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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday on the show again all this year, today, Elizabeth Weise from USA Today who's got a series that comes to the following stark conclusion in this headline; Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built. Let's find out where and why, and who's for and against, and what it means for the world. With us now is Elizabeth Weise, who has long covered science and technology, and for the last two years has been focusing on climate change and the energy transition. Elizabeth, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Elizabeth Weise: You're so welcome.

Brian Lehrer: Let's define some terms to start out. What falls under the category, in that headline, of clean energy plans?

Elizabeth Weise: Okay, so here what we were looking at specifically was utility scale. This is not rooftop solar, and this isn't even utility-scale solar, which is a small block or two solar array. This is something big enough that it can take the place of a power plant, so, utility-scale, wind and solar. In the United States, we have definitions of clean vary depending on who you are, but carbon-neutral energy includes hydroelectric power and nuclear power, little bit of biomass, but nuclear and hydro are not going to grow significantly in the coming years. Really, if we want to reach our targets of 100% clean energy by 2035, we have to build out more utility-scale wind and solar. That's what we looked at.

Brian Lehrer: Wind and solar. You just mentioned some of the context there, which is that the US set a goal of 100% clean energy. That is, I guess, clean energy-driving power plants by 2035. That is a goal that depends on building large-scale solar and wind power. I'm just curious, Elizabeth, before we go on to the battles around solar energy in particular, is that goal a matter of law or just a matter of Biden administration policy, and if some other president is elected who claims global warming is a hoax, I won't mention any names, they can cancel that goal?

Elizabeth Weise: That would be possible. It is a goal. It is also part of the US commitment to the Paris Treaty. However, as we've seen, we can be pulled out of that and were during the Trump administration. At least for now, it is the US goal.

Brian Lehrer: All right.

Elizabeth Weise: When you talk to scientists, of course, it's what we need to be doing.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Some stats to back up your headline about banning faster than we're building, 180 US counties, you report, got their first commercial wind power projects over the last decade, 180 US counties, but twice as many counties blocked wind development. Then 2023 was the first year to see almost as many counties block new solar projects as the ones adding their first projects. Now, Elizabeth, we've talked multiple times on this show as our listeners know, about some of the controversies around wind off the Jersey and Long Island shores, for example. Let's talk primarily about solar. One of the stories in your series is called They hoped solar panels would secure the future of their farm. Then their neighbors found out. Tell us that story. Who's this farm owner?

Elizabeth Weise: This is Donna and Doc Knoche who live in Gardner, Kansas. Donna's family goes back to before the Civil War in Kansas. They came over from Alsace–Lorraine. Doc's family's been there for almost as long. They had 160 acres from her great-grandfather's original plot, which they added to over the years. They were approached five years ago by a solar developer who wanted to put in a solar farm in, it would actually cross, it'd be in Douglas and Johnson County. They were not the only ones, the only landowners who were going to take part in this.

There's a couple of dozen. They had the largest pieces of land. It has become, when you talk to solar developers and wind developers, they talk about it, it's like it's just hand-to-hand combat. They have been to so many meetings, and there are groups of people at every meeting who are protesting. There's also people at the county commission meetings who are saying, "We need this. We need the jobs, we need the clean energy, we need the [crosstalk]"

Brian Lehrer: Let me back up a step because we'll get to that hand-to-hand combat for sure, over solar energy development. For that family, do you know what they grew on the land before and why they wanted to convert from, I think they were cattle farmers, is that right, and why they wanted to convert to solar panels?

Elizabeth Weise: Doc was, well, he still is a large animal vet. The land for the most part had been leased to Donna's uncle, Lucky. When he passed away in the '70s, the Knoches have six kids, and they had turned much of that land over to a cow-calf operation. They had cows, they were producing calves, which were then sold to feed out, so they were ranching it. About 10 years ago, Doc hurt his shoulder, and so they started leasing it to other farmers in the area. Right now on that land, there's cattle, there's corn being grown, there's some soy and pasture land.

