It’s taken a long time, but there’s been quite a shift in the face of the traditional Not In My Back Yard or NIMBY as they’re affectionately known.
Decades ago, the acronym was used almost exclusively to describe the upper-middle-class and wealthy Americans who would come pouring out of hilltop, island, or gated communities to protest planning for something being built they felt was going to adversely impact either their real estate values or their cherished upper-crusty school systems.
It also gave rise to the exasperated, eye-rolling BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone – thanks to the infrastructure gridlock caused by the NIMBIES and their political power when they got their dander up. It didn’t matter what was needed at the time or how minimally intrusive the plans were. If well-heeled NIMBIES decided it offended their tender sensibilities, you might as well scrap the whole thing. They had the time and political firepower to shoot it down, whatever it was.
If it was something particularly distasteful and annoying, as when the original NIMBIES became enamored with environmental causes and began to want wind farms, recycling plants, and solar projects to save the planet, those didn’t happen off of places like Martha’s Vineyard, or in Napa Valley itself. The ugly and impractical gets shunted off to where people either need the money being offered to plop a tower or panels on their back 40. Or where they don’t have the money to fend off the corporation, county, and/or state who’ve decided to locate one locally come hell or high water, particularly when many governments are unafraid to use eminent domain to take the land (see carbon capture pipelines in Iowa and the Dakotas).
But the time for riding roughshod over the little guys in the burbs and rural areas may finally be coming to an end. Witness what happened to a much-ballyhooed wind farm project in Iowa.
Apex Clean Energy, out of Virginia, rode into Traer, IA, in 2022 with an office in town, fancy brochures, and promises of many good things to come. This would be a sure bet, they told attendees at a town meeting, unlike…you know…”farming.”
They even hooked up local former legislator Drew Christiansen to do some of the pitch work.
Crummy weather, kolaches, Busch Lite, and wind turbines appeared to be the ingredients necessary to bring area farmers and landowners out en masse last Tuesday, March 22, to Traer Memorial Building to hear a pitch from Apex Clean Energy on why another large installation of wind turbines belongs in Tama County.
…“We all know clean energy is good for the environment,” Christensen said,” but what’s really important here locally is the economic picture, our commitment to the community. We have $800 million dollars paid to local landowners from Apex. One billion dollars of tax revenue injected into local communities. Thirty-six-hundred short term and 300 permanent jobs created.”
Over the 30-year lifespan of the proposed Winding Stair Wind project, a local economic impact assessment conducted for Apex by a third-party predicts the project will provide more than $40 million in total school district revenue, more than $12 million in total county property taxes, more than $67 million in landowner lease payments, and roughly 16-18 full-time windtech jobs.
Christensen also said Apex plans to establish a community grant program in the county for local nonprofits.
…[Apex development manager Jarrod] Beckstrom also briefly touched on why landowners should consider signing a lease.
“Crop prices change all the time,” Beckstrom said as the presentation wound down. “[It can be] difficult to plan for and sometimes to adjust to. [Wind energy lease payments are] generational income, so the lifetime of the lease enables a lot of landowners to have reliable income for the folks that will take over after them. It diversifies your portfolio of assets … and reduces the impact of fluctuating fuel prices for power generation.”
I don’t know. Maybe their first and biggest mistake was doing all the talking…
…The mood in the room following the less than 15 minute presentation was fairly subdued at first with many in attendance expressing bewilderment to the Telegraph that there was no public Q&A session as anticipated.
…because by last March, Apex had closed their downtown office space and was in the “reassessing argle-bargle” stage of defeat.
…“We are continuing to assess the fluid interconnection situation for our Winding Stair Wind project in Tama County,” Drew Christensen, Director of Public Engagement for Apex, told the North Tama Telegraph in a recent email when asked to provide comment regarding the status of the project in Tama County.
Vurt da furk is that even, right? Argle-bargle.
The project blew up completely this past Saturday when the firm announced they’d canceled the landowner leases they already had in hand.
Hardly any of the farmers bought what Apex was selling and, worse, made sure their voices were heard the entire time by organizing against the wind farm.
After first leasing office space in downtown Dysart more than two years ago, the Virginia-based company Apex Clean Energy – better known by its commercial wind energy project name, Winding Stair Wind – has terminated its leases with Tama County landowners.
…The project generated a significant amount of local opposition ever since the first land agents with the Ames-based JCG Land Services began contacting landowners on behalf of Apex in the fall of 2021. The local coalition Tama County Against Turbines (TCAT) formed in direct opposition to it soon thereafter, and its members frequently attended county meetings and hearings to voice their displeasure with the proposal.
