Solar

While I certainly welcome lower-cost solar panels, and would most certainly include solar power when I own my off-grid homestead, I am deeply concerned about the tens of thousands, and soon to be hundreds of thousands of acres of land being developed for industrial solar farms across the state. Information both on solar farms and smaller, more appropriate uses of solar technology.

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Monster CNY solar farm would replace corn and soybeans with power for 30,000 homes – syracuse.com

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Monster CNY solar farm would replace corn and soybeans with power for 30,000 homes – syracuse.com

I think if you look at the environmental impact of many of these large scale renewable projects natural gas is a much less polluting source of energy than large scale solar. We should be working to improve efficiency of existing gas plants and improving pollution controls on legacy facilities rather than building industrial solar facilities.

Monster CNY solar farm would replace corn and soybeans with power for 30,000 homes – syracuse.com

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Monster CNY solar farm would replace corn and soybeans with power for 30,000 homes – syracuse.com

CONQUEST, N.Y. – Imagine every inch of the New York State Fair covered with solar panels. Now double it. That’s the size of a solar farm that developers hope to build in Cayuga County.

The proposed facility in the rural town of Conquest would contain hundreds of thousands of solar panels spread across 2,000 acres, or more than three square miles.

A 200 MW nameplate solar farm on 2,000 acres of land is absurd compared to what can be done with fossil plants with a much lower environmental impact. Burning natural gas produces carbon dioxide, but the impact on the climate is small compared to the vast industrial impacts of solar.

Maybe there an upside to President Trump blocking New York from tinkering with it's ISO rules to ensure that solar farms have access to the grid. If he's re-elected, projects like this might be forever stillborn, as nobody will finance a power plant where there is no guaranteed market for the power produced.

Know Before you Go…..Solar

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Northview Diary: Know Before you Go…..Solar

With the wild proliferation of solar arrays across valuable farm land, scrub land, and pretty near everywhere else, and with solar companies approaching and pressuring farmers to lease or sell, it is important to know the potential ramifications of signing a deal.

Below is an excellent article, which brings up some issues I hadn't previously considered. We have been approached by at least seven or eight companies, so there has been a lot of research done by Northview folks. The solar company reps who call, write, or stop by in pickup trucks don't seem to like that very much.

Duanesburg adopts solar moratorium after already approving big projectsοΏ½ | The Altamont Enterprise

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Duanesburg adopts solar moratorium after already approving big projectsοΏ½ | The Altamont Enterprise

The thing is these solar farms take up enormous amounts of land and produce very little useful energy. Moreover of the energy produced by solar is being still produced as spinning reserve at fossil plants. 

I would rather see money going towards reducing emissions from existing power plants and retiring dirty old ones and greater efficiency, and subsidies for solar on homes and businesses. In many cases an existing gas or coal plant can be tweaked to increase output by better efficiencies creating all of the energy produced by solar farms. 

So much of the solar business is about green washing and scamming people who feel guilty about their high energy consumption, it's kind of like household recycling of bottles and cans - it feels virtuous - but has little impact on waste volume or consumption.