'It's got nasty': the battle to build the US's biggest solar power farm in Pulaski county, Indiana

[Caribbeans]

One of Connie Ehrlich’s anti-solar billboards in Winamac, Indiana. Photograph: Taylor Glascock/The Guardian

‘It’s got nasty’: the battle to build the US’s biggest solar power farm

A community turns on itself over the aptly named Mammoth solar project, a planned $1.5bn power field nearly the size of Manhattan

The Guardian by Oliver Milman in Pulaski county, Indiana | Oct 30, 2022

When proposals for the largest solar plant ever conceived for US soil started to gather pace – a plan that involves spearing several million solar panels into the flat farmland of northern Indiana – something in Connie Ehrlich seems to have snapped.

Ehrlich, 63, is part of a longstanding farming family in Pulaski county, the site of the new solar project, but doesn’t live in the county and previously only rarely dabbled in its usually somnolent local politics. She has carved out a comfortable life in a sprawling mansion set on 10 acres (four hectares) of land, just outside the city of Lafayette, and is known locally for her donations to medical research and her small fleet of deluxe cars with personalized license plates.

But to Ehrlich the idea of transferring 13,000 acres of prized farmland to solar energy production seems to have been so unthinkable that it demanded an extraordinary response. Within months of the project being proposed she had mobilized her wealth to fund a flurry of lawsuits, spearheaded a sometimes-vituperative pressure group and spent $3m buying new plots of land, including a cemetery, on the fringes of the project...snip

The opponents of the solar project, a $1.5bn venture appropriately called Mammoth that is set to span an area almost as large as Manhattan, say they are defying an egregious assault on time-honored farming traditions and are standing up to a newcomer that threatens to warp their pastoral way of life with Chinese-made technology. “We need to protect America’s farmland,” Ehrlich wrote in a February post for the Pulaski County Against Solar group’s Facebook page. “Not only from being sacrificed for the inefficient, unreliable energy generation, but from foreigners’ interest!” more:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/30/its-got-nasty-the-battle-to-build-the-uss-biggest-solar-power-farm

The Ehrlichs - America's new Luddites. Proud and ignorant at the same time.

[DFW]

1. If there's something out there that makes much sense and will help many prople

You can bet there is a powerful, influential Republican nearby just waiting for the chance to prevent the project from becoming reality.

[Timewas]

2. Good Grief

With the entire state of Nevada, a large portion of Texas and many other places why take farm land ??

[Caribbeans]

3. Crops can be grown under the panels

Like this

There's plenty of land in the US as anyone who has driven across the country knows

Unfortunately not so much common sense CIRCA 2022

[Timewas]

4. You might

If that picture is it then I don't see any way to work under them that close to the ground..

[NNadir]

8. Really? Photosynthesis doesn't require light?

[Chainfire]

5. Are they taking farm land or all the owners selling farm land. There is a difference.

A solar farm the size of Manhattan will eliminate the need for a lot of oil that is controlled by folks like the Russians and Saudis. Until there are better options, I am all for the solar power.

[Timewas]

10. Solar is great

But taking that much farmland is stupid when they have thousands of acres all over the west that is pretty much useless for anything else

[dumbcat]

12. You have to look at the economics of that particular land

Yes, there are many empty acres out west, but the electricity generated by that solar farm is much more valuable in Indiana than it is in Nevada or West Texas. You have to look at the value of the electricity generated per acre vs the value of the crops that it may (or may not, depending on climate and weather) produce.

I'm sure there have been a couple of people that have looked at that more closely than we have.

Any electricity produced on those thousands of acres in Texas has no value in Indiana.

[NNadir]

14. What some people call "useless" land other people call "wilderness." If anything is "useless..."

...it would the solar industry, which has squandered trillions of dollars on junk that has done zero, nothing, to address climate change.

The solar industry is lipstick on the gas and coal pig.

[Nictuku]

16. I agree

I was wondering /why/ Indiana? (because it is flat?), we have lots of flat desert areas in this country.

Did Indiana bid on having it built there? Seems like there could be benefits for the state economically.

The more I read about People, the less I like 'em.

Edited to add: I just saw Finishline's post about Why Indiana. (thank you).

I hope that these people against it are not able to stop it.

[Timewas]

17. There are

Many advantages in that plan, keeping the production closer to the end user makes sense, if the land is not fertile enough anymore then why not use it this way... My point is that if solar is the great savior then why are they not building them all over the country especially out in the flat lands that pretty much can't be used for much else rather than take farmland out of production.

[NNadir]

6. 1.5 Billion for stuff that will be electronic waste in 25 years?

I'm no republican, but I don't think we make ourselves look great when we treat this kind of shit as being reasonable.d

The solar industry is a grotesque, expensive, failure that has done nothing at all to address climate change.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

7. Buggy-whip owners of the world, UNITE! ....or don't.

This is how I see this ridiculous protest.

Unbelievable, antediluvian thinking (if you can even call it thinking!)

[Meadowoak]

9. I live in hill/mountain country, in my opinion, mountain top would be ideal locations for solar farm

It's not really usable for anything else. Lots of direct full sun.

[dumbcat]

13. I wonder how many

large scale solar panel support structures you have built in hilly country, and what your cost was as opposed to flat, level terrain?

[Jilly_in_VA]

11. Same thing going on here

The local village board just nixed a solar farm. For no good reason either, as far as I could see.

[Finishline42]

15. Why they chose this spot in Indiana

the area has flat, sandy ground ideal for solar and is a meeting point for two vast electrical grids, called MISO and PJM, that service tens of millions of Americans and will allow Mammoth to dump converted sunlight into both of them for consumption.

In July 2019, Cohen was introduced to a farmer named Norm Welker. Welker’s land, Cohen said, was “right on the bullseye, exactly where you’d want to be.” Transmission lines run through Welker’s fields in Starke county and, crucially, Welker himself has been unsentimental about turning away from half a century of planting and harvesting corn on this land.

As for the financial incentive for the owner of that land...

Welker’s 1,075 acres in Starke county will be leased for the next three decades at $1,000 an acre a year. “It’s five times what I’d make through corn,” he said. “It’s crazy money.”

And a good point to boot...

To Welker, solar is an evolution of farming rather than a betrayal of it. He already harvests the sunlight for his crops, he reasons, and considers fears of food shortages by taking land out of production overblown given that 40% of all US corn is already mashed up for another form of energy – ethanol,

[Brenda]

18. Last paragraph is SPOT ON

I didn't read the original story but I bet Connie's farmland is nothing but monoculture corn for ethanol or soybeans for unhealthy Big Food.