This is going to be a long post regarding solar panel “farms”. We live outside of a small town and the county/parish govt. were “convinced” that a solar farm on good arable land was a great benefit to the residents … especially with all the credits and upfront money they were paying “if” it was adopted. They met and approved the solar farm in 10 minutes while no one was allowed to speak against it.
The solar farm was being put up a few miles from town and the local power provider was in cahoots with the plan. They also got tons of credits and upfront monies. It would tie into their feeder lines, ya see !!!
Where they were putting it in, was out of town and in an area with few house ..just think houses along the main road frontage…no type of subdivision. However, there was one road with a culdesac (sp?) that would run between their new power transmission station and the panels would encircle this one road. There were supposed to be over 3 thousand huge solar panels in this area that the railroad tracks bracketed one one side and the river levee on the other side. Sounds peachy, yeah, no.
Guess who lives on that one road? Yep, you guessed it, we do. One day we woke up to huge tractors, pile drivers incessant back-up beepers on the equipment, installing the substation for the transmission line and road machinery putting in a gravel road to allow graders, tractors, etc. surrounding our beautiful, quiet, little street.
Now the people that sold them the land made out like bandits (2 people) but there was a fly in their ointment. The house that faced the main road, which the transmission substation was beside/behind was a Mac-daddy home … it really is drop dead gorgeous, btw… took exception. The owner was at the meeting where the parish council went into executive session to pass the building of this solar farm. He is an investment type broker and had the skinny on the amounts of money being doled out. He went up n down the main road and our little road too, getting signatures for a class action lawsuit. Every single person except one signed it, us included.
Picture in your head a transmission sub station approximately 20-30 yards from your back yard…and huge solar panels approximately 50 yards from the other homes on our quite little street. These panels move with the sun and the back of our house faces west while the other side of the street (duh) faces east. They reflect a ton of light when sun is shining on them…blinding reflection.
To wrap up the saga…the transmission line sub-substation was not to code, it’s too close to the houses, so the company “made concessions“ by agreeing to put larger than normal trees (cedar) along the fence line for the houses facing east and the sub-station was granted a variance..too expensive to move. On our side (west facing) it was found that they had no permit at all to put the solar panels behind our house…we sat on the back lanai and toasted all the workers as they removed hundreds of huge square tubing supports for the panels and the gravel road bed…the owner of the land got to keep their money and the solar farm folks have to keep it mowed. The guy will probably get an agreement to cut hay on it as he did previously when his cows weren’t grazing. These people truly had a “set”.. they knew they had no permit yet put all that stuff in.
We got lucky that they hadn’t installed the batteries which from what we were told would be buried along each row of panels…we also learned that the “radiation” (?) from the batteries renders the land un-usable for crops or animals for many, many years. I don’t totally understand about the “radiation” but it is tied to the batteries somehow. Don’t really care one way or the other at this point.
One of the homeowners on the east facing side told the supervisor/worker to either change the track on the two panels that faced the back of his house or else he would render them useless… the reflection was so bright in his house it was blinding. They didn’t like it and drug their feet till he took them to his house and showed them how it was affecting them. He also made sure to have his shot gun out with a box or two of buck shot right beside it. They disconnected/re-programmed those panels from the rotation motor.
Lesson of this story is…our little area got screwed over, two people selling the land got paid while the electricity company and the parish govt. got richer than anyone, and proved themselves to be corrupt to boot. Every household is represented at every council meeting now because we fear they will sneak in the permitting for our side of the street.
Other proposed solar farms are having tons of push back in our area. Don’t know if I said up thread but this is prime hay/grazing and crop land acres they are taking out of production.
Rat-bastiches all !!!