From development phase to bust
From July 2021 through June 2022, some 25 easements ranging in size from just under three acres to over 500 acres were filed with the Tama County Recorder’s Office between Winding Stair Project LLC and landowners. In total, the easements encompassed more than 3,380 acres.
During a Tama Co. Board of Supervisors meeting held in May of 2022, Christensen shared that Apex’s Winding Stairs Wind project would need “somewhere in the realm of north of 20,000 [acres]” to be viable.
After more than two years of working with the local landowners, Apex was only able to secure commitments for about a seventh of the land they needed for the farm. Those darn farmers couldn’t be bought.
Apex finally had to pull the plug.
Oh, it had to be maddening because you just know they thought they had it in the bag by the way they initially rolled into town. Bowl the rubes right over with fistfuls of cash and promises.
Turns out some locals didn’t fall off the cabbage truck yesterday, and the big city guys weren’t prepared for that. Nor were they prepared to treat residents with the respect they deserved, and I will bet you that played a large part in the project going south almost immediately.
That arrogance is a theme in many of these stories, from the New Jersey coast to the Osage Indian reservation. Folks aren’t being quite as polite about it as they were previously.
Arrogance is causing problems for the Green juggernaut in the United Kingdom, too, and it’s about time. People are done being told to suck it up when the end results suck for them every single time.
On a winter afternoon, dozens of local residents pour into a drafty village hall, tucked away in the picturesque English countryside. They wear thick coats and skeptical frowns, and are here to fight plans to build a solar farm on their doorstep.
Meet the NIMBYs. Local, polite, mostly gray-haired — and a nightmare vision for U.K. politicians trying to honor their climate promises.
If hammering out deals at global climate summits is difficult, it has nothing on trying to push through clean energy projects across Britain’s green and pleasant land. Net zero may have been written into law in Westminster, but the frontline of the battle to go green is in rural community halls like this one, where residents organize to insist: Not In My Back Yard.
It’s not like Britain isn’t a tiny island to begin with, so the idea of forcing a solar farm on any community’s greenspace that’s so large it would take three hours to walk from one end to the other? Who in their right mind wouldn’t find that objectionable?
…Botley West, if built, would be the U.K.’s largest solar development, a mega farm covering 18 kilometers of countryside, with the potential to power 330,000 homes. It would take over three hours to walk from one end to the other. The size of the scheme has been agreed with National Grid and can’t be reduced.
“It is just too big,” said two residents in the hall, visibly offended by the plans laid out in front of them, a procession of artwork and heavily bullet-pointed factsheets laid out as part of a public event by Botley West’s developers to canvas local views.
“Just not right for the area,” tuts an elderly lady, fingers pinched tensely over a laminated map of the development, which shows a sea of glass and steel imposed across English countryside.
As the article above says, the Botley West project “is a beast.” The Stop Botley West group’s website is tremendous as far as information goes, and not just for that project…
3,200 ACRES, 15+ villages affected, 11 miles long, 4 miles wide
Over 2 million solar panels, 110km of footpaths overwhelmed
75% on Green Belt, 45% of panel area is best & most versatile (BMV) land
Within the setting of Blenheim Palace, adjacent to Churchill’s Grave and many other heritage assets
…but solar has severe shortcomings in general, especially in regard to the land with an average of 156 cloudy days a year.
The general dreariness of the UK is a running international punchline – who in their right mind would think solar is a good answer for their energy security to begin with? Doesn’t that highlight the inanity baked into the entire NetZero push?
Solar
Different materials absorb light of different wavelengths. The materials used in solar panels absorb about 20% of the spectrum of wavelengths – they are 20% efficient.
The figure used to describe the Botley West proposal, 840MW is not a measure of its output, but its potential maximum capacity.
Obviously, solar panels do not absorb light energy when it is dark or cloudy. Because of where the UK is on the planet, the sunlight which falls on solar panels is the equivalent of three hours of full sun each day, averaged over the year.
So you can say that a solar farm is 20% efficient and can only operate at maximum capacity for three hours a day, averaged over the year.
By comparison, solar panels in the south of France get the equivalent of five hours sunshine/day through the year, so they generate about two-thirds as much electricity again as do panels in the UK.
Unsurprisingly, the group’s best suggestion is nuclear power. Hello.
What a shame the WEF-bought and sold British government isn’t as practical or concerned with its citizens’ welfare and security.
What a good thing that citizens world-wide are finally banding together to fight the madness while utilizing all the media tools that have been arrayed against them previously.
NIMBY power to the PEOPLE at last – not the politicians or the privileged.
Read the full article here
