Ontario town opposes solar panel park - NIMFY

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.market-day.net/article_125386/20080214/Ontario-town-opposes-solar-panel-park.php

Ontario town opposes solar panel park

Posted on February 14, 2008
from Staff Reports

Residents of a southwestern Ontario town voiced opposition to a proposed 35-megawatt solar energy park because it might lower property values, a report said.

Representatives of the California company SunPower and Toronto partner Helios Energy outlined the $300 million proposal Wednesday night at public meeting in Amherstburg, the Windsor Star reported Thursday.

Speakers said the proposed energy park on the grounds of a closed Canadian chemical plant would provide enough electricity to power 5,000 homes and create local jobs, but residents expressed concern about the effect sprawling banks of black solar panels would have on local property values.

Pauline Cookson, a resident, said she couldn't see any direct benefit to her and her family from the project. "I don't want it in my front yard," she said.

...

Now, let me get this straight...

There used to be a chemical plant there? (Presumably there's now an abandoned chemical plant there!) and they're worried about what a solar farm might do to their property values!? :crazy:

[PDJane]

1. Oy, gevalt...........

I would like to say I don't believe it, but I lived in rural Ontario many, many years ago...

[phantom power]

2. I've beat this horse before, but people are very accustomed to unobtrusive energy.

It comes from under the ground, in faraway places that we can ignore.

Now all that's changing. Domestic uranium mining. Big wind-farms. Solar panels. Above ground, and in our face. Kind of like that bitter-sweet day when your kid learns where meat comes from.

I expect this resistance to continue, until the blackouts start. Then we'll see what we see.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. A bit of trivia

One of my friends was in the navy; so he knew what it meant to "beat a dead horse."

[phantom power]

4. Wow, and here I thought it was just about bludgeoning expired horses.

When really it's about bludgeoning junior sailors who are eating expired horses.
:toast:

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. My friend told me that he participated in dead horse rituals

Making an effigy. Throwing it overboard. &c.

[NNadir]

6. Just for the record, what kind of plants do you think manufactures solar cells?

Let me guess...

You think that solar cells are made by farmers using switch grass?

Actually, bub, solar cells are made using something called chemicals.

And where are these chemicals made? Why in chemical plants.

The fact that little whiny yuppie brats living in Snowmass have worked to export all these chemical plants to China and India does not make them innocuous - unless of course, you think (and I sometimes wonder about this sort of thinking in the yuppie brat set) - that Chinese and Indians are somehow less human than the members of Greenpeace.

The fact that the yuppie set pretends that electronic junk comes from outer space and is delivered by space aliens with benign intentions has not a fucking thing to do with cadmium poisoning in the China, and for that matter, in the Platte River.

I'd ask you to get real, but that, apparently would be out of the question.

The main reason that the external cost of solar electricity - which is primarily a toxicological cost gets missed is that solar electricity is, and always has been, a trivial form of energy.

If solar electricity ever gets to an exajoule a year - and there's no evidence that it ever will - there will suddenly appear, out of nowhere, a new set of "concerned" environmentalists who will begin whining about some kid somewhere who got sick from some silicon fluoride compound.