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Counties are blocking wind and solar across the US
(www.usatoday.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Would that be Republican controlled counties?
Odds are that they are Republican counties because wind and solar tend to be built in rural areas and rural areas tend to be Republican. I would actually expect Democrat held areas to also oppose them because people in general are NIMBY.
That said, there are a bunch of valid reasons to oppose large scale projects that can be addressed. A primary problem is the disruption to the local area, either by destroying roads not designed for the heavy machinery or the government taking land from locals that is necessary to implement the project. Both could be handled differently than they tend to be as the large companies that implement these projects tend to not care about locals already living in the area. Some ways they could improve the process would be to improve the roads and offer better compensation for affected locals, but there are valid reasons that some retired person who lives in the home they grew up in to oppose a power plant even if it would be a net benefit to society.
That is to say it is complicated and the best that can be done is better treatment of the people that are impacted by these projects while understanding that some are just complaining to complain and some really do have valid complaints that need to be better addressed so progress can be made.
I’ve lived in left leaning areas for decades. Solar is everywhere, from rooftops to open fields. We don’t have a ton of wind, but there’s a lot of offshore farms and quite a few in the hills. Nobody is “taking” land, it’s sold by the landowner.
If right wing areas are blocking renewables it’s far more likely to be done so it props up the fossil fuel/power generation companies and has little or nothing to do with any actual drawbacks of renewables or their installation.
If someone "owns" land that land was taken by somebody.
Rural folks don't care about other people having rooftop solar panels. I am also not talking about offshore farms, which should be clear by my example about someone's house being impacted.
Large scale wind and solar do require some legal action in rural areas to make them feasible. The most common is needing to run the extremely large power lines across fields to the centralized distribution centers.
It needs to be done, and people will be impacted, but they are still people and shouldn't be ignored completely. In general, they should probably be conpensated more than they are for the inconvenience of having land forcibly purchased from them, or for the negative impacts on their area that are unavoidable for such large scale projects.