Locally Michigan State is covering all their parking lots with solar panels. The added advantage is that since you're car is parked under them you don't have to clear the snow off.
But what I haven't figured out is if they have to broom them off after a snow or just wait until the sun melts it. By the time I am around in the afternoon time they are always cleared.
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)
13.5.3
In most cases, not all wind turbine units within a wind turbine farm need to be lighted. Obstruction lights should be placed along the perimeter of the wind turbine farm so that there are no unlit separations or gaps more than 1/2 SM (0.80 km) (see Figure A-26). Wind turbines within a grid or cluster should not have an unlighted separation or gap of more than 1 SM (1.61 km) across the interior of a grid or cluster of turbines
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.
I think every engineer knows that all things come with trade-offs.
A great engineer, however, is able to readily admit when one option among others has a far, far greater set of costs than another, for the exact same benefit.
And if said engineer can't decide (for claim of ignorance), they mature to learn that the experience and knowledge of others is the best source for understanding the trade-offs involved to make a decision.
I think its pretty clear solar power has trade-offs. I think it's also obvious solar has far less negatives than all other power generating sources.
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.
I come from rural Michigan and everyone in the areas where the turbines are complain about it. Its the view or its the sound. The former sure, the latter I haven't heard it myself but I don't go home anymore. It is also the only new investments made in the area in 50 years in any which way shape or form.
When they first started, they had to build the infrastructure and stations to collect the power to transport it from the turbines. My mom rented out some rooms of her house to make some cash when that went on for maybe 2 years in total. There was a lot of work and money coming into the area for a moment, but now the only people making money are the farmers who own the land the turbines sit on.
It's always a trip to see a view you have seen for 40 years but with the turbines there in the background. Slowly, these rural areas are losing vital services one by one. The specialists stop coming to the hospital, even on rotation. The dentists and optometrists retire out and unless someone growing up there has a passion for teeth and genetically modified corn then the roles get pushed out to the bigger cities, 30-45m away.
> 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...
Not just the fans. The transformers, inductors, chokes, capacitors, etc can get extremely noisy as well. I have to plug my ears when I walk by the switchgear at my local Walmart's EV install because it is so loud.
Any system that relies on high rate of change of current over time is prone to these issues. Look at the prevalence of coil whine in gaming PCs and workstations now. The level of noise scales almost linearly with current up until you saturate the various magnetic cores. In a multi-megawatt installation of any kind that relies upon inverters, it is plausible that these electromagnetic acoustic effects could cause meaningful habitat destruction on their own.
Traditional synchronous machines (turbines) do not have this issue, but they are not something you want to live next to for reasons on the other end of the acoustic frequency spectrum. Infrasound from a turbine can travel for miles, especially during transient phases of operation. There were a lot of complaints on social media during the commissioning of a new natural gas generator unit in my area last year.
I'm quite happy to live next to a 4kw "farm" because without it I would have had to run a $25k easement to get power to the property where i live.
I'm less than $8k in on the solar part of this and it's been more reliable than my neighbor's grid power.
But maybe my enjoyment of the panel set is also a "fringe" opinion. I know folks that live near larger installations with less direct impacts and they seem to have fewer feelings about those plants.
Nuclear is a good candidate - they take up a lot less land mass for the amount of power generated. I used to leave near one, and when my neighbors where asked where it was most pointed instead to a coal power plant many miles away.
In theory I wouldn't mind living next to nuclear.
I say in theory, because we've seen too many times when someone cuts corners, or has deadlines or poorly trained staff on site, that when things go wrong, they can sometimes go very very wrong.
I mean sure, nuclear is very interesting but the cost right now is so sky high vs renewable that it's a massive uphill battle to even consider it. Then factor in the negative public perception and waste disposal issues and that hill you have to fight up just became a vertical wall. Solar and wind are low cost and high return. Maybe one day it will make sense but today it does not.
The plant I'm talking about was built in the 1950s though. I wouldn't build a new one today for the reasons you state, but having lived near one I'd do it again.
On the other hand an old-school power plant has relatively tiny footprint compared to the same output solars.
Many old school plants also rely on dams and provide massive ponds. Which sucks during construction when some people have to move. But in my experience after several decades people are pretty happy to live next to those massive ponds. If I'd have to pick living next to a massive lake which allows boats/yachts/etc (which is not so common in my whereabouts) with a plant on the other side of that lake vs. lake-sized solar plant... Former does sound better.
