American Solar Farms
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The article explores a dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the US, sparking a discussion on the politicization of clean energy and the challenges faced by the industry.
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https://acretrader.com/resources/farmland-values/farmland-pr...
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?
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
(And I didn't even say in which direction it would change, or exactly what will change.)
Like what?
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 I mean is that solar is good, and I support using it in a lot of places. But it's also open to bad decisions like everything else, so I try not to be a zealot about it. It's not the end all perfect cure for energy and it doesn't save the environment in all cases. Just in many.
Ruin the view,
Lower property values,
Habitat destruction,
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.
I was on many solar farms, and the only ones that I could hear from the distance were the ones that had classic substations nearby. The 60Hz transformer sound can be heard for quite a distance.
Please. You won't hear it even a couple hundred meters away.
As for habitat destruction, wildlife _loves_ the shade under solar panels. So much that you need to be careful where you step because rattlesnakes also love (to eat) the wildlife.
Moreover, unlike mines and coal power plants, solar plants are mostly build-and-forget installations. They can be completely unmanned, with only occasional visits for maintenance and panel cleaning.
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.
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.
You won't have to hear it, you won't have to look at it except as way off in the distance, you won't have to worry about whether or not your buddy's farm is gonna get taken over by one when they run into financial troubles. Out your backyard you get to look at mostly pristine farmland and wilderness. During this time where there's political will and capital to just ban them outright I think this relatively small concession will make folks not put up too much in a fight as long as it's kept out of sight out of mind.
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.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987251/Charges-aga...
https://www.theroot.com/atlanta-garbage-man-sentenced-to-jai...
That man shouldn't have been personally sentenced to anything, but it's a legitimate complaint to fix.
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.
I'm pro nuclear power, but I couldn't resist the pop culture reference. And it's good to remember what can go wrong when people's fallibility interacts with a powerful technology.
(Dialog from a memorable Call of Duty level based on Pripyat, Ukraine, near Chernobyl)
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.
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.
OOOhh is there a device I can get that tracks this for home?
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...
My best guess it is because it causes them existential dread by demarcating to them that there once was a time without the new feature. Now kids will be growing up always having there been the new feature. Thus highlighting their own inevitable death.
I like industrial architecture and some plants inspire awe but post-war coal plants are as ugly and boring as it gets. Older ones look much better in my eye and I’m glad that some buildings are preserved after the stations are shut down.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgN2G9d0dc
The turbines I saw in Iowa weren't loud enough to drown out distance sounds of the highway. I didn't hear them at all, but I guess there's also tinnitus to be contended with...
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.
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 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.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/texas-tops-us-states...
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.
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...
ERCOT has also had a number of spectacular -- and costly -- failures.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
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.")
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
> [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....
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)
And still, we've seen a massive amount of green energy installed here. Both windmills and solar farms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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