Solar panels, turbines: Eyesores or future landmarks?
Through some effort, planning and cooperation, those riled-up neighbors might come to see projects like these as landscape enhancements.
Solar farms seem to reliably produce a bumper crop of riled up neighbors. The latest example is the proposed SunTec farm in Accomack County, where people are unhappy about losing farmland to development and officials are also unhappy about losing taxes to state incentives.
There’s been a similar ruckus in Crisfield, with neighbors protesting a solar farm there. Not everybody’s happy with wind turbines either. The consensus seems to be that green energy projects like this are eyesores that destroy the rural character and knock down property values.
SunTec is arguing that agriculture and solar farms can go together. As its trump card, it wants to bring in a flock of the endangered local Hog Island sheep to keep the grass trimmed in an environmentally friendly way around the solar panels. It’s brilliant — who can argue against small farming, preserving local heritage and natural weed control?
It’s a strategic move, but it also illustrates that there’s more than one way of looking at these kinds of projects. What if they can become part of the landscape and not a disruption?
Look at Holland’s famous windmills. They’re a national treasure, an iconic symbol of the Dutch. But long before that, they were working structures built for unromantic tasks like pumping water.
The Dutch Department of Tourism didn’t call in a consultant and decide what the country needed was an iconic symbol, so why not build windmills everywhere? I doubt very much the windmills were designed with future postcards in mind. There may even have been some complaints in the beginning that the new structures were eyesores, cluttering up that pretty Dutch sky.
It may be hard to picture solar panels in landscape paintings of the Eastern Shore, but give it a few hundred years, you never know. There is something pretty about the rows of rectangles in perfect alignment, reflecting the color of the sky.
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There was recently a huge uproar up in Kent County, Maryland, over a plan to bring in wind turbines. People said it would ruin the beautiful Kent County landscape. They named their opposition plan “Keep Kent Scenic.”
It’s true wind turbines change the skyline, but is it a bad change? I’d call the towering turbines majestic. Scenic though Kent County may be, the word “majestic” doesn’t spring to your lips much when you drive through now.
Also, if you stop and think it over, it’s unreasonable to try to control what everyone else does with their land because you don’t like the view over your morning coffee. This is how land ownership works. You don’t put hydrangeas in their solar array, they don’t put solar panels in your yard.
At the same time, it wouldn’t kill developers to put in a little more effort. Instead of just plopping in structures that are all function and efficiency, maybe one of their goals could be to make them look nice.
And that idea about the flock of sheep reminds us that there’s no rule these sites need to be sterile wasteland. Why not put in suitable vegetation that could help wildlife, like milkweed for monarch butterflies? The sheep would eat the milkweed of course, so you’d have to pick one or the other.
Through some effort, planning and cooperation, those riled-up neighbors might come to see projects like these as landscape enhancements, rather than the other way around.
Andrew Sharp is a producer at The Daily Times and delmarvanow.com. Email him at asharp@dmg.gannett.com. Find him on Twitter @buckeye_201 and on Facebook @andrewsharp201.