This town is not too bright about solar panels.
A North Carolina town rejected a solar farm proposal after citizens at the Woodland Town Council expressed fears that the panels would take away sunlight from their town.
Jane Mann, a retired science teacher from Northampton, spoke at the town meeting with concerns about photosynthesis and was worried plants wouldn’t get enough sunlight if solar panels were installed, the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald reported.
She also argued that solar panels could cause cancer.
Her husband, Bobby Mann, claimed that solar farms would “suck up all the energy from the sun” and ruin the town’s businesses.
“You’re killing your town,” he said. “All the young people are going to move out."
The sun provides the Earth with so much energy that if all the solar power in Texas alone was absorbed, it would be 300 times the total output of the world’s power plants, according to the University of Tennessee’s study.
For these solar farms to “suck up all the energy from the sun,” it would have to absorb more than 500 billion horsepower in one second, according to NASA.
Woodland was a popular choice for solar farms because of its electrical substation that could be hooked up to a grid.
Company representatives from the Strata Solar Company tried reasoning with the town’s concerns, and told them there wouldn’t be any negative impacts.
“The panels don’t draw additional sunlight,” Brent Niemann, a company representative told the concerned citizens. “There are no toxical materials on site. This is a tried and true technology.”
It appeared the solar company’s appeal to sensibility didn’t work, as the town rejected the proposal, 3-1 against rezoning land near the town’s highway to build the solar farm.
For the record, Woodland, North Carolina is 279 miles from the home of Env-Econ's resident North Carolina expert. Apparently the radius of John's sphere of influence is less than 279 miles.
