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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ferc.gov/introductory-guide-electricity-markets-... ("ERCOT is not subject to federal (FERC) jurisdiction because its grid is not connected to those of other states. Thus, power sales in ERCOT are not considered sales in interstate commerce and not subject to federal (FERC) oversight. That said, ERCOT runs some electricity markets that have similarities to those described herein.")
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Perhaps you're fortunate to run in different circles that I do, but I have heard that sentiment expressed similarly and unironically. Poe's Law and all...
(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.
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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.
My comment doesn't imply that at all. We absolutely need more solar, and a lot of it. Just that we don't necessarily need more of it everywhere without making accompanying storage investments. (+ possibly transmission investments).
We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
Early net metering schemes were often basically 1:1. You supply a kWh mid-day where it's not worth much and that's "equal" in value to you drawing a kWh at 18:30, even though the market price of electricity then might be 10x what it was when you earned your "credit" and the grid is far more strained.
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Most regions that already have a decent amount of behind the meter home solar at this point exhibit a strong "duck curve" effect, at least on sunnier days. Mid-day demand is deeply suppressed while solar output is strongest.
Meanwhile, the AM/PM peaks remain and are at times of the day when solar output is very low.
With more storage - solar can help cover those peaks (+ overnight demand). Without, you're not accomplishing all that much by just depressing mid-day loads even further unless you can restructure society to better match it's energy demands to those solar supply curves.
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.
Firearms for home and personal defense. Also, not to even dig deeply into the many lunacies that the progressive left became insane about during the pandemic (both sides were guilty here, but it was BOTH sides).
Don't get too smug. You really think your entire half of a political spectrum is free of stupidity and irrational thinking?
Given the current political climate, the left should definitely get on board with this one ASAP.
There's lunacy on both sides for sure, but MAGA has a pretty strong hold on blatant cruelty when it comes to their issues. Also, I'd argue the Overton window has shifted pretty far right, so you have to be pretty extreme to be considered a right wing extremist these days. In fact, some of the major MAGA rallying points could actually be points of compromise to most progressives if they weren't so cruel about it (ICE, farm slavery visas, trans sports). Plus curiously the one we could all agree on but don't hear much about on the right anymore; Epstein.
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.
Yeah, I don’t hate bicyclists in the “I would try to make them feel less safe” sense (I tend to go way the opposite way, if anything) but I do dread seeing them when driving or walking in the same spaces. They’re really unpredictable, and their presence creates extremely unsafe-feeling situations for everyone around.
When I ride a bike, I don’t do it in places where, when I encounter a bike driving, it makes me especially anxious.
Yes, of course. But the bikes are the ones making the space those murder-machines operate in operate differently from how it usually does, which is inherently not great.
I’d like to see car use reduced as much as the next sane person, but I still go “ah, goddamnit” when I see a bicyclist approaching an intersection or come up on one going uphill on a twisty no-shoulder 35+ mph road.
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.
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.
This is a good reply since it feels accurate but generally is not, which captures the sentiment of those opposing solar.
1. “The grid needs an upgrade”. This is true regardless of whether solar exists or not. Energy demand, battery technology, etc have all changed but the grid has not kept pace (on purpose). End customers may foot the bill, again, regardless of solar.
2. Solar does receive more subsidies, intentionally. This is how you quickly drive adoption of new technology and stop the old technology (gas/coal) from using its market power to stop new technology growth. Subsidies jumpstart the switch to solar, which in the long term is good for our country (export more energy), our planet, and for individuals who want energy independence.
3. Taxes aren’t flat rates, so when you make more you pay more progressively. A poor person pays significantly less than a rich person does for solar subsidies.
4. Chinese domination isn’t a reason for not using solar. If we want to change that, the US should motivate buyers to buy US (subsidize), increase import costs (targeted, time limited tariffs), or promote growth of the industry (education, research, etc).
>2. Solar does receive more subsidies, intentionally. …
>3. Taxes aren’t flat rates, so when you make more you pay more progressively. A poor person pays significantly less than a rich person does for solar subsidies.
