This week a council approved a solar farm on two hundred and thirty-five acres of grazing, and the family who had run cattle on it for generations said it would probably finish them. The panels will be there for forty years. The cattle were there for four hundred. The land is not the developer's. It belongs to an estate or a pension fund, and the developer offers a rent per acre no cow has ever earned. The farmer gets a letter. The council, told to triple solar by a minister who has never kept a beast, finds that the loss of a herd is not a planning consideration. So the field goes under glass. In Britain a solar array produces for about one hour in nine. It makes most in June at noon, when the country needs it least, and nothing on a January evening, when it needs it most, so a gas station is kept idling behind every one. The panels are made in China from polysilicon out of a province the government will not name. They lose output every year they stand there, and at the end there is no plan and no bond for taking them away. A quarter of a million square metres of glass, aluminium and copper cable, in a field, with a thirty-year lease and a company that will not exist when it ends. Under the panels the grass dies for want of light, the soil compacts under the plant, and the hedges go because the fence has to be electric and the fence has to be straight. The sheep in the brochure are for the photograph. The cattle were a solar panel already. Grass takes the light, the cow converts it, and the output is beef, every day of the year, on no cable, no subsidy and no inverter, for as long as there is rain. They have replaced a power station that makes dinner with one that works on a sunny afternoon and sits dead the rest of the time, and the family who ran the first one are being evicted to make room for the second.

I love fighting for rural Arizona. #AZ02

This is what was said in a Greer page. They keep stressing its for Greer residents...

Projects like this and Lava Run are being pursued on state land against the wishes of rural Arizonans, @trentloos. Arizona needs a new governor.

I'll be putting my boots on the ground up there next week. We're going to make this a national story, as it should be. @alex_fasulo

Why does everyone else out in rural-residential or zoned agricultural areas have to following local zoning, but foreign solar and wind companies can depart from that zoning for industrial buildouts? This is the "take" that's going on across New York State, where patchworks of 20+ parcels are allowed to break zoning everyone else in the area has to follow. It's why property values plummet if you live near one of these ecological detention zones. Last week at the NYS Senate Energy ORES Roundtable, residents from around the state talked about how no one can sell their homes if they end up near an ORES complex. Would you buy a property and look at this view out your back window? People are in rural areas for peace/quite, viewsheds, history, ability to grow their own food, and the predictability that comes with rural zoning. You're allowed to do what you want with your property in this country... to an extent. Zoning exists to create uniformity and predictability in a region. It guarantees a certain property value for those around you. It's why you can't decide tomorrow to build a Walmart in your backyard (Mind you, Walmarts are about 20 acres, total, in size. These complexes are 1,000+ acres.). If these complexes were being built in zoned commercial/industrial areas, between highways, and over parking lots, you wouldn't hear the outcries that are pouring from rural New York towns statewide. Hard-working New Yorkers who have invested in their properties, land, habitats, views, and culture are being financially destroyed by bureaucrats in Albany who have never, in their lives, set foot in our rural villages. That's the problem here.