

i was under the impression that the panels track the sun as the day goes by to maximize sunlight. If it starts snowing then just put them in a vertical position, there's no sun shining anyway.

Normal people understand this. The people of northern WI are a bit challenged.

My impression is that every industry is subsidize which totally distorts market (perhaps except for one who came up with subsidies in first place).

On flip side the orangutang cut green energy subsidies on grade A farmland, which most likely wasn't happening anyway.

I think it accurately and succinctly sums up the administration’s stance on clean energy. I’m not sure it’s inflammatory to point it out either since they’ve already said as much pretty clearly.

It’s also a double entendre depending on which light you see “woke” in.

(To preface: I am strongly in favor of renewable energy overall).

To the extent that there is anything real to their dislike:

Poorly structured/overly generous homeowner net metering initiatives, especially for solar without storage, legitimately have escalated costs for everyone else in some regions.

The excessive subsidy given to those homeowners for power that's often not very valuable (as it comes primarily at a time of day that's already well supplied) comes from somewhere, and somewhere is....the pockets of everyone who doesn't have home rooftop solar.

And those people are typically poorer people in rented, denser housing than the average homeowner.

Most places have been moving to correct this mistake for the future (ex: CA's "Net Metering 3.0"), but that also gets pushback from people who wanted to take advantage of that unsustainable deal from the government or who incorrectly think it's a part of general anti-renewable pushes.

------

Aside from that, in regions known for production of coal/oil/gas or major processing of, it's seen as a potential threat to jobs + mineral tax revenues that are often what underwrite most of their local/state government functions.

While there are plenty of job creation claims for renewables, it doesn't take a genius to see that they don't appear to need all that many workers once built, and that the manufacturing chain for the solar panels or wind turbines is probably not to be put in places like West Virginia, Midland TX, Alaska, etc.

I think you'll have a difficult time comprehending the phenomenon if you look for reasoned arguments. A much more productive framework, IMO, is to see it in terms of a feedback loop between funding sources and the aggregate valence of speech on a particular topic.

The energy industry is one of the largest in the world, with trillions of revenue on the line. The FF component of that industry has every incentive to turn sentiment against upstart competitors, but you do that at scale less by reasoned arguments and more by gut level appeals: "the people who want renewable energy hate your culture and way of life", "renewal installations are ugly and a blight on the landscape of your home", etc.

Because anything one side says the other must automatically and reflexively oppose no matter what. The example here is Right hating on Left, but the Left as the same illogical hate against the right - though in different areas.

This has often been blamed on first past the post voting - if you want to win you have to team up which means your views on Abortion and Environment Policy have to align even though there is no reason to think the two should have anything to do with one another. Since there is no room for thinking each side is correct one one and wrong on the other you have to oppose anything the other does without wondering if maybe they are correct. Now remember that are thousands (millions?) of different issues, and many of them have a range of different answers, yet there can only be one unified position that you support...

I'm not convinced that the various alternatives are really better though. They all seem to have issues in the real world, and too often people will look at what they have an ignore the issues because they want to feel better.

Most of the "real" opposition is against providing further federal subsidies, along with it doesn't eliminate the need for base load during bad weather. The closing of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility has been making the rounds, as it had received $1.6 billion in funding but can't compete.

I think most people would be less opposed if they saw the math behind more of the actual PV installations.

> It's like hating bikers, why?

Totally off topic, but I was walking through a city yesterday. Cars politely stopped for me as I crossed roads. Bikes didn't, and they also swerved onto sidewalks past me. They obeyed fewer rules of the road and put me at greater risk of harm than did any vehicle.

I grew up an avid bicyclist out in the countryside, but people on bikes in the city manage to piss me off far more than most drivers do.

Technically I could see some reasons. Grids need serious upgrades to support personal solar properly. Which is €€€ and, if end-customers would have to foot the bill themselves, very few people would install solar at home. On top of that, at least in my whereabouts solar is receives a fuckton of subsidies. In the long run lower energy prices will pay back those subsidies for the society, but for now I could see why some people ain't happy to foot the bill. Especially when it's usually better-off people installing solar. While poor people end up partially footing the bool.

Last but not least, Chinese domination in modern solar equipment is mind-boggling. At least when I was installing solar, buying western-made would have been much more expensive, to the point that it wouldn't be worth to go through.

P.S. I got solar on the roof myself. „Free“ electricity is damn nice.

It acknowledges the reality of global warming. Furthermore, and the real reason why it's considered "woke", is that it implies taking some action to reduce the harm done to others. People who enjoy threatening to harm others (such as your biker example) get very angry about that.

Rhetoric mostly I'd say. The idea being promoted is that clean energy subsidies hurt the honest Joe coal miner (details being very hand wavy). I'm not convinced it's really that well thought out though and might just be about owning the libs. Maybe there's a MAGA in here that can educate us.

Arguments only matter if we assume totally rational actors. There is ample evidence that this could potentially be a faulty assumption.

A questiom: What do you think, do people first have an emotion and then try to rationalize it? Or do they first have a the rational judgment and only after that start to become emotional?

If you watch right wing media it is pretty clear that emotions play a huge role for them. And because nobody particularly likes having emotions they can't explain, the rationalizations come after: "Windmills are destroy the landscape" (unlike let's say an oilfield which is somehow totally fine), things about the infrasound (which if a concern you can get rid off by the same way it is done with nuclear waste in the US, just use that massive land mass to your advantage).

If we had rational, emotionally distanced actors they would change their mind once all doubts are addressed and the facts are on the table. But that is not the case here in my own experience. Once the last rationalization breaks they go back to the feeling of: "I just don't like it".

That means the much more fruitful question to investigate is that particular dislike and where it might come from, emotionally.

Surely this isn't just one root. For some it may be the "safe" opinion of their herd/tribe. Others say it, their entertainment (that under traditional media law wouldn't deserve the title "News") says it and so on.

For yet others this may be a question of their insecure masculinity. They feel insecure, but men have to be strong! So they try their best to appear strong, by buying manly products, driving manly trucks and spouting manly opinions. You know what isn't manly in their mind? Being sensible. Sensible with other people, the environment, wensible with thought. And then a sensible energy option come around. Guess what, that feels like an attack to them. Suddenly society wants to erect huge pillars thst remind them that being sensible is now required. That really touches their core fear of not being manly enough. Being sensible could be misread as being gay after all.

There are probably more reasons.

P.S.: I am not saying there are no rational critics of wind energy. Whwt I am saying is the bulk of categorical dislike comes from an entirely uninformed, purely emotional direction

I thought my statement was ridiculous enough to forgo the "/s".

The articles about Solar cost reaching parity with Fossil. Is that before or after taxes?

> I still have family members convinced that offshore wind power is mass-killing whales because of Carlson

And if they are anything like the people I've talked to, they never once cared about whales (or any sea life) before this. Same with the "wind turbines kills birds" or even "trans women are ruining women's sports". Ahh yes, a whole list of things you've never cared about, made fun of, or derided in the past but now suddenly care about because of some talking head. It's exhausting.

The federal government doesn't have to approve solar farms built on private land. Solar is far from dead in the US and there is tons of private land solar farms can and will be built on.

Per year, midwest.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but if I read the following link correctly, the USA average price to purchase is only $5.5k/acre, and any part of the US cheaper than or including the average price in Nebraska (ranked 17th at $3,884/acre) could well be trading food farmland for solar farm land at that price:

https://acretrader.com/resources/farmland-values/farmland-pr...

This is for a 20 or 30 year lease. One time payment. 4k is on the high side.