Angry US landowners are killing off renewable energy projects

There’s an old saw in the trash business that says, “everybody wants their trash picked up but nobody wants it put down.” That’s not a perfect analogy for what’s happening with renewable-energy projects in New York and New England but the sentiment behind it is familiar. A recent Gallup poll found that 73 percent of Americans favor increased use of wind and solar energy. But in New York and the Northeast, adding large increments of new renewable capacity is getting increasingly difficult due to growing local opposition. Land-use conflicts are also hindering high-voltage transmission projects. Last May, Cambria in upstate New York rejected a proposed 100-megawatt solar project because it violated the town’s zoning laws, and another upstate town, Duanesburg, recently imposed a six-month moratorium on new solar projects. Last July, the New Hampshire Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold the state’s rejection of the proposed Northern Pass transmission line, a 192-mile-long project designed to bring hydropower from Canada to New England. In January, the company backing Dairy Air Wind, the only remaining wind-energy project being developed in Vermont, announced it was pulling the plug on the single-turbine facility due to a “political environment that is hostile to wind energy.”

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Posted by admin on Mar 9 2020. Filed under News at Now, Renewable energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry