Not In Our Backyard: Rural America is Fighting Back Against Large-Scale Renewable Energy Projects

Description

Renewable energy is politically popular. About 70 percent of Americans want more wind energy, and 80 percent want more solar. Regulators at local, state, and federal levels have passing a myriad of goals, mandates, and subsidies to encourage the development and consumption of wind and solar energy. Academic studies released over the past few years have claimed that the U.S. can run most or all of its economy solely on renewables. No oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear required.

Although renewables are popular among voters and professors at elite universities, they also have several problems, including their intermittency, need for vastly more high-voltage transmission lines, and demand for enormous amounts of metals and rare-earth elements needed to manufacture the vast amounts of solar panels and wind turbines.

First question: How will all those renewables be paid for? Mandates and subsidies are driving their deployment, but between 2010 and 2029, federal tax incentives for the wind and solar sectors will total $140.3 billion. And federal officials have introduced a spate of energy plans that could add untold billions more in federal spending.

Second question: Where will all those wind turbines, solar arrays, and high-voltage transmission lines needed to connect them to the grid be placed? One scenario necessitates covering about 228,000 square miles with renewables. That’s roughly the size of California and Washington combined. Other scenarios reach similar conclusions.

But the most important—and most obvious—challenge in converting to a renewables-only economy is commandeering the enormous amounts of land needed to accommodate the staggering amounts of solar and wind generation capacity that will be required to meet domestic energy needs.

Any attempt to convert the entire domestic electric grid—not to mention the entire economy—to renewables will require covering vast territories with oceans of solar panels and forests of giant wind turbines. And that prospect is raising strong opposition all over the country. People just don’t want those things in their backyards—or even within miles of them. And for good reasons.

Robert Bryce addresses those issues in Not In Our Backyard. It’s a stunning tour of the problems wind turbines and solar arrays bring to the people near them.