http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/12/14/us-town-rejects-solar-farm-because-it-will-suck-all-sun

The North Carolina town of Woodlawn rejected a proposal by the Strata Solar Company to build a farm near the town after locals expressed serious opposition.

At a community meeting opposition was raised to the idea of a solar plant because it would “suck up all the energy from the sun” in the words of local man Bobby Mann, reported the local paper.

"You’re killing your town,” he said. “All the young people are going to move out,” Mr Mann said.

Another local woman named Jane Mann who was identified as a retired school teacher expressed genuine fears plants in the area would not get enough sunlight to perform photosynthesis if the solar project was approved.

She also said no one had proved solar panels didn’t cause cancer.

“I want to know what’s going to happen,” she said. “I want information. Enough is enough. I don’t see the profit for the town.

“People come with hidden agendas,” she said. “Until we can find if anything is going to damage this community, we shouldn’t sign any paper.”

The council voted 3-1 against the proposal and then agreed to place a moratorium on future farms.

I'm confused by the Plant statement, does Jane Mann expect the Solar Cells to cover most of the farms' plantations in the area, or does an ex-school teacher actually not know how Light works? I feel sorry for her students either way.

The Cancer argument is a bit of a joke too. Nothing has been reported about people who live in close proximity to Solar Cells in the regard of overall health, and it's not like Coal-fired plants and Cars without Catalytic Converters (that are still reasonably common) are making air any better for one's lungs anyway.

Thoughts?

>Complaining that solar cells might cause cancer when we literally live surrounded by cancer causing shit already.

ikr, it's infuriating as fuck.

I really do love the mentality about solar power that most people seem to harbor. "Oh but it's hard and expensive. It doesn't make enough energy, yada yada."

You know what Henery Ford told his team of engineers to do when they told him they couldn't build a certain type of engine? He told them he didn't want fucking excuses, he wanted an engine. Long story short, they gave him an engine. And it was the type that was specified.

We've got all this fucking enginuity at our disposal and a power source sitting right at our fingertips, and rather than capitalize on it we sit back and bitch that it's hard to do or too expensive.

Fuck money when it comes to shit like this. If there was ever a good fucking way to impede decent progress it's always people that are fucking scared that their imaginary numbers will go too high. And fuck people that are content to sit around and turn away when something gets difficult or tricky.

Making excuses and complaining about problems we have no intention to solve is one of the most utilized skills in society. It's a pity that energy can't be put towards advancing our technology to be more efficient and clean, ayy.

You are right Zonda. It is infuriating. And you gotta love how people don't look at the concept directly. Even engineers of solar panels themselves. If you remember, a little while back, there was a big hubub about this team of people creating solar tiles that they wanted to use to replace roads.

Cheap, durable, and easy to mass produce. But still, they'd never be able to replace a road. After the big hubub and the various flaws listed about the project, I assume it probably hit some slow ground and sank in the mud.

The team who worked on the concept had a good idea. Durable, cheap, and easy to produce solar panels. Why not take the concept and simplify it? Why not just make those solar panels for normal useage? Or why not find places that they could fit?

The thing with solar panels, is that they don't have the capability to produce mass amounts of power. And that's what everybody wants. They want this big centralized power source that can give them everything and output miracle amounts of power. I'd argue probably because it'd be a fantastic money maker if you controlled and regulated it.

But there's no feasible fucking reason that you can't set up some solar panels for your house to regulate a portion of the power. And there's no reason that rather than focusing on a solar farm to provide mass amounts of power, you focus on supplying the general population with the individual means to supply themselves can't e done.

How about people that like to complain that there's no sun? Two things for them. Get a fucking battery bank so you can store excess power generated by the panels on the sunny days so that you have a supply for cloudy days.

Get a windmill with an alternator attached to it. Clouds usually come with wind. Combine a small windmill with solar panels and you have a pretty good shot at replenishing a battery bank for your own power supply. Go even farther and make another windmill that catches rain and uses the weight to spin itself. Clouds usually come with rain.

Hook all three of those things up to your house and you'd be well off.

And you don't have to power a city with it. Just houses. Hospitals and big places can still use electric turbines. But imagine if every house had the ability to produce it's own power, or even a portion of it?

How much energy and strain would that take off electrical plants? A lot, no doubt.

And here's another excuse that people like to bring up. Putting that many solar panels and bits and pieces on a large population of houses is going to take time and work. It's a big job. People would probably say, "It's not feasible to try and put solar panels and energy independant systems on a million houses." Guess what genius, how'd those million houses get there in the first place? They were all built independently, one by one.

Let's not forget that such a big project would make a decent amount of jobs. A lot of unemployed people might not be qualified to manufacture/fit Solar panels, but it might make space in other jobs that they are able to do.

