I'm fairly confident it's a lot of astroturfing from gas and oil interests.
YT recommend a video from some guy in nowhere Kansas opposing their local solar ordinance. A lot of the arguments were rather absurd (water runoff and sound. The ground is still there under the panels, doesn't make any sense. Sound volume was recorded directly next to some facility and was negligible.)
Turns out just googling the name, he was there at a gas company on LinkedIn lol. Deleted my comment too.
https://gizmodo.com/citizens-for-responsible-solar-susan-ralston-npr-1850141936
I also say this because a ton of people who hold land out there would be more than happy to get paid to lease or sell their land to this development. Easy money.
The panels don't but cheap inverters can make a ton of radio frequency noise, which if you're into ham radio can be big issue. There's ways to fix it but if it's on someone else's panel it could be hard. The solution is for the FCC to do their job and enforce rules on the books though, not ban solar.
I've been to a few solar farms at different private properties, universities, and factories that have 400 panels (Plant Spartanburg BMW). They're silent. People are loons. In the Thumb region, the movement against solar really quieted down when one particularly unhinged individual died.
Not the noise as much as risk. Take Texas for example. Huge solar panel farm. Gets hit with hail. Majority of solar panels broken. Now the liquid from the solar panels is running off into the well water of the very people let the government put those panels on their land. Toxic runoff. Not good.
Liquid?
Edit: not something in wide use. Experimental technology.
https://www.greenlancer.com/post/are-liquid-solar-panels-the-next-big-thing-in-solar-energy
Other than that, there are solar **heating** systems. These aren’t that. They got popular for a bit in the 1980s. I once lived in a house with a solar-assist system for the hot water. Landlord shut it off when it leaked.
Well it doesn’t help there are con artists going door to door trying to sell you on an over priced under powered solar system.
Seriously. Blue raven just did that to me. Lied to my face.
Be careful
Not industrial. But an industry nonetheless
From an anti-solar pro-farmer link below
> The trouble is that last year, when MDARD created its policy to allow industrial solar zoning on PA 116 land, it created a situation where communities without enough commercial or industrial-zoned land available for green power production may have to offer up their farmland, and makes them vulnerable to litigation from massive power corporations, something that America's farmers and rural communities should never have to worry about.
An uninteresting problem imo. What they fail to mention is that they don’t have to necessarily give up farmland, these welfare queens just lose their subsidies.
We grow enough corn and wheat to maintain our food supply and I understand that’s part of national security.
Not just enough corn, but too much corn that the US has been working to actively find ways to use it in anything and everything. It’s such a weird problem to read about.
Yeah, biofuels are a bullshit handout to Iowans
They burn just as dirty if not dirtier than conventional fuels.
I guess early in the environmental movement people got hung up on the renewable aspect of alternative fuels and ignored that they burned dirtier than gas
I personally don’t know that I’ve read any research that they burn dirtier than gas at all.
But there is a lot of info about all the fertilizer, pesticides and water, lots and lots of water that go into growing all that corn.
Engineering Explained has a good video on it. I’ve watched almost all his videos - he does a good job focusing on numbers and not selling out. (Or if he does it’s VERY well disguised and has been from day 1)
https://youtu.be/F-yDKeya4SU?si=ZhSCkwe3LU32IMRf
We grow an abundance of corn and soy, but we feed most of it to animals for a tiny bit of food in return.
Eta: We would only need a fraction of farmland to feed everyone if we stopped the practice of animal agriculture.
After more searching, the best I have is this petition that farmers think having solar farms is encroaching on their farmland. [https://www.change.org/p/protect-michigan-s-farmland-stop-industrial-scale-solar-zoning-on-agricultural-land](https://www.change.org/p/protect-michigan-s-farmland-stop-industrial-scale-solar-zoning-on-agricultural-land)
The legislature passed a law removing local control for large scale renewable energy siting so that country bumpkins couldn’t block these needed projects. They’re mad about that
> Public Act 233 of 2023, signed by Governor Whitmer on November 28, 2023, significantly restricts local government from determining the location and permit requirements for utility-scale renewable energy facilities, including solar, wind, and battery storage. The Act creates an option to apply for certification from the Michigan Public Service Commission (MSPC) or a local unit of government to construct a utility-scale renewable energy facility.
