NIMBYs Shoot Down Green Projects Next Door While Planet Burns

(Bloomberg) -- People love renewable power projects. Just not the one next door.

While states from New York to Nevada want to get most of their power from solar plants and wind farms, residents are balking at living near green projects. And unlike opposition to fossil fuels due to concerns over pollution and contamination, the hostility toward clean power is largely driven by aesthetics and property values.

Rows of solar panels threaten to mar pristine vistas, while fears are rising among local residents that towering wind turbines will ruin the bucolic nature of their rural towns and drive down home prices. It’s the latest iteration of a longstanding dilemma: People want projects built for the public good —s uch as affordable housing or roads and power lines — but don’t want to be near them.

“There’s a reason people live in communities like this,” said Pamela Atwater, president of a citizens’ group in upstate New York fighting a proposed wind farm on the Lake Ontario shore. “It’s a big visual impact, a big noise impact. It would change the nature, the character of where we live.”

As large projects proliferate across the country, such worries are dimming the green glow that once surrounded an industry built on the promise of saving the world. For instance, supervisors for the largest county in California — a state that has committed to going carbon-free by 2045 — voted in February to block new renewable facilities near many rural desert communities.

San Bernardino County saw a spate of plant construction in the last decade, and some longtime residents suddenly found their views of the desert transformed by fields of panels, said County Supervisor Robert Lovingood. “We believe in this industry, but it’s a balance,” Lovingood said, adding that the new regulations still leave plenty of room for development in a county that’s larger than Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined. “We don’t have to disturb more pristine desert,” he said.

In New York, legislators passed a climate change plan in June calling for all of the state’s electricity to come from emissions-free sources by 2040. And yet, two upstate wind farm proposals stalled this year, one in the face of determined resistance from Atwater’s citizens’ group, the other on concerns it would threaten a bald eagle nest.

“Companies are learning that the halo effect of building solar and wind projects isn’t necessarily enough to protect them from backlash from NIMBYs,” said Alicia Rivera, spokeswoman for renewable developer RES Ltd., referring to the “Not in my backyard” sentiment that has long fueled opposition to big infrastructure projects.

Labeling opponents NIMBYs, however, does nothing to win them over. “Bottom line: They think local people just need to become more educated,” Atwater said. “That doesn’t fly very well.”

Land-intensive and highly visible, individual solar and wind projects have often generated friction with potential neighbors. The pushback may be more noticeable now than, say, 10 years ago, simply because more projects are being proposed in more states, affecting more communities.

“Maybe the easy places for these things to go have been taken,” said Cullen Howe, a senior renewable energy advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Oftentimes, the places these things are now being sited are closer to residential areas, so there’s going to be a greater number of people affected.”

After residents raised concerns about their property values, a proposed NextEra Energy Inc. wind farm fell short of winning approval from Reno County commissioners in Kansas in June. Nebraska passed a law in May making it easier for land owners to challenge in court new transmission lines for wind farms.

Renewable developer RES has dealt with its fair share of backlash. In April, the company canceled its Summit Lake Wind project, a proposed 130-megawatt wind farm in L’Anse Township, Michigan. RES said the decision was due to ongoing delays in the planning process, which made the project unworkable.

Summit Lake faced resistance over fears that the wind turbines would spoil wilderness and discourage tourism on a quiet stretch of the Lake Superior shore. The project site, next to the L’Anse Indian Reservation, also raised concerns among the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community that the turbines would harm their ability to fish and hunt in the area.

The company also canceled plans for a 600 MW wind farm in northern Indiana in September 2018. The Harvest Wind project had received pushback from the local communities in Cass and Miami counties that were concerned about property rights and safety issues. Still, the company has also met with success. In December 2018, it finished a 80-megawatt wind project in upstate New York and in March broke ground on a solar facility in Georgia.

“I think people are right to ask questions about what it means to have a wind farm in a community,” said Paul Copleman, a spokesman for Avangrid Renewables, which last year canceled a wind farm in New York state. “It’s our responsibility to do our best to explain the science, explain what it’s going to mean and convey those benefits.”

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 220 news outlets to highlight climate change.

--With assistance from Hannah Recht and Christopher Cannon.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bloomberg.net, Pratish Narayanan

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