I checked Snopes

Yeah, it's mostly true. People did say that. But the REAL reason it was scrapped was the effect the plant would have on home values. Of the people in the town, the article's author chose the 4 or 5 dumbest.

Quote from: Snowtrap on December 15, 2015, 02:27:46 AM

You are right Zonda. It is infuriating. And you gotta love how people don't look at the concept directly. Even engineers of solar panels themselves. If you remember, a little while back, there was a big hubub about this team of people creating solar tiles that they wanted to use to replace roads.

Cheap, durable, and easy to mass produce. But still, they'd never be able to replace a road. After the big hubub and the various flaws listed about the project, I assume it probably hit some slow ground and sank in the mud.

The team who worked on the concept had a good idea. Durable, cheap, and easy to produce solar panels. Why not take the concept and simplify it? Why not just make those solar panels for normal useage? Or why not find places that they could fit?

The thing with solar panels, is that they don't have the capability to produce mass amounts of power. And that's what everybody wants. They want this big centralized power source that can give them everything and output miracle amounts of power. I'd argue probably because it'd be a fantastic money maker if you controlled and regulated it.

But there's no feasible fucking reason that you can't set up some solar panels for your house to regulate a portion of the power. And there's no reason that rather than focusing on a solar farm to provide mass amounts of power, you focus on supplying the general population with the individual means to supply themselves can't e done.

How about people that like to complain that there's no sun? Two things for them. Get a fucking battery bank so you can store excess power generated by the panels on the sunny days so that you have a supply for cloudy days.

Get a windmill with an alternator attached to it. Clouds usually come with wind. Combine a small windmill with solar panels and you have a pretty good shot at replenishing a battery bank for your own power supply. Go even farther and make another windmill that catches rain and uses the weight to spin itself. Clouds usually come with rain.

Hook all three of those things up to your house and you'd be well off.

And you don't have to power a city with it. Just houses. Hospitals and big places can still use electric turbines. But imagine if every house had the ability to produce it's own power, or even a portion of it?

How much energy and strain would that take off electrical plants? A lot, no doubt.

trap, I'm pretty sure the solar freaking roadways thing was anything but cheap and the durability made them woefully inefficient because of the thickness of the glass covering.

Even if they were, no reason you can't re-engineer and re-purpose things.

Quote from: Snowtrap on December 18, 2015, 10:22:37 AM

Quote from: DASHALLAH on December 18, 2015, 04:35:57 AM

Quote from: Snowtrap on December 15, 2015, 02:27:46 AM

You are right Zonda. It is infuriating. And you gotta love how people don't look at the concept directly. Even engineers of solar panels themselves. If you remember, a little while back, there was a big hubub about this team of people creating solar tiles that they wanted to use to replace roads.

Cheap, durable, and easy to mass produce. But still, they'd never be able to replace a road. After the big hubub and the various flaws listed about the project, I assume it probably hit some slow ground and sank in the mud.

The team who worked on the concept had a good idea. Durable, cheap, and easy to produce solar panels. Why not take the concept and simplify it? Why not just make those solar panels for normal useage? Or why not find places that they could fit?

The thing with solar panels, is that they don't have the capability to produce mass amounts of power. And that's what everybody wants. They want this big centralized power source that can give them everything and output miracle amounts of power. I'd argue probably because it'd be a fantastic money maker if you controlled and regulated it.

But there's no feasible fucking reason that you can't set up some solar panels for your house to regulate a portion of the power. And there's no reason that rather than focusing on a solar farm to provide mass amounts of power, you focus on supplying the general population with the individual means to supply themselves can't e done.

How about people that like to complain that there's no sun? Two things for them. Get a fucking battery bank so you can store excess power generated by the panels on the sunny days so that you have a supply for cloudy days.

Get a windmill with an alternator attached to it. Clouds usually come with wind. Combine a small windmill with solar panels and you have a pretty good shot at replenishing a battery bank for your own power supply. Go even farther and make another windmill that catches rain and uses the weight to spin itself. Clouds usually come with rain.

Hook all three of those things up to your house and you'd be well off.

And you don't have to power a city with it. Just houses. Hospitals and big places can still use electric turbines. But imagine if every house had the ability to produce it's own power, or even a portion of it?

How much energy and strain would that take off electrical plants? A lot, no doubt.

trap, I'm pretty sure the solar freaking roadways thing was anything but cheap and the durability made them woefully inefficient because of the thickness of the glass covering.

Even if they were, no reason you can't re-engineer and re-purpose things.

But we already have solar panels.

There's also a neat thing called re-purposing ideas. We already have solar panels but most people don't think of solar power in the correct way. As demonstrated rather nicely by the article itself up above.

no, they used the argument of ONE person in an interview and the media decides to clickbait this topic. the town didnt want the solar stuff for something different.