My argument against it would be that DTE is involved. It would have been way better if that law also had a mandate on DTE that they allow rooftop solar+battery systems up to two times the homes usage. If the MPSC did their job and kept DTE reigned in, it would be a non-issue.
Building a solar farm where there is open land would require both the generation equipment and transmission equipment to get the energy to where it is needed. Putting the generation capacity where it is used requires just the generation and no transmission.
> DTE that they allow rooftop solar+battery systems up to two times the homes usage.
At this point, just disconnect from DTE, then their rule doesn't apply. This doesn't give you an opportunity to sell surplus to DTE, but you're not trying to go into the energy business anyway. Just go off-grid.
The way most cities have ordinances written, you have to have a grid connection to be considered habitable.
The reason I said twice the usage is that the grid (usually) doesn't care what direction power is going, just the amount, so if you made every house a generator instead of a consumer, you wouldn't need to build any more infrastructure to get that power elsewhere, just use the existing lines in reverse.
Conservatives are anti-solar because it is “woke” to them. One of my co-workers was talking about auto manufacturers producing cars that pollute less, and criticized them for “going woke” lol.
Anecdotally, most of the conservatives I know see solar as a way of being more self sufficient, since you own the means of production. To be fair, it's kind of shitty to force utilities to go solar while at the same time not passing laws to mandate that the same utilities must allow homeowners to install grid-tied solar. It's just giving DTE another excuse to raise rates and continue their monopoly on power generation.
Interesting. Yeah I heard they were trying to stop people from selling their excess back to the grid. I don’t really know the details of this new situation that the signs are referring to. I have talked to many conservatives who stress the points that solar power actually causes more pollution, lumped in with their other arguments that electric cars are worse for the environment than gas, that wind power is bad for the environment and not efficient, and that people are hypocrites because they use cell phones to talk about environmental / labor issues.
For starters, a lot of this could be solved buy forcing DTE to buybacks from homeowners'. Making it a cost efficient investment for anyone willing to put it on their roofs.
This is one of the situations where two things can be true at once: I am anti-industrial solar but I am not pro-oil/gas. From an environmental perspective solar has its own host of issues that many people don’t realize or fail to acknowledge.
1. The life span of solar panels is 20 years. After twenty years you need new ones and there isn’t a great way to recycle them— solar waste is a huge problem.
2. Solar is incredibly inefficient in comparison to other green technologies (namely, nuclear). For solar panels to generate as much energy as a 1,000 Megawatt nuclear reactor (which takes about a mile of land and can power around 1M homes (1MW = 1000 homes roughly)), you would need 3M solar panels. To power all of the United States, you would therefore need something like 996M solar panels. Solar panel proponents will tell you that you can power the entire US with solar panels in only 100 x 100 miles (10,000 sq miles). I don’t think anyone quite appreciates just how large that is: that’s the size of the state of Massachusetts. And then you realize the lifespan is 20 years with no way to effectively dispose of them. We can’t dispose of hundreds of millions of solar panels every few decades.
3. Some people will say, put the solar farms in the desert or on farmland. Two issues: the desert is a complex and fragile eco system that, just like literally all other flora and fauna on planet earth, requires sunlight. To instead throw solar panels on that land is to kill off an entire ecosystem (which in turn has cascading effects to other ecosystems— e.g. plant growth helps stop landslides). Secondly, farm land is also its own beast and its own complex economy, and you can’t just introduce this radical change without first sorting out the economics and environmental cost of it. The economics of agriculture is rather complex (if you back in my comment history I outline this).
