Rural Kansas Fights Corporate Solar

An important look at rural community push back against new tech and its impact on longtime residents.

Here's a glimpse at the conversation . . .

Many wore matching T-shirts that implored the council to “Stop INDUSTRIAL SOLAR,” testifying for more than three hours against the plan for Knoche’s farm and others across the county.

To them, the solar plant  would “threaten health and well-being” and did not fit “the character of the land.” It would create “a landscape of black glass and towering windmills,” that would put lives at risk and cause “a mass exodus out of the area.”

The fight played out in front of one small county commission in one 613,000-person county. But at its heart, this fight – and hundreds of others like it across the country – was over the future of the whole nation’s energy supply and, perhaps, the future of the planet.

As the country races to shift to carbon-free energy to forestall climate change, opposition movements have popped up nationwide to fight new solar and wind farms, hampering America’s chances of meeting its climate pledges.

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

They hoped solar panels would secure the future of their farm. Then their neighbors found out

The reasons for local opposition vary. The motives behind them can be murky. But they often boil down to one idea: Renewables are fine, but we don't want them here.