Americans Like Wind and Solar in Theory, Dislike Them in Practice, Study Reveals

An aerial view of solar panels at the Sutter Greenworks Solar Site in Calverton, N.Y., on Sept. 19, 2021. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

A recent report by the Brookings Institution claims that “the American public overwhelmingly favors renewable power.” While this may be true in theory, when Americans experience the reality of it, they don’t seem to like it much at all.

Brookings, which sees local resistance as an impediment to overcome, conceded that “even though people like wind and solar power in the abstract, some still object to large projects near their homes.” The report, “Renewables, Land Use, and Local Opposition in the United States,” notes that wind and solar generation takes up at least 10 times as much land as coal- or gas-fired plants, while other estimates have put it as high as 75 times.

“Most wind turbines being installed in the United States today are the height of a 35-story building,” the report reads. “The expanding land needs of a renewable energy system raise concerns about ‘energy sprawl.’”

Extensive networks of power lines must be constructed to transmit between the remote areas where wind and solar are located and the cities that use their power. Fossil fuels are mobile and those plants, as with nuclear plants, can be located close to end users. Wind and solar, for the most part, can’t.

“Offshore wind eliminates land use, but it raises opposition among those concerned with the impact on the environment and scenic views. ... Transmission for renewable power can also be unpopular, and even more difficult to site when the power is just passing through an area, rather than directly benefitting local residents,” the report reads.

Renewable Rejection Is on the Rise

Author and energy expert Robert Bryce has been tracking just how unpopular renewable power is in his Renewable Rejection Database, collecting data from sources such as local news reports. He has observed an escalation in local community “rejections” over the past decade, increasing from virtually none from 2011 to 2014 to more than 450 cases in the almost 10 years since.

Source: Robert Bryce, Renewable Rejection Database

“I’m interested in what’s happening in rural America and how local communities are reacting to the encroachment of these wind and solar projects,” Bryce told The Epoch Times. “From Maine to Hawaii, the bottom line is local people care about what happens in their neighborhoods everywhere, and they are concerned about their views and their property values and rightly concerned about their health and the noise that comes from these wind projects.”

Source: Robert Bryce, Renewable Rejection Database

Many Americans feel that what President Joe Biden calls the “incredible transition” to renewables from fossil fuels has been imposed on them by government fiat and corporate net-zero cabals, but Bryce said local democracy is giving people a voice.

“Americans very broadly are having a say, based on the very fundamental issue of property rights and land use,” he said.

The Brookings report states: “An energy system based on renewables will have a different shape than the fossil fuel-based system Americans are accustomed to. Production facilities will cover more land in areas that are not accustomed to energy infrastructure. Trillions of dollars of infrastructure will be needed to achieve a renewable power system, for construction of generation and transmission capacity.”

But according to Bryce’s database, in January alone, wind and solar project permits were denied in six cases by local boards and commissions in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Nebraska. Even communities in deep-blue Massachusetts and New York have been rejecting wind and solar projects and blocking transmission lines through their towns.

The Environmental Cost of Mining

In addition to the “energy sprawl” once the systems are built, there’s also the issue of the exploitation of wide tracts of land and habitats for the mining of minerals that are needed for batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and transmission lines. They include cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, and other minerals that must be extracted from the earth, creating toxic waste, pollution that has turned rivers red, and extensive carbon dioxide emissions.

Here, too, local communities have put up resistance. In 2022, the Biden administration announced a number of initiatives to increase the mining and refining of minerals for renewables in the United States. His Defense Production Act reclassified lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, and manganese as essential to national security, giving the green light to the Defense Department to subsidize domestic mining.

This was soon contradicted by his administration’s efforts to block domestic mining, most recently in an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision on Jan. 31 to block the Pebble Mine project near Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Americans appear to want the mining of renewables to be done abroad.

Hailing the decision, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) stated: “We are thrilled with the EPA’s finding and thank the thousands of people in Alaska and around the country who participated in the public process that led to this result, including more than 31,000 TNC supporters. A ‘no’ on the Pebble Mine is a ‘yes’ to letting local communities decide what’s best for them and a ‘yes’ to preserving some of the last wild salmon runs on earth.”

Pebble Project CEO Disagrees

“The EPA decision to try to destroy the Pebble opportunity is just one more piece of the Biden administration’s war on domestic natural resource development,” said John Shively, CEO of The Pebble Partnership, the company that would control the mine. “The Biden strategy, when it comes to securing the minerals required for its green energy goals seems to be to give some passing support for the development of boutique minerals such as lithium and rare earths in the United States but to seek the enormous supply of base metals such as copper needed for EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric plants, and the associated infrastructure from other nations.”

According to a report by the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based intergovernmental organization, these other nations include, most notably, China.

“The Democratic Republic of the Congo and People’s Republic of China were responsible for some 70 percent and 60 percent of global production of cobalt and rare earth elements respectively in 2019,” the report reads.

In terms of the refining of these minerals, China is even more dominant. Its global market share is 35 percent for nickel, 50 to 70 percent for lithium and cobalt, and 90 percent for rare earth elements.