Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
People Are Okay With Wind & Solar Installations In Their Neighborhoods, Studies Say::More neighborhoods than ever are accepting the role of solar and wind power installations near their homes and towns.
I find both solar panels and wind turbines to be quite beautiful and aesthetic when done at least half well. However turbines do have its issues with noise and shadows so I definitely wouldn’t want one close by.
My in-laws had a neighbor with a turbine for years and it could get really loud on a windy day. That said if I have to choose between coal and a little noise, I’d still choose the noise.
I think the issue with fossil fuels is that their damage is not as apparent as a 100meter tall bird smasher. Thats why this conflict is so complex.
I’m shocked people are fine with clean windmills and solar panels near their home and not dirty coal plants. If anything seeing clean energy just makes you think of a rich neighborhood just like a Tesla would.
I’m amazed anybody is against solar at all, it’s the least obtrusive energy regardless of anything else. I’m genuinely happy to see wind power but I also respect people who feel it’s a necessary eyesore, as that’s basically taste, but who has ever seen a solar panel and been unhappy without the person being a crazy radicalised person who isn’t taken seriously anyway.
Also Sim City is old, maybe those costs were more true back then? Either way I think people are generally learning that green energy can be more cost effective now.
But solar energy sucks up the sun! /s
Come to the UK, where its so popular with a particular demographic that the ruling party banned on shore wind farms (lifted as a month ago) as well as large solar installs on farming land, even if its low yield. Pretty sure they only lifted the onshore wind farm ban because nobody bid in the last offshore wind farm auction.
news.sky.com/…/onshore-wind-farms-ban-to-be-eased… theguardian.com/…/de-facto-ban-on-solar-farms-in-…
People in the USA* pretty big detail to leave out of the title, this isn’t a global study.
I’m not from there but I wouldn’t have any problem with such installations as long as they’re done tastefully, so as to not affect the beauty of the land any more than what’s essential. Renewables are the way forward after all!
I belive nuclear and some day fusion is the real way forward.
Then you have been misled. The oil and gas industries have a long history of spreading misinformation and creating doubt in order to prolong their profits.
Nuclear helps them do that because it prevents funding from going towards renewables. Anything that does that is not helping.
Nuclear could be useful in future but we need renewables NOW. Any and all funding and resources that can be used to accelerate renewable energy generation, must be directed that way. Otherwise it is detrimental, to renewables, to the environment and ultimately to all of us.
We need renewable energy now. Don’t accept delays, fight for the right of humanity to have a future.
HOAs still place restrictions unfortunately. Perhaps not an outright ban in most places, but limited installations and possibly in not the best place on the house for solar production.
HOAs existing should be illegal
They make sense in communities with shared facilities (pool, playgrounds, walls, roofs, or whatever) and common areas so that everyone helps maintain things. The list of what they get away with should be really, super limited though.
What a strange take, how do you organize or run the community without it? Everyone just does whatever without any coordination or some other type of model?
HOA officers and board members should be given the option of abdication or guillotine.
See there’s something interesting in this and every time an article like this comes up it always makes me think about this.
There is a wind farm going to be constructed near where I live, they send out a bunch of letters telling everybody that we were going to build the wind farm and then that was it. There’s been no public consultation if you had an objection you could email them but I’m not sure what that would do. Perhaps they would hold a consultation if anybody had objected, but nobody has.
This is the way to do it, public consultations are ridiculous, they just allow NIMBY idiots the opportunity to mess things up for everyone else. If it’s got the proper permits, and the proper environmental investigations have already been conducted, why is it any business of the locals, it’s not like it’s going to cause more traffic.
This means little. People always say they are okay with it, in the abstract. Then when it’s time to get specific and build an actual wind or solar farm near them, suddenly it’s a big nuisance, harmful to the local ecology, etc.
A solar farm tried to go up near my S/O’s grandpa. I never realized how some people turn into such awful NIMBYs as soon as you try to do something near their property.
Exactly. Every time a new windmill goes up in a residential area around here, there are protests and complaints about the noise, the repetitive shadow, the view, etc.
Those sound like legitimate complaints. I’d be pissed if the house that I bought ended up a much, much less pleasant place to live because of a 3rd party.