Yes, subsidies are done to help drive adoption. The key is that the subsidies should go where they can do the most good. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further to decarbonizing the grid than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar. It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone MUCH further if spent on other solar projects) - it isn’t hard to imagine that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels. This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run. The goal should be to decarbonize the grid - not implement some kind of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
I am not an electrician, but big problem with home-solar is grid not being bi-directional. In my whereabouts it's common to have good „down“ power, but no permit for „up“ back to the grid. Which makes it not worth it for home users. Batteries make it somewhat better, but it's still far from ideal.
For big commercial arrays, the grid used to have main lines to certain old school plants. Now for solar new major lines are needed to middle-of-nowhere locations to connect solar and wind farms. While old-school plants were more concentrated and closer to major locations, it was less costly than major lines out-there and to many more locations. And, obviously, investors into solar/wind ain't willing to food those bills.
The problem with solar subsidies, especially when it comes to home solar, is that they're very skewed to favor better-off people.
As for Chinese, yes, something needs to be done. But for now I kinda understand people who ain't happy subsidies are ending up in China.
Isn't US made equipment facing the headwinds of the US being anti-solar. It seems more like the US shot itself in the foot by letting the Chinese get the lead on this technology. And by subsidizing, and maybe regulating buying US, we could support our domestic industry.
Seems like all over the place we are giving up and letting China win the technology race. Robots, cars, solar, all the future tech is in trouble.
I don't know why anybody is against clean air. It makes no sense.
The US has invested a lot of money, lives, political capital & environment to become a big oil & gas producer.
One of it's potential weapons against China is that China imports most of it's oil & gas. China also has a few easy geographical choke points to prevent it from importing gas. Solar & wind plus electrical vehicles destroy this advantage.
So China has many reasons to push in this direction while the US is doubling down on it's bet, even while other historical oil countries like Saudi Arabia are diversifying away from oil.
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)
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.
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.
Its probably referring to the price at which solar can sell power. In the middle of the day, its actually effectively $0 (no marginal cost). In nighttime, its infinite cost. Fossil fuels marginal cost is effectively the cost of fuel per MWh.
Taxes are far too complex to figure that our. In the case of other there are a lot of different players and most do things other than oil and so it isn't possible to figure out what tax/subsidy is from oil.
Was wondering if anybody just took raw manufacturing/operating costs, and energy output, and compared. Removing all taxes and subsidies from the equation. If we are going to say Solar is now cheaper, I'd think it would have to be without subsidies.
Accounting is a big issue for renewables because almost all the cost is upfront. You pay a capital cost for X years (say, 30) of electricity. Maintenance is a much smaller fraction of the cost. Therefore the question of profitability depends on all sorts of non-power things: amortization, interest rates, how the tax-deductibility of a capital investment is handled, what future electricity costs are, and so on.
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.
> 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.
Too true. Until they realized they could use it to bully the trans community the only time they talked about the likes of the WNBA was in service of a punchline for a bad joke.
This exactly. People who I have seen make jokes at the WNBA's expense suddenly caring about the sanctity of the sport... I often wonder if they see the cognitive dissonance, probably not.
Most of the actual work to stop males from competing in women's sports, through evidence-guided changes in policy, has been driven by female athletes who are directly affected by this, feminists and feminist allies, scientists that study sex differences, and experts in the philosophy of sport.
That it's become such a well-known topic of contention is because sports are a spectator event and there have been some very high-profile instances of this unfairness towards female athletes.
>Most of the actual work to stop males from competing in women's sports,
Males who transition to female are not males. They are female/women. It is already not permissible for men to compete in women-only sports.
This became a national issue when many politicians and pundits saw a new vector to attack the trans community. We have heard it on campaign trails constantly for years now as if it’s some existential threat to the country. Your (incorrectly) characterizing it as some grassroots movement by concerned women across the nation who “simply don’t want men competing in women’s sports” is exactly what they hoped would happen over time because it gives them plausible cover.
Yes sports are a spectator event but I guarantee you not one of these people has watched women’s sports outside of exciting Olympic bids. They can’t name a single women’s soccer team in the US or a single star WNBA player. The sport is not the concern at all and we shouldn’t pretend it is.
They are male, and retain male physiological advantage even if they undergo interventions like testosterone suppression. It's not the only route by which a male athlete with such advantage might compete in women's sport, nor is it an issue limited to the USA. This is a broader issue affecting the fairness of women's sport in competitions across the world.
For instance, all three medallists in the women's 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were male. They had been issued with female birth certificates by their home countries due to having underdeveloped external male genitalia - and therefore according to the rules at the time could enter as female - but they still benefited from testosterone-driven development.