I can understand not wanting to live close to wind turbines but I don't understand the issue with living next to a solar farm since the panels just sit there silently.
Lots of people dislike change. Neophobia is a thing, and it's not particularly uncommon.
The good news is, they'll rapidly adapt to each new solar farm; the bad news is, they'll forget about all the ones they're used to by the time comes to expand — I've seen anecdotes of the same thing happening with power lines, where people were upset that some proposed new ones would ruin the view, the person proposing them said they wouldn't be any different from the current ones, and the complainers said "what current ones?" and had to have them pointed out.
The only problem that I kind of understand are the huge fences surrounding the farms. Because copper thefts are a big problem for them, it is quite common to have 3m high fences all around, which is obviously more gated community like than a monoculture field. And of course, it depends on how the farm is run. Solar farms can be ecological heaven if managed properly, unless growing weeds are just killed of with round-up every few months. Everything else seems more pretended problems, like inverter fans that may just be placed in the middle and should barely be hearable from 100 meters away.
Idk, maybe 3mm wire of 15cm grid size vs. 6mm wire in a <=5cm grid. But I have never seen a big deer farm, that is probably also not so nice to have right next door. But what do I know, here in Scandinavia, you have the right to roam pretty much everywhere, makes countries with too many fences seem claustrophobic.
Well its not silent those panels go into MPPTs that produce noise when high amps are flowing through them to charge batteries if they don't direct export , if they direct export then there is noise from inverters to convert DC->AC
Compared to literally every other way of generating power, they are relatively silent and unobtrusive. They also don’t poison the air around them which is pretty neat.
Yes, but the relevant comparison for the residents isn't to a coal plant, it's to the undeveloped field that the solar arrays replaced.
Depending upon their other priorities, they may be upset about the loss of hunting access as well. Understandably, people putting up solar arrays don't want people firing guns in the middle of their arrays.
We have to make power somehow and they all want to use said power. It mostly just boils down to nimbyism at the end of the day. They are just unaware of (or don’t care about) areas like cancer alley where we dump all our mining/refining/processing/etc. in an already impoverished area that can’t push back the same way wealthy neighborhoods with social status can.
If I were to hazard a guess every person complaining would happily suffer the 'consequences' of a solar farm not being near their neighborhood.
It really should be a no brainer compromise to zone solar as industrial so they're not near where people live. There's in practice infinite amounts of land you can get zoned like this. Living to electrical noise sucks in a way living need next to a wind farm doesn't.
"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.
Is it intentional that you're listing export-based business as "local" while that solar farm probably does supply the town? It's a beautiful contrast either way.
All the businesses produce fungible commodities, and feed those into distribution systems ~10000X larger than the town. So, socially, it does not matter where any given ear of corn, gallon of milk, or watt of electricity ends up.
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.
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.")
Edit: This is only up until recently; Texas is seeking to potentially interconnect with neighboring grids, forgoing FERC independence in the process.
Texas Bill [H.B. 199] Opens ERCOT to Grid Interconnection - https://www.environmentenergyleader.com/stories/texas-bill-o... - July 25th, 2025 ("A completed interconnection—either synchronous or non-synchronous—would likely bring ERCOT under partial federal jurisdiction for the first time since its creation. Currently, ERCOT operates almost entirely within Texas to avoid triggering FERC oversight under the Federal Power Act.")
This has got to be more of FERC doesn't want to regulate ERCOT though no?
> [1] In the 1939 case United States v. Rock Royal Co-op, the Supreme Court had included milk processed and sold entirely within the state of New York within the federal government's purview because the company used a mixture of raw milk from farms within and outside the state of New York.
Like there's no way all of the energy in Texas only comes from Texas supplied materials.
I can't find the court case I want but there's another one about how somebody's local consumption had an effect on the interstate price so growing plants for local use can be federally regulated. And therefore, to me, FERC's existence effects the price of electricity on the rest of the states.
Maybe my wording is incorrect, I should have said "ties" instead of interconnects. Texas has several, just not much in aggregate capacity (can supply ~1-2% of peak demand):
Quebec operates like Texas does, for political reasons too, with ample export and import capacity (import/export capacity = 15/20% of peak consumption)
It makes fantastic sense in Texas too because air conditioning is such a high portion of demand. Clean energy production reaches its peak at midday when everyone has their AC going flat out.