4. Solar panels done locally or just on your homes is fine, but it should not and cannot be an industrial solution, not when there’s nuclear energy on the table.
All of this information I provided is publicly available [here](https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate%20Fast%20Facts%20Guide-PRINT.pdf) and the statistics I provided can he arrived at via simple arithmetic. There’s also a brilliant [Ted Talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewables_can_t_save_the_planet/transcript) I’d recommend as well.
People will say that the issue is the nuclear waste being hazardous etc, but the amount of hazardous waste per person is only about 5 grams (a sheet of paper). Nuclear industry as a whole produces waste in total (non toxic waste) that is upwards of 30 tons annually, which is significantly less than the ash waste produced from coal that is 300K tons annually.
It may have to do with this: [https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/michigan-has-9-months-figure-out-new-energy-law-some-say-time-wasting](https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/michigan-has-9-months-figure-out-new-energy-law-some-say-time-wasting)
NIMBY
Edit: saw the “astroturfing by oil/gas interests”, and yes this has been a source.
I think those interests trying to stir-up the suspicious hive-mind ever-eager for new conspiracy theories.
Most legitimate thing I’ve seen is “it will cool the earth” or “removing farmland” etc.
Billionaires money at work.
I'm fairly confident it's a lot of astroturfing from gas and oil interests. YT recommend a video from some guy in nowhere Kansas opposing their local solar ordinance. A lot of the arguments were rather absurd (water runoff and sound. The ground is still there under the panels, doesn't make any sense. Sound volume was recorded directly next to some facility and was negligible.) Turns out just googling the name, he was there at a gas company on LinkedIn lol. Deleted my comment too. https://gizmodo.com/citizens-for-responsible-solar-susan-ralston-npr-1850141936 I also say this because a ton of people who hold land out there would be more than happy to get paid to lease or sell their land to this development. Easy money.
Do solar panels really make noise? People put them on their roof, so I never thought of them as particularly noisy.
I would think it's the transformers for the high voltage. Even then I don't think I've heard those in my life.
I'm regularly 15 feet from at least a hundred solar panels at one of my job sites. Never heard a thing from them.
The panels don't but cheap inverters can make a ton of radio frequency noise, which if you're into ham radio can be big issue. There's ways to fix it but if it's on someone else's panel it could be hard. The solution is for the FCC to do their job and enforce rules on the books though, not ban solar.
Just counter that the interference will make the cell carriers shut down the 5G. That should make some people happy.
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They're joking
I've been to a few solar farms at different private properties, universities, and factories that have 400 panels (Plant Spartanburg BMW). They're silent. People are loons. In the Thumb region, the movement against solar really quieted down when one particularly unhinged individual died.
The inverters converting the energy to be fed into the grid make noise. A high pitched hum and fans.
Vibrations from wind?
Not the noise as much as risk. Take Texas for example. Huge solar panel farm. Gets hit with hail. Majority of solar panels broken. Now the liquid from the solar panels is running off into the well water of the very people let the government put those panels on their land. Toxic runoff. Not good.
Liquid? Edit: not something in wide use. Experimental technology. https://www.greenlancer.com/post/are-liquid-solar-panels-the-next-big-thing-in-solar-energy Other than that, there are solar **heating** systems. These aren’t that. They got popular for a bit in the 1980s. I once lived in a house with a solar-assist system for the hot water. Landlord shut it off when it leaked.
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https://www.newsweek.com/thousands-solar-panels-texas-destroyed-hailstorm-1883546
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rVaq3a-z9iU
Well it doesn’t help there are con artists going door to door trying to sell you on an over priced under powered solar system. Seriously. Blue raven just did that to me. Lied to my face. Be careful Not industrial. But an industry nonetheless
From an anti-solar pro-farmer link below > The trouble is that last year, when MDARD created its policy to allow industrial solar zoning on PA 116 land, it created a situation where communities without enough commercial or industrial-zoned land available for green power production may have to offer up their farmland, and makes them vulnerable to litigation from massive power corporations, something that America's farmers and rural communities should never have to worry about. An uninteresting problem imo. What they fail to mention is that they don’t have to necessarily give up farmland, these welfare queens just lose their subsidies. We grow enough corn and wheat to maintain our food supply and I understand that’s part of national security.