World Athletics, and other sports governing bodies for other sports, have tightened their eligibility criteria in response to cases like this, and in light of evidence that male advantage is still retained even with pharmaceutical or surgical treatments. This has been an ongoing problem for much longer than US pundits have been bringing it up in relation to trans, and it's adversely affected many female athletes, from amateur leagues to international competition.
No they are not. You can debate physical advantages but I won’t indulge transphobia. If you can’t stop then I have no desire to continue this discussion.
It is not a belief and I am not debating this with you. You can educate yourself on the issue if you want, but we both know this is just going to become an axe grinding session here. Have a good rest of your week.
It is a belief, and a factually incorrect one, as any biologist would confirm to you. Humans, like all mammals, cannot change sex. Just like the earth is round, not flat.
So there's not really anything to debate on that point anyway.
>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.
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.
For example, there basically will not be large scale solar in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, etc under this administration. You know, some of the highest value spots.
Nevada, Utah and Arizona are all low population states with little power demand. While power can be shipped that needs power lines and other complexity. There is a lot of solar potential there, but the lack of demand means they are not highest value.
I’m not sure land is the controlling factor. Look at current fuel mix: the upper Midwest is mostly coal, with all its disadvantages. How was it possible for Iowa, South Dakota, and Kansas to choose wind?
Iowa choose wind because 20 years ago it wasn't an issue and someone put in a clause that made building wind an advantage to utilities so they tried. By the time wind became an issue elsewhere there was too much installed in Iowa for anyone to be able to claim it couldn't work and in turn those who made it political have to be quiet about it when they come to Iowa.
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'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:
1. The Nebraska price is the 17th highest on that list. Nevada and Montana are both below $1k/acre. I've seen Nevada in person, I can guess why the small amount of possibly-arable land I saw there might be cheap, never been to Montana but the Google street view photos told me the same story.
2. If the profit per acre is low, surely this just means they don't have a better use for the land?
3. Even if you assume they're all idiots who could make more profit if they thought harder about better uses for their land, I'm not clear why the reason for the land being what it is, is supposed to matter?
The point I was trying to get across is that, because animal feed is an inefficient way of making people food, it's a little tendentious to say that we're trading food for energy.
Well thanks. Now I reviewed what I had in mind for the size of an acre, and it's way smaller than I though (I don't know why I was thinking it was way bigger than an hectare). Also, I always forget the size differences of unused land between continental Europe and the US. :D
High plains Nebraska land can support cattle grazing or maybe a wheat crop, given they receive less than 10” of rain per year.
Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields, they’re taking marginal land used for grazing and using that for solar fields. Productive farmland can have wind turbines within it, due to the smaller footprint of the turbine tower.
Productive farmland is $10k+ an acre, more if it’s irrigated. The cost of rural land is based on the economic rents/value that can be extracted from the land.
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.
> 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'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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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...
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.
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...
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.
Avoiding federal regulatory oversight.
https://www.ferc.gov/introductory-guide-electricity-markets-... ("ERCOT is not subject to federal (FERC) jurisdiction because its grid is not connected to those of other states. Thus, power sales in ERCOT are not considered sales in interstate commerce and not subject to federal (FERC) oversight. That said, ERCOT runs some electricity markets that have similarities to those described herein.")
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
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!
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.
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
At least it's only natgas for electricity, which is less valuable than oil.
Saudi Arabia generates ~41% of its electricity from oil, 59% from natgas and <1% solar. Talk about mismanagement...
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/SAU/electrici...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
> 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.
The contractors that build it and the jobs to maintain them.
>> "who will clean the snow off of it in winter"
Not sure why they are whining. Sounds like job creation to me!
Clean energy is woke energy.
Clean energy understands systemic racism?
I thought my statement was ridiculous enough to forgo the "/s".
Perhaps you're fortunate to run in different circles that I do, but I have heard that sentiment expressed similarly and unironically. Poe's Law and all...
I thought the same about their question.
Not in these times, even here on HN. SMDH.
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?
(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.
Highest demand for energy is during the day.
Highest output of solar is during the day.
Your comment about energy supply implies we just don't need any solar at all.
I think we need is a large set of incentives to do home solar with storage.
My comment doesn't imply that at all. We absolutely need more solar, and a lot of it. Just that we don't necessarily need more of it everywhere without making accompanying storage investments. (+ possibly transmission investments).
We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
Early net metering schemes were often basically 1:1. You supply a kWh mid-day where it's not worth much and that's "equal" in value to you drawing a kWh at 18:30, even though the market price of electricity then might be 10x what it was when you earned your "credit" and the grid is far more strained.
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Most regions that already have a decent amount of behind the meter home solar at this point exhibit a strong "duck curve" effect, at least on sunnier days. Mid-day demand is deeply suppressed while solar output is strongest.
Meanwhile, the AM/PM peaks remain and are at times of the day when solar output is very low.
With more storage - solar can help cover those peaks (+ overnight demand). Without, you're not accomplishing all that much by just depressing mid-day loads even further unless you can restructure society to better match it's energy demands to those solar supply curves.
A few illustrations/articles:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/where-we-are-going/solar-power-... (New England).
Thank You. That seems like some reasonable issues to address.
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.
> the Left as the same illogical hate against the right
Challenge accepted. Receipts please.
Firearms for home and personal defense. Also, not to even dig deeply into the many lunacies that the progressive left became insane about during the pandemic (both sides were guilty here, but it was BOTH sides).
Don't get too smug. You really think your entire half of a political spectrum is free of stupidity and irrational thinking?
> Firearms for home and personal defense.
Given the current political climate, the left should definitely get on board with this one ASAP.
There's lunacy on both sides for sure, but MAGA has a pretty strong hold on blatant cruelty when it comes to their issues. Also, I'd argue the Overton window has shifted pretty far right, so you have to be pretty extreme to be considered a right wing extremist these days. In fact, some of the major MAGA rallying points could actually be points of compromise to most progressives if they weren't so cruel about it (ICE, farm slavery visas, trans sports). Plus curiously the one we could all agree on but don't hear much about on the right anymore; Epstein.
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.
Yeah, I don’t hate bicyclists in the “I would try to make them feel less safe” sense (I tend to go way the opposite way, if anything) but I do dread seeing them when driving or walking in the same spaces. They’re really unpredictable, and their presence creates extremely unsafe-feeling situations for everyone around.
When I ride a bike, I don’t do it in places where, when I encounter a bike driving, it makes me especially anxious.
Who is driving the two ton vehicle that has killed millions worldwide?
Yes, of course. But the bikes are the ones making the space those murder-machines operate in operate differently from how it usually does, which is inherently not great.
I’d like to see car use reduced as much as the next sane person, but I still go “ah, goddamnit” when I see a bicyclist approaching an intersection or come up on one going uphill on a twisty no-shoulder 35+ mph road.
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.
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.
This is a good reply since it feels accurate but generally is not, which captures the sentiment of those opposing solar.
1. “The grid needs an upgrade”. This is true regardless of whether solar exists or not. Energy demand, battery technology, etc have all changed but the grid has not kept pace (on purpose). End customers may foot the bill, again, regardless of solar.
2. Solar does receive more subsidies, intentionally. This is how you quickly drive adoption of new technology and stop the old technology (gas/coal) from using its market power to stop new technology growth. Subsidies jumpstart the switch to solar, which in the long term is good for our country (export more energy), our planet, and for individuals who want energy independence.
3. Taxes aren’t flat rates, so when you make more you pay more progressively. A poor person pays significantly less than a rich person does for solar subsidies.
4. Chinese domination isn’t a reason for not using solar. If we want to change that, the US should motivate buyers to buy US (subsidize), increase import costs (targeted, time limited tariffs), or promote growth of the industry (education, research, etc).
>2. Solar does receive more subsidies, intentionally. …
>3. Taxes aren’t flat rates, so when you make more you pay more progressively. A poor person pays significantly less than a rich person does for solar subsidies.
Yes, subsidies are done to help drive adoption. The key is that the subsidies should go where they can do the most good. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further to decarbonizing the grid than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar. It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone MUCH further if spent on other solar projects) - it isn’t hard to imagine that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels. This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run. The goal should be to decarbonize the grid - not implement some kind of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
I am not an electrician, but big problem with home-solar is grid not being bi-directional. In my whereabouts it's common to have good „down“ power, but no permit for „up“ back to the grid. Which makes it not worth it for home users. Batteries make it somewhat better, but it's still far from ideal.