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.
Right now, about 6% of my power comes from natural gas. That's the only fossil fuel power I'm currently using. Everything else is solar/hydro/wind. Not sure why nuclear isn't listed, I thought we had an active plant here. But you get the picture.
For my grid, new solar or wind is simply not needed so why would we be anywhere near the top of installation? Batteries is what we actually need.
There is a point where it's a bad idea to install more renewables.
Idaho Power’s local generation is quite clean. But…during the summer in Idaho, almost a third of energy comes from Wyoming and Utah where coal is still a substantial part of generation.
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.
Indeed. I live in a pretty red state, and have lots of red or red-leaning family and friends, and practically nobody I know is "anti-solar" or even considered it a political stance. I do run into more anti-windmill though, but the reason is clearly that nobody likes looking at them across the landscape (windfarm in SE Utah was controversial for this point). Also in the southwest solar is often not favored because some amount of water is used to clean the dust off, and water scarcity here in the SW US is starting to finally creep into peoples' minds.
I'd imagine a lot of the lack of solar farms in the rural midwest and southwest is due to land use conflicts with ag and ranching. I don't have data to back that up though, just a hunch.
There are both red states and blue states in places in the US that are good for solar power (rural, lots of sun). The sunny American southwest with huge amounts of empty desert land good for solar arrays includes the states of California (blue), Arizona (red), Nevada (toss-up), New Mexico (blue), and Texas (red). And the party that a state's population prefers in presidential elections isn't stable over mutli-decade time periods, but this doesn't change suitability for solar energy production.
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…
I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete.
Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.
It’s likely more to do with population density. Middle America is a lot less dense. If you look both Florida and Georgia have solar installs and are “red” states
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.
> 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.
But it's unreliable, and needs a lot of battery tech + overbuilding to make it reliable. Can people be confident that building the array will in and of itself make their electricity bills go down?
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 a fair concern. There's a solar install up in northern WI that is part of a microgrid and basically doesn't generate energy in winter due to the amount of snow they get. The lack of solar output is offset by nat gas generators.
Oconto County averages between 4 and 5 feet of snow every winter. You need pretty heavy duty equipment to move that much snow out of a large field.
Most of Wisconsin doesn't actually get that much snow, though.
PV panels are typically angled to catch the sun better, and they're smooth and dark... snow slides off by itself if the sun is shining (and if the sun isn't shining, you aren't losing much by having the panels covered).
i was under the impression that the panels track the sun as the day goes by to maximize sunlight. If it starts snowing then just put them in a vertical position, there's no sun shining anyway.
> 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.
It really is absurd how expensive our energy is across the state. Meanwhile Virginia gets electricity for 15 cents a kwh.
Notably, the municipal power companies mostly are far lower. It's PG&E and SoCal Edison who are that high, because they're shoving the costs of doing 75 years worth of deferred system maintenance all at once onto current ratepayers instead of their investors taking the hit. It's too bad that there wasn't a viable legal framework whereby the investor-owned utilties' shareholders could be wiped out as they deserved to be, and the utility infrastructure transferred to municipal ownership. Around PG&E's bankruptcy there were rumblings, but Sacramento couldn't figure out how to do it, so they propped them up and created a Wildfire Fund paid for by ratepayers to keep bailing them out.
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.
Optimally, I'd like to see both calculated with zero subsidies.
Some people also complain about Solar being front loaded. But a power plant is also paid for up front. I'd like to see life time costs, minus subsidies.
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.
College sports should expand into having an Alumni league. Like the WNBA and other W-sports have a suspicious system where the leagues expenses grow very much in line with revenue while player salaries don't.
Colleges already have the facilities to host games so it seems like an easy steal as there's actually a lot of money in (certain) woman's sports (i.e. USMNT and USWNT in soccer have similar revenue but different salaries) but the salaries are low so its an easier target then say the NFL.
>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.
> Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields
Given the rate at which the aquifer is being depleted, they should. There are some water districts in CA that have encouraged conversion to solar but it's controversial.
Solar panels == shade. Any companies deploying solar in this manner (parking lots, pedestrian trails, bus benches, etc..)
Locally Michigan State is covering all their parking lots with solar panels. The added advantage is that since you're car is parked under them you don't have to clear the snow off.
https://ipf.msu.edu/about/news/solar-carport-initiative-earn...