It's mixed-use, and they had part of their discussion in the family. Doc and Donna are in their 90s. They have six children and they're not concerned about losing their land, but their thought was, "How do we best pass this along to the next generation?" because none of their kids wanted to farm, which is common, as you, I'm sure, have reported. When they got a call from a solar developer, they're like, "This could work."

Brian Lehrer: You report, now to the hand-to-hand political combat, that the catchphrase the opponents were using was "Stop industrial solar." What do they mean by industrial solar?

Elizabeth Weise: Yes, that's an excellent question. What they are protesting is large-scale solar installations that would be visible. Nobody is saying you can't have solar on your roof there. A lot of farmers around there might have a couple of solar panels for a pump or something, but they're talking something that covers acres and acres. If it gets built, it'll be a large-scale solar operation that it will cover more than 1,000 acres of land. Although they're big counties, but still, it would be a large solar array in the middle of counties that are predominantly but not entirely agricultural.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Some of this, I think you're suggesting, is aesthetic. Let me read for our listeners, your list of various objections that these potential neighbors of the solar farm have doesn't fit with the character of the land. That's what you were just referring to. Threatens health and wellbeing. It would create a landscape of black glass and cause a mass exodus out of the area. You bust some myths around some of these things, and we'll get to that, but are the aesthetics of black glass and the feared exodus out of the area as a result of that supposed to be a big thing? Like people will find solar panel farms uglier than cow pastures or corn or soybean fields, so they'll move away?

Elizabeth Weise: In the last year and a half, I've spent a lot of time in counties where solar and wind are being debated. I've gone to a lot of county commission meetings and heard a lot of testimony, and I've watched a lot on Zoom. The things you hear, they tend to fall into two categories. There's what people are saying, and then what they're feeling.

I think what people are feeling really strongly is, "I don't want the rural nature of where I live to change. I am opposed to this because I don't like how it looks because I don't want it to change."

There is an overlay on top of that, of, what are reasons that could stop this so it doesn't happen? I swear you can hear people searching for reasons that this is a bad idea. I'm sure many of them feel very strongly that some of these are true, but at baseline, what you hear again and again and again in these meetings is people saying, "I'm not opposed to renewable energy, but this is the wrong place for it." You hear that everywhere in the country, and it's not just Kansas, it's California, it's New York, it's everywhere. Then the question becomes how do we build it? The other piece of that, when you talk about, "I don't want the rural nature of where I live to change," and this is especially--

Well, it's huge in Virginia too. I'm sure your listeners are aware, we're in the midst of a time in America when there's a bit of a resorting, and you're seeing some people moving out to more rural areas because they believe that is a realer America, that that is the lifestyle and the place they are choosing. They come because even if they're not farmers, and most of them aren't, they want to live among a rural farming landscape. Then somebody comes in and says, "Oh, by the way, 2,000 acres of your county is going to be solar," and they are not happy about it.

There are so many layers to this. Whereas the farmers are often really for it because when you talk to farmers, and I covered ag, so I spent a lot of time in fields with farmers, to them, land is what you make money off of. It's not pretty. It's not something you want to look at. It is, what are the inputs? What are the outputs? How much money do I make an acre and is it better to throw down corn or soy or wheat this year, or should I let it live fallow? For them, it's about money. When you talk to the farmers, they say, actually, Donna Knoche went off about this, "How dare you tell me what to do with my family's land?

If you want my view, you pay for it." It's a fundamental divide that I haven't seen a county yet that's figured out a way to deal with this. Actually, that's not true. There are counties who have dealt with it, but it's usually not about the viewshed.

Brian Lehrer: It's a rural version of the urban paradox we were talking about on this show in our previous segment, an affordable housing paradox. Everyone agrees on two things about affordable housing. Number one, we desperately need a lot more of it. Number two, just don't build any near me. Listeners, can anyone help us report this story? Are you on either side of a local fight over the placement of solar energy panels or solar energy farms, if that's the more accurate term, in your community? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Or anyone with a comment or a question for our guest, Elizabeth Weise from USA Today, who's got a series out in that paper called, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built Across America.

212-433-WNYC. Does anybody have a story? Is this happening in any area where anybody is listening right now? What side of it are you on? Or anybody with a question? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. What did you want to say?

