Compared to literally every other way of generating power, they are relatively silent and unobtrusive. They also don’t poison the air around them which is pretty neat.
Yes, but the relevant comparison for the residents isn't to a coal plant, it's to the undeveloped field that the solar arrays replaced.
Depending upon their other priorities, they may be upset about the loss of hunting access as well. Understandably, people putting up solar arrays don't want people firing guns in the middle of their arrays.
We have to make power somehow and they all want to use said power. It mostly just boils down to nimbyism at the end of the day. They are just unaware of (or don’t care about) areas like cancer alley where we dump all our mining/refining/processing/etc. in an already impoverished area that can’t push back the same way wealthy neighborhoods with social status can.
If I were to hazard a guess every person complaining would happily suffer the 'consequences' of a solar farm not being near their neighborhood.
It really should be a no brainer compromise to zone solar as industrial so they're not near where people live. There's in practice infinite amounts of land you can get zoned like this. Living to electrical noise sucks in a way living need next to a wind farm doesn't.
I mean you're not wrong, if I measured the sound with a microphone I bet an air conditioner would be twice as loud but at the same time I'm sure that air conditioner would also be louder than the electrical buzzing you hear when you live near the big wires. But here's the thing, arguing over whether or not the sound is tolerable (or worse having some government agency full of people who will never live next to these things declaring it tolerable) I think is the wrong battle to be fighting which is why I think it's a no-brainer compromise.
You won't have to hear it, you won't have to look at it except as way off in the distance, you won't have to worry about whether or not your buddy's farm is gonna get taken over by one when they run into financial troubles. Out your backyard you get to look at mostly pristine farmland and wilderness. During this time where there's political will and capital to just ban them outright I think this relatively small concession will make folks not put up too much in a fight as long as it's kept out of sight out of mind.
I have an air conditioner and I have solar panels. The air conditioner is not merely twice as loud. My air conditioner is 70 dbA and the solar panels are certainly below 30 dbA because I have never heard them make noise. The difference is multiple orders of magnitude.
Want a car? Here are thousands of options.
Want a fridge? Good luck in market research.
Want a TV? Nope, I will not help. Too many variables.
Bottle of water? Here are hundreds of options. Let's guess why one bottle can cost x100 times more than another.
Sometimes I just want simple things ... Like to drink a cup of coffee.
In my student time. There was a shop where we bought "Beer", "Cognac" or "Vodka", with corresponding simple labels. No trademarks, no info on producers. Very easy to choose.
I find coffee very approachable for people without any experience. If you have a good barista they should be able to make a good recommendation for you. Maybe start with something nutty or chocolatey and if you are a bit more adventurous, try a coffee with a berry flavored profile. For me the big surprise was when I started with specialty coffee that I could taste the difference between very small changes when pulling a shot.
If paralysed by consumer choice I would lean on Which?[0] magazine which is run by the Consumers' Association charity. Perhaps there is something similar in your geography.
> In my student time. There was a shop where we bought "Beer", "Cognac" or "Vodka", with corresponding simple labels.
This reminds me of the grocery store in the film Repo Man[1] which had a few digs at consumerism. I prefer to know where my alcohol is from & who made it but I pass no judgement.
Ahha, recently my daugher come to me with 3rd grade math problem.
"Without rearranging the digits 1 2 3 4 5, insert mathematical operation signs and, if necessary, parentheses between them so that the resulting expression equals 40 and 80.
The key is that you can combine digits (like 12+3/45) but you cannot change their order from the original sequence 1,2,3,4,5"
Grok3, Claude, Deepseek, Qwen all failed to solve this problem. Resulting in some very very wrong solutions. While Grok3 were admit it fail and don't provide answers all other AI's are provided just plain wrong answers, like `12 * 5 = 80`
ChatGPT were able to solve for 40, but not able to 80.
YandexGPT solved those correctly (maybe it were trained on same Math books)
Just checked Grok3 few more times. It were able to solve correctly for 80.
Geez. Who teaches this 3rd-grade class, Prof. Xavier?
Interestingly, the R1 1.58-bit dynamic quant model was able to sort of solve it. I changed the problem statement a bit to request only the solution for 40 and to tell it what operations it can use, both needed to keep from blowing out the limited context available on my machine (128MB RAM + 24MB GPU).
Took almost 3 hours and it wigged out a bit at the end, rambling about Lisp in Chinese, but it got an almost-valid answer: 1 * (2 + 3) * (4 + 5) - 5 (https://pastebin.com/ggL85RWJ) I didn't think it would get that far.
Neither Claude Sonet 3.5 or 3.7 could solve this correctly unless you add to the prompt “ Prove it with the js analysis tool, please use an efficient combinatorial algorithm to find the solution”… and I had to correct 3.7 because it was not following the instructions as 3.5 did
Yeah, the fact that I can't have my mouse in the normal position and scroll the actual article was a problem 10 times or more while trying to read the thing...
I mean slug is not important - id - is. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/eating-carrots-make-childr...