More than 10 million U.S. homes sit within three miles of a solar farm. A new national survey looks into how people feel about having these large renewable energy projects as their neighbors.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory led a survey of nearly 1,000 people living near a large solar farm in 39 states, including several in the Mountain West: Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. The responses came from people who live near projects built between 2017 to 2021, ranging in size from 1 megawatt to 250 megawatts.
Researchers found positive attitudes about being neighbors to solar developments outnumber negative by nearly a 3-to-1 margin.
But negative attitudes outnumber the positive by a 12-to-1 margin for people living near really big solar farms. Specifically, these are projects that are 100 megawatts or larger and cover thousands of acres of land. In the Mountain West, projects of that…