Elizabeth Weise: In the series, for those who are interested in looking, we posted our entire database. For every state, there is an overview of what the state rules for the zoning of wind and solar are, and then what the bans or blockages are at the county level for all 50 states. New York is actually an interesting example because, especially in upstate New York at the state level, New York has been really clear that the sighting of power cannot be blocked by counties. If it is unreasonably burdensome, then it's got to go through the state office of renewable energy sighting, which was the first of its kind in the nation.

New York has been out in front, and it's one of the few states that has said at the state level, "We're not going to let people just block this stuff willy-nilly." That, however, has not stopped a lot of townships and towns, especially in upstate New York, from passing either very restrictive zoning rules or statutes that ban these new projects. As far as I can tell thus far, none of those have worked their way through to the state level for the state to say yay or nay because that new state law was passed in 2020. New York is an interesting example because New York, Illinois, and now Michigan all have state laws saying basically you can't just stop power because you don't want to see it in your county, but townships and sometimes counties are busily trying to do just that.

It's a model that is working in some places. I have so many Google alerts that I get every day on all of this. Every week there's a couple in New York State where some township has said, "No, we're not going to do this," or, "No, we're not going to let this happen."

Brian Lehrer: I want to ask you before we go to the phones for a few calls, a key question from me that I'm sure a lot of other listeners have on their mind when we talk about this kind of a topic. That is, how much of this is genuine local debate about the nature of their communities and solar farms and how much is it the fossil fuel industries fomenting an uproar to thwart competition from renewables?

Elizabeth Weise: Oh, that is the $100,000 question, isn't it? It is both. There are definitely think tanks that have been busy pumping out white papers with varying reasons why wind and solar are a bad thing with, generally speaking, not a lot of facts behind them. That said, there's also very strong feeling on the ground from people who get wind as has happened in the Knoche's counties, that something is going to go in. What tends to happen is, and this is a pattern too, people in the community hear that a wind or a solar project is being contemplated.

They go online, they find there is an entire ecosystem of websites and information from people who are fighting these. It's very easy to plug into it and get talking points and t-shirts and phrases and slogans. They self-organize. It's not like somebody comes out from DC and says, "Okay, this is how you put together your campaign." It is very much local, and yet there is also a stream of it that is being egged on by some national groups. The important thing to remember here, and I can't emphasize this enough, is that this is not a conservative versus liberal fight.

As you alluded to, when it comes to affordable housing, California is one of the hardest states in the country right now to build wind and solar in. It's not because California has a bunch of conservatives. Some of the counties are, but a lot of them aren't. It's because, especially in Southern California, it's wealthy folks who like their views, and how dare you build anything that's going to ruin my view. I've got lawyers and I'm going to stop you, and they do. It feels more to me like the people who live there, many of them generally just, "I don't want to look at it, for whatever reason, I don't want to look at it, then how can I find a way to stop it?"

In California, it's all about we must protect protected animals or lands, which isn't to say that that isn't sometimes appropriate. You get different reasons why it's a bad thing wherever you are, but it's in almost every state where people are putting in wind and solar, there's almost always a fight to stop it.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a related question that I think is pretty astute from a listener who writes in, "Does Ms. Weise ever think that opponents are motivated more by tribal partisanship than aesthetics or spirit, despite what they say?" I could see it. Remember when Donald Trump the other week said he would only be a dictator on Day 1 to do two things? One of them is build that wall and the other one is drill, baby drill. If you're in that political tribe, then solar and wind are bad by generalization. I wonder if you ran into that in your reporting?

Elizabeth Weise: In some areas, it is definitely a conservative talking point. I went to a meeting in Kansas that was actually sponsored by a County Republican Committee that was all about how to stop wind and solar and why climate change was not actually a thing and why this was all nonsense. There are places in the country where it is a plank, at least at the local Republican party, though I haven't found any states where it is a national or a statewide plank. That is definitely true. It just doesn't explain all of it. Especially, it doesn't explain people are fighting them in Oregon. They're fighting them in Washington state. They're fighting in Massachusetts, in very liberal places.

