Across the country — from suburban Virginia, rural Michigan, southern Tennessee, and the sugar cane fields of Louisiana to the coasts of Maine and New Jersey and the deserts of Nevada — new renewable energy development has drawn heated opposition that has birthed, in many cases, bans, moratoriums, and other restrictions.
By ROBERT ZULLO, Florida Phoenix
BUCYRUS, Ohio — In four terms as a county elected official in northern Ohio, it was the most contentious issue Doug Weisenauer had ever seen.
The state legislature had newly empowered county governments to drastically restrict wind and solar power development, a process formerly overseen by the Ohio Power Siting Board, and the meetings of the three-member governing body for Crawford County (population 41,754) suddenly started becoming a lot more animated.
“As soon as Senate Bill 52 passed, the anti-wind people, they started converging on our weekly commissioners’ meetings and demanding that we do something,” said Weisenauer, a Republican, like the other two members of Crawford County Commission.
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Apex Clean Energy, a Virginia company, had been signing leases with locals for a proposed 300-megawatt wind farm, called Honey Creek, but Weisenauer was skeptical it would ever get built, saying in an interview he’d seen more than half a dozen would-be wind projects come and go.
Ultimately, the commissioners voted 2-1 last year, with Weisenauer the lone no vote, for a 10-year ban on wind development. The commission’s decision was overwhelmingly upheld by county voters in a referendum last fall.
“I said all along I am not telling people what they can and can’t do on their property,” Weisenauer said. “It got ugly. Our families have been split, and friendships broken. It was bad for our community.”
Crawford County, of course, is far from an isolated case. Across the country — from suburban Virginia, rural Michigan, southern Tennessee, and the sugar cane fields of Louisiana to the coasts of Maine and New Jersey and the deserts of Nevada — new renewable energy development has drawn heated opposition that has birthed, in many cases, bans, moratoriums, and other restrictions.
With states, corporations, utilities, and the federal government setting aggressive renewable energy goals, as well as big tax incentives such as in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, wind and solar developers have been pushing projects that are igniting fierce battles over property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns.
And those debates are often happening in a miasma of misinformation and skewed by political polarization. However, some who have seen the backlash to renewable development up close and personal also say developers need to do a better job of being upfront with communities and convincing them of the benefits of their projects.
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