For big commercial arrays, the grid used to have main lines to certain old school plants. Now for solar new major lines are needed to middle-of-nowhere locations to connect solar and wind farms. While old-school plants were more concentrated and closer to major locations, it was less costly than major lines out-there and to many more locations. And, obviously, investors into solar/wind ain't willing to food those bills.
The problem with solar subsidies, especially when it comes to home solar, is that they're very skewed to favor better-off people.
As for Chinese, yes, something needs to be done. But for now I kinda understand people who ain't happy subsidies are ending up in China.
Isn't US made equipment facing the headwinds of the US being anti-solar. It seems more like the US shot itself in the foot by letting the Chinese get the lead on this technology. And by subsidizing, and maybe regulating buying US, we could support our domestic industry.
Seems like all over the place we are giving up and letting China win the technology race. Robots, cars, solar, all the future tech is in trouble.
I don't know why anybody is against clean air. It makes no sense.
The US has invested a lot of money, lives, political capital & environment to become a big oil & gas producer.
One of it's potential weapons against China is that China imports most of it's oil & gas. China also has a few easy geographical choke points to prevent it from importing gas. Solar & wind plus electrical vehicles destroy this advantage.
So China has many reasons to push in this direction while the US is doubling down on it's bet, even while other historical oil countries like Saudi Arabia are diversifying away from oil.
It should also be noted that many Chinese companies are selling at a loss or very low margin, especially the electric car companies. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-is-sending-its-...
As an euro, here it's the same. Even though (most of?) europe is pro-solar.
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)
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...
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.
The articles about Solar cost reaching parity with Fossil. Is that before or after taxes?
Its probably referring to the price at which solar can sell power. In the middle of the day, its actually effectively $0 (no marginal cost). In nighttime, its infinite cost. Fossil fuels marginal cost is effectively the cost of fuel per MWh.
Taxes are far too complex to figure that our. In the case of other there are a lot of different players and most do things other than oil and so it isn't possible to figure out what tax/subsidy is from oil.
Was wondering if anybody just took raw manufacturing/operating costs, and energy output, and compared. Removing all taxes and subsidies from the equation. If we are going to say Solar is now cheaper, I'd think it would have to be without subsidies.
Accounting is a big issue for renewables because almost all the cost is upfront. You pay a capital cost for X years (say, 30) of electricity. Maintenance is a much smaller fraction of the cost. Therefore the question of profitability depends on all sorts of non-power things: amortization, interest rates, how the tax-deductibility of a capital investment is handled, what future electricity costs are, and so on.
How do you suggest fossil fuel subsidies should be positioned in the equation?
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...
> 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.
Too true. Until they realized they could use it to bully the trans community the only time they talked about the likes of the WNBA was in service of a punchline for a bad joke.
This exactly. People who I have seen make jokes at the WNBA's expense suddenly caring about the sanctity of the sport... I often wonder if they see the cognitive dissonance, probably not.
Most of the actual work to stop males from competing in women's sports, through evidence-guided changes in policy, has been driven by female athletes who are directly affected by this, feminists and feminist allies, scientists that study sex differences, and experts in the philosophy of sport.
That it's become such a well-known topic of contention is because sports are a spectator event and there have been some very high-profile instances of this unfairness towards female athletes.
>Most of the actual work to stop males from competing in women's sports,
Males who transition to female are not males. They are female/women. It is already not permissible for men to compete in women-only sports.
This became a national issue when many politicians and pundits saw a new vector to attack the trans community. We have heard it on campaign trails constantly for years now as if it’s some existential threat to the country. Your (incorrectly) characterizing it as some grassroots movement by concerned women across the nation who “simply don’t want men competing in women’s sports” is exactly what they hoped would happen over time because it gives them plausible cover.
Yes sports are a spectator event but I guarantee you not one of these people has watched women’s sports outside of exciting Olympic bids. They can’t name a single women’s soccer team in the US or a single star WNBA player. The sport is not the concern at all and we shouldn’t pretend it is.
They are male, and retain male physiological advantage even if they undergo interventions like testosterone suppression. It's not the only route by which a male athlete with such advantage might compete in women's sport, nor is it an issue limited to the USA. This is a broader issue affecting the fairness of women's sport in competitions across the world.
