Solar power’s big fat dead footprint

If being “green” means “nature friendly,” solar is anything but.

Big industrial solar farms, like one currently being proposed by sPower Company off the I-95 corridor in Northern Virginia, are notorious for not only chewing up large tracts of open spaces but also threatening area wildlife. Indeed, if you want to sterilize a woodland or meadow, blacking it out with miles upon miles of (made in China) silicone panels will accomplish your mission as surely as paving it over.

Constructing big solar farms seems innocuous enough, until you realize how inefficient they can be. Every new solar project jacks up prices for ratepayers. That’s partly how Germans tripled the price they pay for electricity without reducing their CO2 emissions.

Such inefficiency also means the amount of land required to generate just a little bit of electricity is staggering. Residents of rural Virginia are finding this out the hard way as the proposed sPower solar farm will blanket a swath of 3,500 acres, or 5.5 square miles, just to provide a small amount of juice to help out some of the area’s big tech companies.

CFACT senior policy analyst Bonner Cohen reports at CFACT.org on sPower’s plans to build one of the largest solar installations in North America right in the heart of lush, historic Spotsylvania:

Thousands of acres of trees have already been cleared to make way for the solar arrays. Like industrial-size wind installations, solar arrays are both land-intensive and intermittent. The Spotsylvania project will require a source of backup energy when the sun doesn’t shine. But battery backup brings its own environmental problems. Batteries degrade over time, and the maintenance and eventual disposal of the thousands of batteries, all laden with toxic chemicals, needed to back up the project’s 1.8 million solar panels raises questions about how “green” the project really is.

Constructing large, industrial-sized solar farms are a favorite of those on the Green Left. This is because they believe such facilities are needed to give them a good night’s sleep and dissipate their hypochondriac fears surrounding “global warming.”

It is also for this reason they bizarrely consider such industrial-sized solar farms to as “green.” For to them, Big Solar is an environmental plus, a boon for Mother Nature and the planet — even if it happens to wipe out a few endangered birds and thousands acres of trees in the process.

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