But what I haven't figured out is if they have to broom them off after a snow or just wait until the sun melts it. By the time I am around in the afternoon time they are always cleared.
Very much enjoy this guy flexing his setup his always interesting articles
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)
At first I questioned your assertion, but after reading the most recent FAA AC revision (https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...) I found:
13.5.3 In most cases, not all wind turbine units within a wind turbine farm need to be lighted. Obstruction lights should be placed along the perimeter of the wind turbine farm so that there are no unlit separations or gaps more than 1/2 SM (0.80 km) (see Figure A-26). Wind turbines within a grid or cluster should not have an unlighted separation or gap of more than 1 SM (1.61 km) across the interior of a grid or cluster of turbines
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...
There seems to be a decent counter argument about the size & impact to local environment. https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/massive-esmeralda-s...
I do not have a side as I don't know enough.
I think every engineer knows that all things come with trade-offs.
A great engineer, however, is able to readily admit when one option among others has a far, far greater set of costs than another, for the exact same benefit.
And if said engineer can't decide (for claim of ignorance), they mature to learn that the experience and knowledge of others is the best source for understanding the trade-offs involved to make a decision.
I think its pretty clear solar power has trade-offs. I think it's also obvious solar has far less negatives than all other power generating sources.
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.
I come from rural Michigan and everyone in the areas where the turbines are complain about it. Its the view or its the sound. The former sure, the latter I haven't heard it myself but I don't go home anymore. It is also the only new investments made in the area in 50 years in any which way shape or form.
When they first started, they had to build the infrastructure and stations to collect the power to transport it from the turbines. My mom rented out some rooms of her house to make some cash when that went on for maybe 2 years in total. There was a lot of work and money coming into the area for a moment, but now the only people making money are the farmers who own the land the turbines sit on.
It's always a trip to see a view you have seen for 40 years but with the turbines there in the background. Slowly, these rural areas are losing vital services one by one. The specialists stop coming to the hospital, even on rotation. The dentists and optometrists retire out and unless someone growing up there has a passion for teeth and genetically modified corn then the roles get pushed out to the bigger cities, 30-45m away.
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 had to google it and apparently the complaints are:
Ruin the view,
Lower property values,
Habitat destruction,
Noise from inverter fans
> Noise from inverter fans
Not just the fans. The transformers, inductors, chokes, capacitors, etc can get extremely noisy as well. I have to plug my ears when I walk by the switchgear at my local Walmart's EV install because it is so loud.
Any system that relies on high rate of change of current over time is prone to these issues. Look at the prevalence of coil whine in gaming PCs and workstations now. The level of noise scales almost linearly with current up until you saturate the various magnetic cores. In a multi-megawatt installation of any kind that relies upon inverters, it is plausible that these electromagnetic acoustic effects could cause meaningful habitat destruction on their own.
Traditional synchronous machines (turbines) do not have this issue, but they are not something you want to live next to for reasons on the other end of the acoustic frequency spectrum. Infrasound from a turbine can travel for miles, especially during transient phases of operation. There were a lot of complaints on social media during the commissioning of a new natural gas generator unit in my area last year.
So bury them? Is that not feasible for some reason?
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.
People object to any construction whatsoever.
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.
In theory I wouldn't mind living next to nuclear. I say in theory, because we've seen too many times when someone cuts corners, or has deadlines or poorly trained staff on site, that when things go wrong, they can sometimes go very very wrong.
I 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.
Didn't Schelling have the answer to this?
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?
Idk, maybe 3mm wire of 15cm grid size vs. 6mm wire in a <=5cm grid. But I have never seen a big deer farm, that is probably also not so nice to have right next door. But what do I know, here in Scandinavia, you have the right to roam pretty much everywhere, makes countries with too many fences seem claustrophobic.
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
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.
Are solar panel inverter fans running at night?
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.
> and they all want to use said power
If I were to hazard a guess every person complaining would happily suffer the 'consequences' of a solar farm not being near their neighborhood.
It really should be a no brainer compromise to zone solar as industrial so they're not near where people live. There's in practice infinite amounts of land you can get zoned like this. Living to electrical noise sucks in a way living need next to a wind farm doesn't.
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...
Complaining about garbage trucks before 7am is very different. They are quite loud and they get within 30 feet of your bed.
