The Truth Behind Rural America’s Great Wind & Solar Backlash

[FTW]

I’ve been reporting on the resistance in rural America against the encroachment of large renewable energy projects for a dozen years. For instance, in 2010, I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal in which I wrote about the problem of noise pollution from wind turbines, an issue that the wind industry has denied, and intentionally obscured, for years. That same year, in my fourth book, Power Hungry, I published a chapter on the myth that wind and solar energy are “green.”

In Chapter 8, I noted that people living near wind projects in “Texas, Oregon, New York, and Minnesota, as well as in numerous foreign countries, including England, New Zealand, Canada, France, and Australia have complained about the noise [from wind turbines] and cited some of the same problems that Porter named, including sleep deprivation.” I also noted the “vast stretches of land that are needed for the production and transportation of energy from wind and solar installations” and that the “low power density of wind and solar means that they need lots of land.”

In 2015, after writing a number of articles about the rural backlash against renewables, I began compiling data on the communities that have rejected or restricted wind projects in an Excel spreadsheet. That effort eventually became the Renewable Rejection Database, which is available on my website, and contains details on the rejections, which now total 368 for wind and 106 for solar.

https://stopthesethings.com/2023/01/21/ ... DvkwFXK0V0