C'mon, Robert. I don't disagree that the mainstream media is pro-renewables. But to say the NYT and NPR *never* cover local opposition to solar and wind projects is just false. It took me 30 seconds to Google up these, and there are plenty more:
As Demand for Green Energy Grows, Solar Farms Face Local Resistance
There are plenty of people out there already lazily bashing the media without actually checking their facts. You're too good a reporter to be one of them.
One other question local resident should ask is who will be responsible for the junk when these projects reach the end of their lifespans. I suspect a lot of these companies will go belly up and governments and/or landowners will be stuck with remediation (or the junk will just be left in place to rust and leach chemicals).
Hi Robert. Thanks for this great article. I have been involved with a group of agricultural land owners in Missouri who are resisting the construction of utility-scale solar industrial power plants on our farm lands. Working at both the county and state government levels, it has been tough going and frustrating. I think we have done a pretty good job of educating our County Commissioners and state legislators, but we face a daunting uphill battle. The solar lobbyists are a formidable foe. Could you do some investigation of the DOE's plan to develop National Interest Electric Transmission
Corridors? The Midwest Plains proposed corridor crosses Missouri in what appears to be the exact planned location of Invenergy's Grain Belt Express high voltage transmission line project. The proposed width of the NIETC corridor is 5 miles, with a length of 780 miles. That works out to a seizure of land of approximately 2,496,000 acres. No doubt much of this land in privately owned. The Tiger Connector of the Grain Belt Express is on my neighbor's land. The standard width of a high voltage transmission line corridor is approximately 150 feet, which would occupy approximately 13,978 acres along the 780 mile route. So why is the federal government going to seize over 2 million acres when it only needs 14,000? Thanks for any information you can provide, and please make your supporters aware of this next big land grab.
"You can fool all the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time" Abraham Lincoln
A cooling cycle has already started in 2020. Two great oceans are cooling already, (measured data not from a poxy model) and historical sites of temperature measurement outside of urban heat islands are showing that the warming trend has ceased and the cooling commenced.
Look up Valentina Zhakova and Grand Solar Minimum magnetic field cycles.
We, here in Texas, have the giant monolithic grid operator, ERCOT! There isn't a wind or solar project that it hasn't been approved for connection to the Texas grid. It doesn't give a rats about the communities in revolt against more renewable projects that cannot be relied upon for energy when needed, its unbelievably expensive, and is costing Texas the stability it must have for the grid. Meanwhile, in its winter report, it sent out a request to shuttered power plants to restart so it can ensure winter reliability since ERCOT needs 3GW of generating capacity to meet demand. As usual, ERCOT is about as competent as the BLM, BOEM, FWS, EPA, etc. since it received only 11MW of demand response capacity in the submitted bids.
ERCOT is a propaganda machine and said "oh, it was just too short a period to respond" so they cancelled the request for purchase and said "it's fine, we'll just work with the PUC to work on defining the kinds of products that could be utilized throughout the year. So, we hold our breath that another Uri won't be coming our way since ERCOT can't for the life of it, figure out its algorithms so its always putting its finger in the air to calculate its supply and demand for Texas.
In the meantime, the people in Val Verde County, Texas have had it with ERCOT as 2 ranchers sued it for the approval of a wind farm across thousands of acres of scrubby acres near the pristine Devils River. They won their lawsuit, and the 46 wind turbines, 700' tall was tossed by the courts. But, not because it was the wind farm, it was found that it was being developed by the Chinese. No, No, in Texas, but now, the citizens of Val Verde Co. are once again in the court since a Spanish company Greenailia came in to take over and ERCOT is thrilled. So, here in Texas, the wind and solar madness is becoming a huge issue in the Lone Star State, but although the voters approved a $10 billion energy fund for gas fired power plants, ERCOT will still be the giant mismanaged grid operator that is buying unreliable power with no guardrails and continues to raise its rates to make up for its disastrous decisions.
Meanwhile, our electric generation co-op is sending letters to tell its customers how excited it is to be installing smart meters in our homes. It's a bit odd, when you call to ask questions, and decide you want to opt-out, that excitement turns into a very angry and defensive representative who is no longer that once excited and thrilled voice you first engaged with on the phone. You have to wonder why they are so pissed off?
"In politics, regulatory capture (also called agency capture) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession."
This is directed at some of the usual suspects in the comments.
As Robert frequently points out, including in this piece, rural opposition to giant RE projects spans the political spectrum. My rural lake county has its share of tree huggers and “libtards”, along with conservatives, libertarians, and other persuasions. We are all united in protecting our natural landscape (nature tourism accounts for about a third of our economy) and our property values against rapacious RE developers.