That man shouldn't have been personally sentenced to anything, but it's a legitimate complaint to fix.
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.
are the homes that were burned down by solar farms in the room with us right now?
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.
Is it intentional that you're listing export-based business as "local" while that solar farm probably does supply the town? It's a beautiful contrast either way.
All the businesses produce fungible commodities, and feed those into distribution systems ~10000X larger than the town. So, socially, it does not matter where any given ear of corn, gallon of milk, or watt of electricity ends up.
The beginning of Blade Runner 2049 was a succinct depiction of the eternal struggle between Big Solar and the local grub farmers.
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.
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...
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.")
Edit: This is only up until recently; Texas is seeking to potentially interconnect with neighboring grids, forgoing FERC independence in the process.
Texas Bill [H.B. 199] Opens ERCOT to Grid Interconnection - https://www.environmentenergyleader.com/stories/texas-bill-o... - July 25th, 2025 ("A completed interconnection—either synchronous or non-synchronous—would likely bring ERCOT under partial federal jurisdiction for the first time since its creation. Currently, ERCOT operates almost entirely within Texas to avoid triggering FERC oversight under the Federal Power Act.")
Connecting Past and Future: A History of Texas’ Isolated Power Grid - https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/connecting-past-and-... - December 1st, 2022
Why Texas Has Its Own Power Grid - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it... - August 18th, 2003
This has got to be more of FERC doesn't want to regulate ERCOT though no?
> [1] In the 1939 case United States v. Rock Royal Co-op, the Supreme Court had included milk processed and sold entirely within the state of New York within the federal government's purview because the company used a mixture of raw milk from farms within and outside the state of New York.
Like there's no way all of the energy in Texas only comes from Texas supplied materials.
I can't find the court case I want but there's another one about how somebody's local consumption had an effect on the interstate price so growing plants for local use can be federally regulated. And therefore, to me, FERC's existence effects the price of electricity on the rest of the states.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wrightwood_Da....
Maybe my wording is incorrect, I should have said "ties" instead of interconnects. Texas has several, just not much in aggregate capacity (can supply ~1-2% of peak demand):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection (see Ties section)
(Yes, they have to be HVDC or VFT).
Quebec operates like Texas does, for political reasons too, with ample export and import capacity (import/export capacity = 15/20% of peak consumption)
It makes fantastic sense in Texas too because air conditioning is such a high portion of demand. Clean energy production reaches its peak at midday when everyone has their AC going flat out.
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.
For what it's worth Oregon and Washington are pretty much at the bottom of new renewable installs: https://www.propublica.org/article/oregon-washington-green-e...
Yup, Idaho's on that list as well.
But when you look at a grid map you pretty quickly understand why that's the case.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NW-IPCO/live/fif...
Right now, about 6% of my power comes from natural gas. That's the only fossil fuel power I'm currently using. Everything else is solar/hydro/wind. Not sure why nuclear isn't listed, I thought we had an active plant here. But you get the picture.
For my grid, new solar or wind is simply not needed so why would we be anywhere near the top of installation? Batteries is what we actually need.
There is a point where it's a bad idea to install more renewables.
Idaho Power’s local generation is quite clean. But…during the summer in Idaho, almost a third of energy comes from Wyoming and Utah where coal is still a substantial part of generation.
Idaho power has been working at installing batteries across the state I believe for this very reason.
They have a plan to be 100% renewable by 2030 and I believe they'll actually hit that target given how close they already are.
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.
Indeed. I live in a pretty red state, and have lots of red or red-leaning family and friends, and practically nobody I know is "anti-solar" or even considered it a political stance. I do run into more anti-windmill though, but the reason is clearly that nobody likes looking at them across the landscape (windfarm in SE Utah was controversial for this point). Also in the southwest solar is often not favored because some amount of water is used to clean the dust off, and water scarcity here in the SW US is starting to finally creep into peoples' minds.
I'd imagine a lot of the lack of solar farms in the rural midwest and southwest is due to land use conflicts with ag and ranching. I don't have data to back that up though, just a hunch.
There are both red states and blue states in places in the US that are good for solar power (rural, lots of sun). The sunny American southwest with huge amounts of empty desert land good for solar arrays includes the states of California (blue), Arizona (red), Nevada (toss-up), New Mexico (blue), and Texas (red). And the party that a state's population prefers in presidential elections isn't stable over mutli-decade time periods, but this doesn't change suitability for solar energy production.