Windmills don’t belong in residential areas, just as coal power plants don’t, and solar farms in residential areas just seems like a waste of space.
Interesting. In my country nobody wants to live next to windmills (I’m from the Netherlands). The sound and even the constant shadows falling over your house is said to be causing mental health issues.
Mind you, The Netherlands is a very densly populated country.
I’d say about 30% has solar on their roof though.
There’s been a German study and please don’t ask me to find the pdf but the basic comparison was between comparable installations in the north and in the east, major difference between those categories being whether they were owned by a local citizen coop or a big company from whoknowswhere.
Long story short: If the blade swooshing sounds like “cha-ching” it actually lulls people to sleep.
As to shadowing though yes that can definitely be nasty. Luckily we have the science necessary to predict where the sun will be and can build the windmills such that moving shadow don’t hit homes at all, or only for a minute a couple of days a year or such.
Totally unrelated, but which theoretical field would the science of knowing where the shadow falls be? As in, if you can only hire one scholar to do the plans?
I would say astronomy or geography, but I guess a scholar of photon physics might work?
Not sure if I wanna live next to a wind farm, but solar is 100% okay
I came across a company called Flower Turbines, they sell tulip-shaped wind turbines. They look nice and hopefully would do well on the energy front. They claim that their turbines start producing energy with just a touch over 1 mph winds.
It looks like it would be a cute way to generate clean energy.
All the Hicks out here in upstate NY defeated two of them… one was a wind turbine, the other was a grid battery facility… Which they justified by saying it would start a fire… These were Lithium iron phosphate…
Until populism gets a beef with it and begins appealing to the crazies, who will happily egg and throw paint bombs solar panels. But at least we haven’t reached that point in the timeline yet.
please don’t give them ideas
I love driving by a wind farm. The wind turbines make me feel really peaceful.
Wouldn’t want a solar farm anywhere I wouldn’t want a giant warehouse either. You probably wouldn’t put a warehouse in the middle of residential neighborhood anyways so I don’t think that’s an issue. Plenty of places to put those where people don’t need to be inconvenienced by them.
Windmills on the other hand I think are cool as fuck. I’ve never actually stood right next to one but people say they’re a bit noisy, so while I might not want one on my yard I sure wouldn’t mind seeing the from the window.
I don’t see why anyone would care about a solar farm. Maybe they have a raging dislike of the aesthetic or something, but whatever.
Wind turbines, on the other hand, have at least two significant non-aesthetic issues:
Noise. This one doesn’t matter if it’s far enough away.
Flashing. This was not something that I’d thought about, but it’s actually an interesting problem. You tend to put windmills on ridgelines. The problem is that this also means that they cast enormous shadows when the sun is coming up/down. And the shadows that they cast are moving and flash at a rate determined by the rotational speed of the turbine. It’s apparently extremely obnoxious if you’re in the path of the shadow.
Fuck people. Fuck it all. We don’t get to be ok as the world burns so some ass clown gets a mega yacht
I’d be interested to know how many people who say nope to Wind and Solar are just fine with wood burning and chimneys. Which cause lung cancer.
That’s kind of moot for wind though, since most residential neighbourhoods are apparently pretty shit for that. Something to do with the wind being more turbulent because of all the buildings.
Wind power is best at sea, or maybe in the open countryside (where it’s ugly, but no worse than the massive coal power station I’ve been able to see since I was born).
Solar? Well some of us lucky enough to live in the right places, or have a roof slanting in the right direction already have that. (Not sure why we’re still building houses facing all sorts of directions with a traditional pointed roof, when we can face them all the same way with a larger, south/north facing section for optimal solar panel placement)
I doubt a solar farm would bother that many people, they’re low to the ground and have no moving parts. Yeah, ugly I guess, but so are farmer’s fields.
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Let’s do personal wind and solar as well, it doesn’t have to be the huge utilities doing it.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Widespread personal installations won’t be sustainable in most situations. Instead, we should be working to create microgrids for higher resiliency and more efficient electricity transmission. While we’re at it, geothermal heat pumps should be installed in a similar microgrid method
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Why do you think that?