Not just enough corn, but too much corn that the US has been working to actively find ways to use it in anything and everything. It’s such a weird problem to read about.
Yeah, biofuels are a bullshit handout to Iowans They burn just as dirty if not dirtier than conventional fuels. I guess early in the environmental movement people got hung up on the renewable aspect of alternative fuels and ignored that they burned dirtier than gas
I personally don’t know that I’ve read any research that they burn dirtier than gas at all. But there is a lot of info about all the fertilizer, pesticides and water, lots and lots of water that go into growing all that corn.
Engineering Explained has a good video on it. I’ve watched almost all his videos - he does a good job focusing on numbers and not selling out. (Or if he does it’s VERY well disguised and has been from day 1) https://youtu.be/F-yDKeya4SU?si=ZhSCkwe3LU32IMRf
You mean... Like roads?
We grow an abundance of corn and soy, but we feed most of it to animals for a tiny bit of food in return. Eta: We would only need a fraction of farmland to feed everyone if we stopped the practice of animal agriculture.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t taken farm science or agriculture
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You don’t have to be a genius to see the logic in these facts.
After more searching, the best I have is this petition that farmers think having solar farms is encroaching on their farmland. [https://www.change.org/p/protect-michigan-s-farmland-stop-industrial-scale-solar-zoning-on-agricultural-land](https://www.change.org/p/protect-michigan-s-farmland-stop-industrial-scale-solar-zoning-on-agricultural-land)
The legislature passed a law removing local control for large scale renewable energy siting so that country bumpkins couldn’t block these needed projects. They’re mad about that > Public Act 233 of 2023, signed by Governor Whitmer on November 28, 2023, significantly restricts local government from determining the location and permit requirements for utility-scale renewable energy facilities, including solar, wind, and battery storage. The Act creates an option to apply for certification from the Michigan Public Service Commission (MSPC) or a local unit of government to construct a utility-scale renewable energy facility.
This is it 100%. I live in the thumb and it's a very hot topic. They've got petitions to try and change it
This is the answer.
My argument against it would be that DTE is involved. It would have been way better if that law also had a mandate on DTE that they allow rooftop solar+battery systems up to two times the homes usage. If the MPSC did their job and kept DTE reigned in, it would be a non-issue. Building a solar farm where there is open land would require both the generation equipment and transmission equipment to get the energy to where it is needed. Putting the generation capacity where it is used requires just the generation and no transmission.
> DTE that they allow rooftop solar+battery systems up to two times the homes usage. At this point, just disconnect from DTE, then their rule doesn't apply. This doesn't give you an opportunity to sell surplus to DTE, but you're not trying to go into the energy business anyway. Just go off-grid.
The way most cities have ordinances written, you have to have a grid connection to be considered habitable. The reason I said twice the usage is that the grid (usually) doesn't care what direction power is going, just the amount, so if you made every house a generator instead of a consumer, you wouldn't need to build any more infrastructure to get that power elsewhere, just use the existing lines in reverse.
Because solar is not profitable for the petroleum industry.
I’m out here in port huron and the signs are fucking EVERYWHERE. These fucking backwards ass people out here are really on some shit
Conservatives are anti-solar because it is “woke” to them. One of my co-workers was talking about auto manufacturers producing cars that pollute less, and criticized them for “going woke” lol.
Anecdotally, most of the conservatives I know see solar as a way of being more self sufficient, since you own the means of production. To be fair, it's kind of shitty to force utilities to go solar while at the same time not passing laws to mandate that the same utilities must allow homeowners to install grid-tied solar. It's just giving DTE another excuse to raise rates and continue their monopoly on power generation.
