American solar farms
29 comments
·October 13, 2025null
Bonobozpage
[dead]
paulnpace
[flagged]
IAmBroom
Having farmers in the family, I can confirm they are unhappy about living next to anything other than what they grew up next to.
Also, the rainfall. Some farmers go from morning to night never saying a word that isn't a complaint about the rainfall being wrong.
ourmandave
I had to google it and apparently the complaints are:
Ruin the view,
Lower property values,
Habitat destruction,
Noise from inverter fans
cainxinth
Who enjoys living next to a power plant of any kind?
jstanley
Of all the kinds of power plant, a solar farm has to be the least intrusive.
UltraSane
I can understand not wanting to live close to wind turbines but I don't understand the issue with living next to a solar farm since the panels just sit there silently.
ben_w
Lots of people dislike change. Neophobia is a thing, and it's not particularly uncommon.
The good news is, they'll rapidly adapt to each new solar farm; the bad news is, they'll forget about all the ones they're used to by the time comes to expand — I've seen anecdotes of the same thing happening with power lines, where people were upset that some proposed new ones would ruin the view, the person proposing them said they wouldn't be any different from the current ones, and the complainers said "what current ones?" and had to have them pointed out.
hermannj314
That human psychology eventually adapts to tolerate enshittification is probably the main reason we have enshittification.
patall
The only problem that I kind of understand are the huge fences surrounding the farms. Because copper thefts are a big problem for them, it is quite common to have 3m high fences all around, which is obviously more gated community like than a monoculture field. And of course, it depends on how the farm is run. Solar farms can be ecological heaven if managed properly, unless growing weeds are just killed of with round-up every few months. Everything else seems more pretended problems, like inverter fans that may just be placed in the middle and should barely be hearable from 100 meters away.
ourmandave
Maybe the guy who cleans them complains loudly, or the squeak of his 4' squeegee is annoying.
alexdns
Well its not silent those panels go into MPPTs that produce noise when high amps are flowing through them to charge batteries if they don't direct export , if they direct export then there is noise from inverters to convert DC->AC
AlfeG
Because they are not silent. Or sometimes are not. Inverters do have quite large fans.
bfkwlfkjf
Would you like to share with us what it is they say makes them unhappy about it specifically?
squigz
"My experience is that people whose homes have burned down are unhappy that their homes burned down. It is also my experience that this is a fringe opinion"
Like what?
nemomarx
Is a solar farm being built nearby as bad as your house burning down? I didn't think the property value would change that drastically...
trimethylpurine
[delayed]
jibal
This will change under the policies of the current U.S. administration.
hwillis
Pretty unlikely. Solar is built on cheap land with low demand, and if the land isn't sold then the power is free so why wouldn't you sell it? No matter how high the taxes are, free money is free money. Aside from making it totally illegal it is very hard to reduce the incentive to sell power.
On top of that the subsidies for solar installations are mostly frontloaded, since the costs are frontloaded. Annual tax breaks are transferrable, so they get sold at the beginning of the project to offset investment cost, lowering interest payments. Even removing tax breaks would not make existing installations less profitable.
UltraSane
Federal funding for solar farms will stop but private funding will continue because solar electricity is the the cheapest source right now.
ben_w
Unless it gets outlawed, which I suspect is something Trump might do or attempt as part of his campaign in favour of fossil fuels and/or to own the libs/China.
I'm also not clear how cheaply the US could make its own PV in the event of arbitrary trade war (let alone hot war) between the USA and China.
(The good news there is that even in such a situation, everyone else in the world can continue to electrify with the panels, inverters, and batteries that the USA doesn't buy).
cactusplant7374
I am still receiving advertisements from solar companies that want to put panels on farm land. They pay around $3-$4k an acre
binarymax
Per month or year? And what region?
tecleandor
Like monthly? Yearly?
ben_w
I'm not the person you're replying to, but if I read the following link correctly, the USA average price to purchase is only $5.5k/acre, and any part of the US cheaper than or including the average price in Nebraska (ranked 17th at $3,884/acre) could well be trading food farmland for solar farm land at that price:
https://acretrader.com/resources/farmland-values/farmland-pr...
dgacmu
This is for a 20 or 30 year lease. One time payment. 4k is on the high side.
IAmBroom
You dropped this: /s
The title is a bit non descript, so the blog post is exploring
> a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS.