https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/renewable-energy-land-use-san-bernardino-county/
The biggest county in America doesn’t want big solar or wind projects.
It may be the largest county in America by land area, but San Bernardino County, Calif., has decided it doesn’t have enough room for big wind or big solar projects. On February 28, the county’s board of supervisors approved a measure that bans large renewable-energy projects on more than 1 million acres of private land.
The move provides yet another example of how the energy sprawl that inevitably comes with large-scale renewable-energy deployment is colliding with the interests of rural landowners and local governments that don’t want “green” projects in their neighborhoods. Of course, there’s no small irony that that collision is happening in California, which passed a law last year that requires utilities to be getting 60 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030.
As Los Angeles Times reporter Sammy Roth drily noted, achieving those renewable-energy goals “will require cooperation from local governments — and big solar and wind farms, like many infrastructure projects, are often unpopular at the local level.” All across the country rural landowners and governments have been rejecting or restricting renewable projects, and they’re doing so at the very same time that left-leaning politicians and some of the country’s biggest environmental groups are claiming that the U.S. must quit using hydrocarbons and nuclear energy, and instead rely solely on renewable energy for our electricity.
In January, some 600 environmental groups, including 350.org, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Working Group, submitted a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives, which said that the U.S. must shift to “100 percent renewable power generation by 2035 or earlier.” It continued, saying any “definition of renewable energy must . . . exclude all combustion-based power generation, nuclear, biomass energy, large-scale hydro, and waste-to-energy technologies.” For good measure, it said this new hypothetical electric grid must have the “ability to incorporate battery storage and distributed energy systems that are democratically governed.”