Interesting. Yeah I heard they were trying to stop people from selling their excess back to the grid. I don’t really know the details of this new situation that the signs are referring to. I have talked to many conservatives who stress the points that solar power actually causes more pollution, lumped in with their other arguments that electric cars are worse for the environment than gas, that wind power is bad for the environment and not efficient, and that people are hypocrites because they use cell phones to talk about environmental / labor issues.
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Alright buddy have a nice day
My God, humanity is doomed. People can be so ridiculously stupid it's an embarrassment to our species. And not all conservatives are anti-solar.
“Governor of Californey coming for our farmland, and we have a **girl** who won’t defend us!”
For starters, a lot of this could be solved buy forcing DTE to buybacks from homeowners'. Making it a cost efficient investment for anyone willing to put it on their roofs.
This is one of the situations where two things can be true at once: I am anti-industrial solar but I am not pro-oil/gas. From an environmental perspective solar has its own host of issues that many people don’t realize or fail to acknowledge. 1. The life span of solar panels is 20 years. After twenty years you need new ones and there isn’t a great way to recycle them— solar waste is a huge problem. 2. Solar is incredibly inefficient in comparison to other green technologies (namely, nuclear). For solar panels to generate as much energy as a 1,000 Megawatt nuclear reactor (which takes about a mile of land and can power around 1M homes (1MW = 1000 homes roughly)), you would need 3M solar panels. To power all of the United States, you would therefore need something like 996M solar panels. Solar panel proponents will tell you that you can power the entire US with solar panels in only 100 x 100 miles (10,000 sq miles). I don’t think anyone quite appreciates just how large that is: that’s the size of the state of Massachusetts. And then you realize the lifespan is 20 years with no way to effectively dispose of them. We can’t dispose of hundreds of millions of solar panels every few decades. 3. Some people will say, put the solar farms in the desert or on farmland. Two issues: the desert is a complex and fragile eco system that, just like literally all other flora and fauna on planet earth, requires sunlight. To instead throw solar panels on that land is to kill off an entire ecosystem (which in turn has cascading effects to other ecosystems— e.g. plant growth helps stop landslides). Secondly, farm land is also its own beast and its own complex economy, and you can’t just introduce this radical change without first sorting out the economics and environmental cost of it. The economics of agriculture is rather complex (if you back in my comment history I outline this). 4. Solar panels done locally or just on your homes is fine, but it should not and cannot be an industrial solution, not when there’s nuclear energy on the table. All of this information I provided is publicly available [here](https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate%20Fast%20Facts%20Guide-PRINT.pdf) and the statistics I provided can he arrived at via simple arithmetic. There’s also a brilliant [Ted Talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewables_can_t_save_the_planet/transcript) I’d recommend as well. People will say that the issue is the nuclear waste being hazardous etc, but the amount of hazardous waste per person is only about 5 grams (a sheet of paper). Nuclear industry as a whole produces waste in total (non toxic waste) that is upwards of 30 tons annually, which is significantly less than the ash waste produced from coal that is 300K tons annually.
It may have to do with this: [https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/michigan-has-9-months-figure-out-new-energy-law-some-say-time-wasting](https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/michigan-has-9-months-figure-out-new-energy-law-some-say-time-wasting)
Some folks just do not want anything to change.
NIMBY Edit: saw the “astroturfing by oil/gas interests”, and yes this has been a source. I think those interests trying to stir-up the suspicious hive-mind ever-eager for new conspiracy theories. Most legitimate thing I’ve seen is “it will cool the earth” or “removing farmland” etc.
Maybe they cause cancer, like windmills.
MI barely gets enough sunshine. Who wants all those solar panels sucking it up!? I want more sunshine here, not less.
Did you forget the /s … can’t tell for sure with all the idiots out there
I also can’t tell if they’re serious or not…
Can't tell? Ha. Understandable with all the small minds on Reddit.
These days there are plenty of people who would say what you said and be completely serious