Over a decade ago, residents and local leaders came together to enact strict wind and solar ordinances that, among other things, require setbacks of 3/4 mile from non participating property lines (same as Germany, of all places), 1+ miles from lakes and natural areas, and developers to create escrow accounts held by the county whose value = decommissioning costs determined by an independent engineer. These measures are wildly popular across the board among our residents.
With hundreds of lakes and natural areas, it is basically a de facto ban - without an outright ban that might attract the unwelcome attention of the zealots in the state legislature, who see only “economic development” dollars. I’m happy to report
not a single major RE project has been proposed. We didn’t achieve this victory by calling each other names.
The moral of the story is: if you want to win this battle in your community, then you best be prepared to make common cause with your fellow citizens, regardless of political persuasion.
You won't read about it in the New York Times or Atlantic Monthly, but the StopTheseThings blog from down under has one or two articles every day. They occasionally quote an article by Robert.
"They invent claims that project opponents are backed by hydrocarbon money." More likely, the projects are backed by hydrocarbon money because every watt of wind or solar label capacity has to be matched by four or so watts of coal, gas, or nuclear (because batteries and pumped storage and towing rocks up mountains simply cannot work -- see http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html). The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation was the mover and shaker behind the anti-nuclear hysteria starting in the 1960's, and they (along with Bloomberg and others) are still funding it, including by way of the Sierra Club.
California has pretty much stripped all zoning authority from local jurisdictions. You live in a single-family-home suburb? Too bad, a developer just bought four houses just South of yours and will be building a five-story stack-and-pack -- with no indoor parking -- and your city or county can't stop it. Too bad about your rooftop solar panels being in the shade 24/7.
"Wind projects hurt nearby property values." Farmers are discovering that the $25,000/yr they get from a windmill, which some view as "drought insurance." isn't such a good deal. They're supposed to last for 25 years, but when subsidies run out after ten or fifteen years, maintenance is abandoned and they quit working, so the farmers get $350,000 to $500,000. Then they discover in the 6-point type on page 23 of the contract that they're responsible for the $600,000 bill for decommissioning each monster.
I'd be wary of states that pass laws limiting local communities' control of big wind and solar projects. That may mean that control rests in the hands of state legislatures.
Control in WI resides in our Public Service Commission, the Commissioners of which are vying for highly paid executive jobs with utilities after their PSC terms. Incest much? Think they deny many solar and wind projects? Shocked, huh?
Ask every libtard in your communities (to include the legislators) to show you the reclamation and disposal plans and bonds for such, from installation to complete disposal, breakdown and recapture. They won't be able to, because these companies and political/governmental scammers always intentionally neglect or avoid that back end cost and headache.
There are hundreds of stories out there where land owners with windmills/wind farms are now left with decommissioned junk on their lands, because the installing energy company went out of business (surprise - took the subsidies, erected the BS scam and then vaporized with the tax dollars) and didn't set up bonds, meant to cover the cost of dismantling and recycling (id at all possible). And the idiots in the county, town, city and state legislators, in their drooling to gain the federal credits and green energy merit badge, purposely ignored the back end as well.
Make them document, file and then show their plan and the deposited funds for the end of life and maintenance costs, otherwise your town will be paying the price for these tax raiding scam artist's profiteering.
And Orsted, Vestas, Avangrid (a member of Iberdrola) all are major wind developers based overseas. Given the Vineyard Wind disaster installed by Avangrid, there is no way in hell they'll stick around to pick up the pieces. When the thousands of wind turbines fail to produce, break down from blade fatigue, wind effect, the the landscape is crisscrossed with useless towers, turbines, and solar panels, it will be, as always, the ratepayers on the hook.
Windmills and solar are not clean or cheap. A massive grift,
C'mon, Robert. I don't disagree that the mainstream media is pro-renewables. But to say the NYT and NPR *never* cover local opposition to solar and wind projects is just false. It took me 30 seconds to Google up these, and there are plenty more:
As Demand for Green Energy Grows, Solar Farms Face Local Resistance
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/business/solar-farms-resistance.html
The Clean Energy Future Is Roiling Both Friends and Foes
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/12/climate/wind-solar-clean-energy.html
Energy Firms, Green Groups and Others Reach Deal on Solar Farms
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/business/energy-environment/solar-farm-agreement.html
He Set Up a Big Solar Farm. His Neighbors Hated It.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/solar-energy-farms-ny.html
Solar Projects Draw New Opposition
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/business/businessspecial2/24shrike.html
In some fights over solar, it's environmentalist vs. environmentalist
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/18/1177524841/solar-energy-project-location-debate
Why the pushback against more renewable energy infrastructures?
