MOAPA VALLEY, Nev.—This windswept desert community is full of clean energy supporters including Suzanne Rebich, an airline pilot who recently topped her house with 36 solar panels. About 200 homes generate their own solar energy and a quarter of the local electricity supply comes from hydroelectric power.
All the same, many here are dead set against a planned solar plant atop the Mormon Mesa, which overlooks this valley 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Slated to be the biggest solar plant in the U.S., the Battle Born Solar Project by California-based Arevia Power would carpet 14 square miles—the equivalent of 7,000 football fields—with more than a million solar panels 10 to 20 feet tall. At 850-megawatts, it would generate nearly one-tenth of Nevada’s current electric capacity.
“It will destroy this land forever,” Ms. Rebich, 33, said after riding her bicycle on the 600-foot high mesa. Across the U.S., more than 800 utility-scale solar projects are under contract to generate nearly 70,000 megawatts of new capacity, enough to power more than 11 million homes, equivalent to Texas and then some. More than half this capacity is being planned for the American Southwest, with its abundance of sunshine and open land.
These large projects are increasingly drawing opposition from environmental activists and local residents who say they are ardent supporters of clean energy. Their objections range from a desire to keep the land unspoiled to protection for endangered species to concerns that their views would no longer be as beautiful.
Want huge amount of power with small land footprint? Use nuclear
Take a lot of land to obtain energy reserve to handel peak demands. Normal day time demand and storage for nights demands.
You could change the panels out for windmills and kill all of the birds instead.
Wow. Land grab. Guess your black lung buddies are still paying more protection money than the solar lobby.
They are hideous
We must use “renewables” regardless of the damage to nature. Come on man!
We simply don’t have the technology to have a carbon neutral energy source. Not on a mass scale.
Move those NIMBY mofos into some caves.
OK they want a green energy source, but they don't want give some dry lands to get solar energy?
They probably would have said the same thing about railroads, highways and electric power lines. Some concessions are necessary.
These activists don’t really support clean energy so much as they support no energy.
Maybe if they realized its either than or we start building new nuclear facilities asap?
Environmentalists opposing solar farms... classic 'Not in my backyard' rhetoric. We can't continue to kill our planet because a few people out in the desert are being selfish.
Activists are never happy. They protest for A then once they get it they complain about A & protest (and fundraise) for B. If we as a nation understood the unserious, profit-driven, hyper-emotional activists for what they were we’d have a mature nuclear system in place already.
Appeasement never works
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: Newsweek - 🏆 468. / 52 Read more »
Source: Jezebel - 🏆 153. / 63 Read more »
Source: MarketWatch - 🏆 3. / 97 Read more »
Source: NASA - 🏆 672. / 51 Read more »
Source: TMZ - 🏆 379. / 59 Read more »
Source: Newsweek - 🏆 468. / 52 Read more »