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American solar farms
181–190 of 343 posts
Re: American solar farms
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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 lun…
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.
Re: American solar farms
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Power bills will go down. Solar electricity is by far the cheapest form.
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?
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.
Re: American solar farms
#184My 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 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.
Re: American solar farms
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, of course. But the bikes are the ones making the space those murder-machines operate in operate differently from how it usually does, which is inherently not great. I’d like to see car use reduced as much as the next sane person, but I still go “ah, goddamnit” when I see a bicyclist approaching an intersection or come up on one going uphill on a twisty no-shoulder 35+ mph road.
You can choose to stop doing that.
Huh? I react that way because it introduces a lot of chaos to the situation. That won’t change even if I stop minding that chaos has been introduced to a dangerous situation.
Re: American solar farms
#186Speculation: 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 c…
The beginning of Blade Runner 2049 was a succinct depiction of the eternal struggle between Big Solar and the local grub farmers.
Re: American solar farms
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 us…
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.
Re: American solar farms
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can choose to stop doing that.
Huh? I react that way because it introduces a lot of chaos to the situation. That won’t change even if I stop minding that chaos has been introduced to a dangerous situation.
It isn't chaos. It's your subjective assessment that you are now sharing the road with another, different vehicle and that this is a problem.
That's your choice to make, and the one you're making now is not invalid or indefensible. It does, however, remain a choice.
Re: American solar farms
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Most of the actual work to stop males from competing in women's sports, Males who transition to female are not males. They are female/women. It is already not permissible for men to compete in women-only sports. This became a national issue when many politicians and pundits saw a new vector to attack the trans community. We have heard it on campaign trails constantly for years now as if it’s some existential threat…
> Males who transition to female are not males. They are female/women. It is already not permissible for men to compete in women-only sports. This is precisely the point of contention. The people who want women's sports leagues to be able to legally or socially-acceptably bar transwomen want this precisely because they do not consider trans women to have the meaningful female characteristics that justify having a fem…
I understand the point of contention should be that but sadly when we dig into these discussions it often becomes clear that’s not what it is actually about. So frankly, I won’t sit here and stand for this user saying these women aren’t women.
They can talk about physical advantages/fairness in sports in good faith without erasing their identities and saying “it’s a fact that biology says they’re not women,” which is wrong. That’s just ignorance and/or transphobia, not a healthy discussion about advantages in competition.
“Men in women’s sports” is often convenient cover for many people to participate in erasure without copping to the fact that they’re just uncomfortable with trans people simply existing (or worse). Most of them, especially men with media reach/political clout constantly talking about it, are not passionate about women’s sports in the slightest and couldn’t care less if the playing field was level. So we can’t sit here and pretend that’s what this discussion is really about.
It’s very similar to when incels said “it’s about ethics in gaming journalism” during gamergate. Yeah, some people care about that legitimately, and there is a legitimate discussion to be had, but that wasn’t what the movement was actually about in any real sense. It just gave them a palatable reason to project to more reasonable people.
Re: American solar farms
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.