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/14/1182074476/why-the-pushback-against-more-renewable-energy-infrastructures
Some Midwest states look to counter local opposition to wind and solar farm projects
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/14/1238704568/some-midwest-states-look-to-counter-local-opposition-to-wind-and-solar-farm-proj
There are plenty of people out there already lazily bashing the media without actually checking their facts. You're too good a reporter to be one of them.
One other question local resident should ask is who will be responsible for the junk when these projects reach the end of their lifespans. I suspect a lot of these companies will go belly up and governments and/or landowners will be stuck with remediation (or the junk will just be left in place to rust and leach chemicals).
A farmer friend here in Alberta told me a sobering fact.
If he leases his land to a farmer or company to grow food he would make $100/acre.
If he leases it to a renewables developer, it’s $800 an acre
So a section of land 640 acres is $64k per year for food, $500k.
Hard to resist those kind of $$
Hi Robert. Thanks for this great article. I have been involved with a group of agricultural land owners in Missouri who are resisting the construction of utility-scale solar industrial power plants on our farm lands. Working at both the county and state government levels, it has been tough going and frustrating. I think we have done a pretty good job of educating our County Commissioners and state legislators, but we face a daunting uphill battle. The solar lobbyists are a formidable foe. Could you do some investigation of the DOE's plan to develop National Interest Electric Transmission
Corridors? The Midwest Plains proposed corridor crosses Missouri in what appears to be the exact planned location of Invenergy's Grain Belt Express high voltage transmission line project. The proposed width of the NIETC corridor is 5 miles, with a length of 780 miles. That works out to a seizure of land of approximately 2,496,000 acres. No doubt much of this land in privately owned. The Tiger Connector of the Grain Belt Express is on my neighbor's land. The standard width of a high voltage transmission line corridor is approximately 150 feet, which would occupy approximately 13,978 acres along the 780 mile route. So why is the federal government going to seize over 2 million acres when it only needs 14,000? Thanks for any information you can provide, and please make your supporters aware of this next big land grab.
I hold fast to some wisdom from past sages.
"You can fool all the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time" Abraham Lincoln
A cooling cycle has already started in 2020. Two great oceans are cooling already, (measured data not from a poxy model) and historical sites of temperature measurement outside of urban heat islands are showing that the warming trend has ceased and the cooling commenced.
Look up Valentina Zhakova and Grand Solar Minimum magnetic field cycles.
We, here in Texas, have the giant monolithic grid operator, ERCOT! There isn't a wind or solar project that it hasn't been approved for connection to the Texas grid. It doesn't give a rats about the communities in revolt against more renewable projects that cannot be relied upon for energy when needed, its unbelievably expensive, and is costing Texas the stability it must have for the grid. Meanwhile, in its winter report, it sent out a request to shuttered power plants to restart so it can ensure winter reliability since ERCOT needs 3GW of generating capacity to meet demand. As usual, ERCOT is about as competent as the BLM, BOEM, FWS, EPA, etc. since it received only 11MW of demand response capacity in the submitted bids.
ERCOT is a propaganda machine and said "oh, it was just too short a period to respond" so they cancelled the request for purchase and said "it's fine, we'll just work with the PUC to work on defining the kinds of products that could be utilized throughout the year. So, we hold our breath that another Uri won't be coming our way since ERCOT can't for the life of it, figure out its algorithms so its always putting its finger in the air to calculate its supply and demand for Texas.
In the meantime, the people in Val Verde County, Texas have had it with ERCOT as 2 ranchers sued it for the approval of a wind farm across thousands of acres of scrubby acres near the pristine Devils River. They won their lawsuit, and the 46 wind turbines, 700' tall was tossed by the courts. But, not because it was the wind farm, it was found that it was being developed by the Chinese. No, No, in Texas, but now, the citizens of Val Verde Co. are once again in the court since a Spanish company Greenailia came in to take over and ERCOT is thrilled. So, here in Texas, the wind and solar madness is becoming a huge issue in the Lone Star State, but although the voters approved a $10 billion energy fund for gas fired power plants, ERCOT will still be the giant mismanaged grid operator that is buying unreliable power with no guardrails and continues to raise its rates to make up for its disastrous decisions.
Meanwhile, our electric generation co-op is sending letters to tell its customers how excited it is to be installing smart meters in our homes. It's a bit odd, when you call to ask questions, and decide you want to opt-out, that excitement turns into a very angry and defensive representative who is no longer that once excited and thrilled voice you first engaged with on the phone. You have to wonder why they are so pissed off?
