Solar Farm On Private Land Would Have Generated $1M/Year For Dying SD Town, But Hurr-Durr Libtard!! Won, So Nope
Ed. - Gosh, I feel totally owned - how about you?
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“Unless you’re a farmer, a hunter or a fisher, there’s really nothing to do in this area,” said Colton Berens, a 33-year-old US army veteran and fourth-generation farmer. As a result, not many people his age stick around. However, when Doral Renewables, an Israeli-owned energy company, contacted his family in 2022 with a proposal to build a 3,200-acre (1,295-hectare) solar array on the Berens’ property, Colton saw a chance for his family to benefit – as well as an opportunity to breathe life into his “dying” community. The Berens’ solar project would have generated about $1m in annual tax revenue that would have been split between the county and its school for 35 years – money that could have gone a long way toward solving some of these challenges. During negotiations with his family over the use of its land, Berens said, Doral also agreed to upgrade the rugged gravel roads its crews would use during construction and to plant native grasses under the panels that could provide fodder for sheep.
“We made people aware of all that in a public meeting,” said Deb Kahl, Walworth county’s deputy auditor. But once news of the proposal spread, what the family believed to be its private business became a heated, county-wide argument that ultimately killed the promise of solar in Walworth county. In this, the Berenses were not alone.
Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, Republican districts across the country have received about $200bn in clean energy investment. And yet many red communities have also joined a rising tide of resistance against the growth of clean energy, driven by ideological resentment for its inclusion in the liberal agenda. By the end of 2024, according to researchers at Columbia Law School, at least 459 counties and municipalities across 44 states had severely restricted renewable energy through things like buffer requirements, fees and bans that limit what their neighbors can do with their land. This is a 16% increase in such restrictions over the previous year.
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South Dakota’s Public Utilities Commission will not permit a project unless it follows local rules, and since Walworth did not have a local ordinance to regulate utility-scale solar when Doral arrived, the Berens’ project was delayed while county commissioners drafted a law to determine how and where an installation could be built. Dozens of farmers, teachers, fishing guides, moms and grandparents turned out to public hearings to voice their opinions. While some supported the project, a vocal opposition won out – complaining that such a large installation would visually mar the agrarian landscape and relying heavily on alarming misinformation and talking points spread by rightwing activists with roots in the oil and gas industry. In late 2024, the county adopted an ordinance that requires solar panels be at least 1 mile from any occupied dwelling and 1,000 ft from a property line. These restrictions, which are stricter than the state’s regulations, not only quashed the Berens’ project, but stamped out almost any hope that utility-scale solar could bring this economically depressed community in the future. The new law limits the county’s economic development prospects, Kahl said. “We’re probably not going to get anything except wind or solar” since Walworth does nothave enough employable residents to lure other industries with higher human resource needs. For Colton, who feels that his family’s right to develop its own land was violated, it was a shattering blow. “It left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole area,” he said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/10/south-dakota-solar-energy
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Last edited Sat Sep 13, 2025, 07:42 AM - Edit history (1)
...are you claiming that the trillions of dollars spent on solar and wind junk prevented the rise in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel by 56.53 ppm (as of the week beginning August 31, 2025) since January 1, 2000 to 425.23 ppm?
The purpose of the solar industry has never been about environmental issues. As demonstrated with this crap about the efficiency of solar junk - which has done nothing to address extreme global heating - and replacing it regularly while building fossil fuel plants to back it up when, as is widely reported, an event called "night" takes place, the "fact" about which apologists for wind and solar couldn't care less is this one: The planet is burning.
The sole reason that all this solar hype continues is solely and wholly to attack the only scalable reliable high capacity utilization carbon free form of energy there is, nuclear energy. The Germans didn't shut their fucking coal plants. They embraced them. They shut their nuclear plants. QED for the real purpose of the fossil fuel dependent solar and wind junk.
If the result was not a burning planet, I would be amused by a solar and wind apologist - who are all, to my mind, fossil fuel apologists - appealing to "facts." But, again, in case anyone missed this fact the first time I mentioned in this post, the planet is burning.
Despite trillions thrown at so called "renewable energy" in this environmentally disastrous century, the rate of increases in carbon dioxide has reached 26.40 ppm/10 years, compared to 15.26 ppm/10 years in the week beginning January 2, 2000 based on a 52 week running average of the data at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory.
How do I know?
I know, because for many years, I have been keeping a spreadsheet of this data, because the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is a fact about which I give a shit, even if solar and wind apologists couldn't care less.
To wit, from the spreadsheet:
The first four columns represent the beginning date of the data collection. The 5th column is the reading for that week, the 6th the number of days in that week the data was analytically acceptable, the 7th, the reading from the same week of the previous year, the 8th, the reading from 10 years earlier, the 9th, the increase since 1800, and the remaining columns are calculations from formulas I add, including increases over the data from ten years before which is the 3rd to last column on the left. The colors represent the fact that at the time of the weekly entry, the 10 year comparator was in the top 50 of all time out of well more than 2000 such data points. All but 11 weeks in the year 2024 and 2025 out of 87 recorded thus far, met this criteria The last column is the 52 week running average of ten year increases, now at 26.40 ppm/10 years, the highest such average ever recorded.
Give a shit? No? Why am I not surprised?
These numbers are "facts," facts about which I care, even if apologists for the useless solar and wind industry couldn't give a flying fuck about them. Their interest, again their sole interest, is to attack nuclear energy.
As for Switzerland, the glaciers that drive their hydroelectric plants, and provide much of Europe's water supply are disappearing, a fact about which solar apologists couldn't care less apparently. Switzerland was planning to join Germany in ignoring the collapsing planetary atmosphere and closing its nuclear plants.
Last year, waking up at long last to the fact that antinukism is a key reason behind the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, and the fact that Switzerland, like every fucking country on Earth faces disaster because of antinukism, reversed its antinuclear stance:
Switzerland moves to remove ban on new reactors.
It is far too late for the world to address to save much of what is left to save by shrugging off antinuke stupidity. The time to have done that was nearly half a century ago. Nevertheless, some people are waking up. It's too little. It's too late. But indeed the world is waking up from a very bad hangover, one that may prove fatal.
As for facts, it is very, very, very, very, very clear that antinuke attention to "facts" is wholly and totally devoted to selective attention. These assholes are still carrying on about Fukushima, Chernobyl, and even Three Mile Island. They couldn't give a fuck about the hundreds of millions of people who died from air pollution since the latter, in 1978, even though Harrisburg - through which I sometimes drive - is still there.
The solar and wind industries are useless, mass intensive, land intensive, unsustainable, and are an artifact of the embrace of extreme ignorance, a reactionary effort to return to dependence on the weather for energy that was abandoned, for a reason beginning in the 19th century.
Have a swell weekend.