For instance, all three medallists in the women's 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were male. They had been issued with female birth certificates by their home countries due to having underdeveloped external male genitalia - and therefore according to the rules at the time could enter as female - but they still benefited from testosterone-driven development.
World Athletics, and other sports governing bodies for other sports, have tightened their eligibility criteria in response to cases like this, and in light of evidence that male advantage is still retained even with pharmaceutical or surgical treatments. This has been an ongoing problem for much longer than US pundits have been bringing it up in relation to trans, and it's adversely affected many female athletes, from amateur leagues to international competition.
> They are male
No they are not. You can debate physical advantages but I won’t indulge transphobia. If you can’t stop then I have no desire to continue this discussion.
Why do you hold the belief that they are not male?
It is not a belief and I am not debating this with you. You can educate yourself on the issue if you want, but we both know this is just going to become an axe grinding session here. Have a good rest of your week.
It is a belief, and a factually incorrect one, as any biologist would confirm to you. Humans, like all mammals, cannot change sex. Just like the earth is round, not flat.
So there's not really anything to debate on that point anyway.
How did we get from an article about solar farms, to your anti-trans BS?
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.
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.
Most the best land for solar farms in the west half of the US is controlled by the federal government. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Ma...
For example, there basically will not be large scale solar in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, etc under this administration. You know, some of the highest value spots.
Nevada, Utah and Arizona are all low population states with little power demand. While power can be shipped that needs power lines and other complexity. There is a lot of solar potential there, but the lack of demand means they are not highest value.
I’m not sure land is the controlling factor. Look at current fuel mix: the upper Midwest is mostly coal, with all its disadvantages. How was it possible for Iowa, South Dakota, and Kansas to choose wind?
Iowa choose wind because 20 years ago it wasn't an issue and someone put in a clause that made building wind an advantage to utilities so they tried. By the time wind became an issue elsewhere there was too much installed in Iowa for anyone to be able to claim it couldn't work and in turn those who made it political have to be quiet about it when they come to Iowa.
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?
Like monthly? Yearly?
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...
In Nebraska, you're talking about food for cattle. The profit per acre is low and so the price is low.
1. The Nebraska price is the 17th highest on that list. Nevada and Montana are both below $1k/acre. I've seen Nevada in person, I can guess why the small amount of possibly-arable land I saw there might be cheap, never been to Montana but the Google street view photos told me the same story.
2. If the profit per acre is low, surely this just means they don't have a better use for the land?
3. Even if you assume they're all idiots who could make more profit if they thought harder about better uses for their land, I'm not clear why the reason for the land being what it is, is supposed to matter?
The point I was trying to get across is that, because animal feed is an inefficient way of making people food, it's a little tendentious to say that we're trading food for energy.
Oh, right; I agree, but that intent wasn't clear.
Well thanks. Now I reviewed what I had in mind for the size of an acre, and it's way smaller than I though (I don't know why I was thinking it was way bigger than an hectare). Also, I always forget the size differences of unused land between continental Europe and the US. :D
High plains Nebraska land can support cattle grazing or maybe a wheat crop, given they receive less than 10” of rain per year.
Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields, they’re taking marginal land used for grazing and using that for solar fields. Productive farmland can have wind turbines within it, due to the smaller footprint of the turbine tower.
Productive farmland is $10k+ an acre, more if it’s irrigated. The cost of rural land is based on the economic rents/value that can be extracted from the land.
This is for a 20 or 30 year lease. One time payment. 4k is on the high side.
You dropped this: /s
I mean, ultimately, ol' minihands won't be there forever.
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'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 had to google it and apparently the complaints are:
Ruin the view,
Lower property values,
Habitat destruction,
Noise from inverter fans
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.
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.
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?
Deer breeding isn't liberal wokeness. Only the good ol boys do that, so it's ok.
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?
Well depends on where they are they might be obligated to put due to some noise polution law or they might not care because there is no such law
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.
Crop dusters do not run 24/7, nor do the combines or other tractors.
Really? I had no idea! Thanks for clearing that up.
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.
Would you like to share with us what it is they say makes them unhappy about it specifically?
"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?
I didn't. It looks like GP changed their comment. I was answering the question of what people don't like about living next to a solar farm.
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.
Agriculture in the desert is awe inspiring in the opposite way, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
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.