Brian Lehrer: Apparently, they're fighting in Maine because here's Ron in Unity, Maine.

Elizabeth Weise: In Maine.

Brian Lehrer: You're on WNYC. Hi, Ron.

Ron: Hello. Yes, it's a very interesting subject. This has been a fairly recent development up here the last couple of years. It's not so much a NIMBY attitude that people have. Basically, it's, they're coming in very fast, and they do these things without much input from the locals. What our biggest problem is that they're using up viable farmland. Farmland is a very, what's the word, important aspect of living in a rural area. We have many, many, many farmers. Now, these are not huge projects. I think the largest one that we have out here that I've seen is 700 acres. Most of these projects are 100 acres, 120 acres. Most of them are being put on hay fields. It's easier for them to lease out the land, but it's a long-term event. These things go in for 20 years, 30 years.

Brian Lehrer: Tell me why that's important to you, Ron. You said, in rural areas, farmland is important. Is it visual, because otherwise, these are basically farmers who have found a more profitable crop?

Ron: No. It's not so much visual, it's just that it's a life choice. Say, a farm goes up to a solar farm, if there's a farmer who doesn't really want to farm anymore, there are plenty of young people that want to buy farms and farm up here, but the land is getting too expensive for them. The more farmland that you take out of production, the more expensive it's going to get. There are [inaudible 00:22:51] have a problem with, this is another subject.

Brian Lehrer: Ron, I have to leave it there for time, but thank you for raising those issues. He's almost implying, Elizabeth, that food would become more expensive if more farmland is being used for other things.

Elizabeth Weise: This is a common talking point when you go to these meetings, that we'll lose all the farmland and we won't be able to feed ourselves, and it's critical to US safety. I've heard that argument. The truth is that we use up a lot of our agricultural land in this country to grow corn for ethanol. 40% of corn acres go straight to ethanol. If you want to talk about using agricultural land to produce energy, ethanol is actually a much less efficient way to produce energy.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

Elizabeth Weise: We have a lot of acres devoted to corn for ethanol. The other piece of it is that we also have a lot of acres that are taken out of production as part of USDA's conservation plans. I think the final thing I would say is that there have been various estimates of how much land we actually need to produce all the wind and solar that we would like. The one that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory came up with, which I think is a really good one, is about 10,000 square miles, which is about the size of Vermont. That's a lot of land, but it's also, it would provide all the power that we needed.

Again, this is all about trade-offs. What trade-offs are we willing to make? These are really hard questions. We have, in the United States, power is not typically something that you have to watch being made. Suddenly, we're shifting to a system where a lot of people are going to have to see their power being made. It's a change and change is hard, but however you do it [crosstalk] the question.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more caller with a quick story in here.

Elizabeth Weise: Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Cheryl in Brooklyn, we've got just under a minute for you, but I see you're calling about a solar panel dispute in Columbia County. For people who don't know who, that's just south and a little east of Albany, like up the top of the Taconic. Cheryl, what you got?

Cheryl: We're in a very rural area. I have a little house, a cottage. I'm a social worker. I actually live in a Mitchell on the co-op. I finally was able to buy this little cottage on a lake. It's a very rural area. The company coming in, it's a for-profit company, as many of these are. It's not the state putting in a solar farm, and farm is a little misleading. It's a solar plant. They were going to clear-cut 500 acres, which would be very bad for the animals, for the environment, for the stream runoff in the area. They were going to surround 3 miles of solar plant with a chain link fence.

There is something to be said for rural beauty. It's an important characteristic of upstate New York. It's tourism up there. I myself rent my house on Airbnb. People come for the natural beauty. The farmers produce farms, which we need. These are for-profit companies. They could site these plants on Brownfield sites. Traditionally, New York State had a policy of putting solar plants on Brownfield sites, of which we have many.

Brian Lehrer: Cheryl, I'm going to have to leave it there for time, but there you go. An example of this taking place, this kind of fight taking place not that far upstate from New York City. There we leave it for our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on the show. With Elizabeth Weise from USA TODAY, her series is called Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. We really appreciate the conversation.

Elizabeth Weise: Thanks for having me. It was fun.

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