Meanwhile, ERCOT
Seems to be a common practice:
"In politics, regulatory capture (also called agency capture) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession."
If taxpayers weren’t being forced to unwittingly support this scam the $reen energy industry would vanish.
This is directed at some of the usual suspects in the comments.
As Robert frequently points out, including in this piece, rural opposition to giant RE projects spans the political spectrum. My rural lake county has its share of tree huggers and “libtards”, along with conservatives, libertarians, and other persuasions. We are all united in protecting our natural landscape (nature tourism accounts for about a third of our economy) and our property values against rapacious RE developers.
Over a decade ago, residents and local leaders came together to enact strict wind and solar ordinances that, among other things, require setbacks of 3/4 mile from non participating property lines (same as Germany, of all places), 1+ miles from lakes and natural areas, and developers to create escrow accounts held by the county whose value = decommissioning costs determined by an independent engineer. These measures are wildly popular across the board among our residents.
With hundreds of lakes and natural areas, it is basically a de facto ban - without an outright ban that might attract the unwelcome attention of the zealots in the state legislature, who see only “economic development” dollars. I’m happy to report
not a single major RE project has been proposed. We didn’t achieve this victory by calling each other names.
The moral of the story is: if you want to win this battle in your community, then you best be prepared to make common cause with your fellow citizens, regardless of political persuasion.
You won't read about it in the New York Times or Atlantic Monthly, but the StopTheseThings blog from down under has one or two articles every day. They occasionally quote an article by Robert.
"They invent claims that project opponents are backed by hydrocarbon money." More likely, the projects are backed by hydrocarbon money because every watt of wind or solar label capacity has to be matched by four or so watts of coal, gas, or nuclear (because batteries and pumped storage and towing rocks up mountains simply cannot work -- see http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html). The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation was the mover and shaker behind the anti-nuclear hysteria starting in the 1960's, and they (along with Bloomberg and others) are still funding it, including by way of the Sierra Club.
California has pretty much stripped all zoning authority from local jurisdictions. You live in a single-family-home suburb? Too bad, a developer just bought four houses just South of yours and will be building a five-story stack-and-pack -- with no indoor parking -- and your city or county can't stop it. Too bad about your rooftop solar panels being in the shade 24/7.
"Wind projects hurt nearby property values." Farmers are discovering that the $25,000/yr they get from a windmill, which some view as "drought insurance." isn't such a good deal. They're supposed to last for 25 years, but when subsidies run out after ten or fifteen years, maintenance is abandoned and they quit working, so the farmers get $350,000 to $500,000. Then they discover in the 6-point type on page 23 of the contract that they're responsible for the $600,000 bill for decommissioning each monster.
There is only one solution. Build nukes. Starting now.
Great article, thank you. And can we clone Danielle Smith??
Robert, you might be interested in this paper about the devastating impacts of utility solar in the desert southwest: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2024.2388051#d1e167
I'd be wary of states that pass laws limiting local communities' control of big wind and solar projects. That may mean that control rests in the hands of state legislatures.
Control in WI resides in our Public Service Commission, the Commissioners of which are vying for highly paid executive jobs with utilities after their PSC terms. Incest much? Think they deny many solar and wind projects? Shocked, huh?
Ask every libtard in your communities (to include the legislators) to show you the reclamation and disposal plans and bonds for such, from installation to complete disposal, breakdown and recapture. They won't be able to, because these companies and political/governmental scammers always intentionally neglect or avoid that back end cost and headache.
There are hundreds of stories out there where land owners with windmills/wind farms are now left with decommissioned junk on their lands, because the installing energy company went out of business (surprise - took the subsidies, erected the BS scam and then vaporized with the tax dollars) and didn't set up bonds, meant to cover the cost of dismantling and recycling (id at all possible). And the idiots in the county, town, city and state legislators, in their drooling to gain the federal credits and green energy merit badge, purposely ignored the back end as well.
Make them document, file and then show their plan and the deposited funds for the end of life and maintenance costs, otherwise your town will be paying the price for these tax raiding scam artist's profiteering.
And Orsted, Vestas, Avangrid (a member of Iberdrola) all are major wind developers based overseas. Given the Vineyard Wind disaster installed by Avangrid, there is no way in hell they'll stick around to pick up the pieces. When the thousands of wind turbines fail to produce, break down from blade fatigue, wind effect, the the landscape is crisscrossed with useless towers, turbines, and solar panels, it will be, as always, the ratepayers on the hook.
Nuclear plants have to do this no reason why other electricity generation modalities should do this also
Coal mines, copper mines, ... too.
Agreed, but they don’t. And there is the double standard in this woke, green energy money grab.