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…
> renewable subsidies
I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete.
Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.
my red state is full of solar, so you may want to double check whatever sources you are using, as they seem dubious at best and biased at worst
It’s likely more to do with population density. Middle America is a lot less dense. If you look both Florida and Georgia have solar installs and are “red” states
The blue ones generally have a lot of people and need a lot more energy
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.
> 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.
Power bills will go down. Solar electricity is by far the cheapest form.
I guess you're assuming that power will be used locally and not sold to a different city/state?
Source: the butt tons of wind farms that sell their power to the state next door and the fact that our power bill has doubled in that time frame.
But it's unreliable, and needs a lot of battery tech + overbuilding to make it reliable. Can people be confident that building the array will in and of itself make their electricity bills go down?
Even with those additional costs, it is still arguably the cheapest generation technology.
if people can't be confident about this it's only because a bunch of grifters and oil company propaganda. The math here is pretty easy.
The contractors that build it and the jobs to maintain them.
We should be honest and admit that the maintainance jobs are very, very few.
> "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.
The process really is as simple as "libs want it so it must be bad". Everything else is a rationalization after the fact.
It's a fair concern. There's a solar install up in northern WI that is part of a microgrid and basically doesn't generate energy in winter due to the amount of snow they get. The lack of solar output is offset by nat gas generators.
Oconto County averages between 4 and 5 feet of snow every winter. You need pretty heavy duty equipment to move that much snow out of a large field.
Most of Wisconsin doesn't actually get that much snow, though.
I agree that removing snow can be a concern in some regions, it’s just like—yeah, that’s a job we’ll have to pay somebody to do.
It just seems like a less unpleasant and less unhealthy job than pretty much anything related to petrochemicals, haha.
PV panels are typically angled to catch the sun better, and they're smooth and dark... snow slides off by itself if the sun is shining (and if the sun isn't shining, you aren't losing much by having the panels covered).
Snow only rolls off after a lite dusting.
If there's a foot of snow on the panels they don't catch any sun, don't get warm, and it doesn't melt off.
More than about 3 inches needs to be manually cleared.
I wonder if you could just run them backwards for a while to clear them. Use the V*I loss.
The energy it takes to do that is significant.
Often exceeding the energy gained in the winter.
i was under the impression that the panels track the sun as the day goes by to maximize sunlight. If it starts snowing then just put them in a vertical position, there's no sun shining anyway.
I don’t think all panels are necessarily tracking, there’s some trade off; tracking mounts aren’t free.
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"
Not sure why they are whining. Sounds like job creation to me!
The price of electricity in blue states has sky rocketed.
Electricity in SF is now more than $0.50/kWh OFF peak.
It is certainly not a coincidence that CalISO has contracted with the most solar generators.
It really is absurd how expensive our energy is across the state. Meanwhile Virginia gets electricity for 15 cents a kwh.
Notably, the municipal power companies mostly are far lower. It's PG&E and SoCal Edison who are that high, because they're shoving the costs of doing 75 years worth of deferred system maintenance all at once onto current ratepayers instead of their investors taking the hit. It's too bad that there wasn't a viable legal framework whereby the investor-owned utilties' shareholders could be wiped out as they deserved to be, and the utility infrastructure transferred to municipal ownership. Around PG&E's bankruptcy there were rumblings, but Sacramento couldn't figure out how to do it, so they propped them up and created a Wildfire Fund paid for by ratepayers to keep bailing them out.
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?
Optimally, I'd like to see both calculated with zero subsidies.
Some people also complain about Solar being front loaded. But a power plant is also paid for up front. I'd like to see life time costs, minus subsidies.
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.
College sports should expand into having an Alumni league. Like the WNBA and other W-sports have a suspicious system where the leagues expenses grow very much in line with revenue while player salaries don't.
Colleges already have the facilities to host games so it seems like an easy steal as there's actually a lot of money in (certain) woman's sports (i.e. USMNT and USWNT in soccer have similar revenue but different salaries) but the salaries are low so its an easier target then say the NFL.
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.
> Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields
Given the rate at which the aquifer is being depleted, they should. There are some water districts in CA that have encouraged conversion to solar but it's controversial.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/07/california-agricul...
This is for a 20 or 30 year lease. One time payment. 4k is on the high side.