No corporate taxes, a compliant regulator, a dearth of environmental protection and cheap labor make South Dakota the perfect dumping ground for Earth killers like coal and eyesores like wind farms.
Nevertheless, according to Earth hating Public Utilities Cartel Commissioner Chris Nelson the amount of wind power generation may have reached its plateau. In a 2019 interview with WNAX Radio Nelson said he believes there will be rapid development of solar power production facilities instead. But, the predicted shift toward solar, wind energy didn't stop entirely; major projects like the $400 million Crowned Ridge Wind Farm still moved forward around that timeframe. However, his prediction accurately foreshadowed a broader regional and national trend of diversifying renewable portfolios with rapid solar deployment to balance out the grid.
Walworth County has a population of about 5,300 souls; it's rural, backwards and overwhelmingly Republican so Doral Renewables targeted slightly less primitive Brookings County for a solar farm instead.
Doral Renewables has much of the land it needs for a proposed 1,000-megawatt solar farm near Elkton in Richland and Elkton townships. “We’re at an endpoint regarding acquiring enough acreage to host the construction of the entire project,” Curtis Nordick, a senior development manager with Doral, told The Brookings Register in a recent interview. The proposed project has a lot of hoops to jump through at the state and local levels, including permitting processes, before it can even hope to break ground. But if it does, it’ll provide jobs for 200 to 300 workers during its multi-year construction phase that would start in early 2029 and continue into at least 2031. “We’re not taking the land out of production, necessarily; we’re just changing the use to be kind of an accommodation regarding the solar project,” Nordick said. [Proposed solar farm near Elkton reaches land milestone]Utilities are not your friends so don’t tie your photovoltaic system to the grid but if you use it as a backup keep your own electricity completely separate from the utility that reads your meter.
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Despite their flaws, wind and solar are better than coal and gas. What would be better than any of those is aggressive energy efficiency and conservation, but it's not going to happen on the scale needed to meet Kyoto targets, since Americans feel they are entitled to burn (or waste) as much energy as they can afford.
Thanks for your input, it's always nice to have visitors!
Using a closed-loop, self-sustaining process that operates through an engineered thermal cycle data centers can generate their own power and cool water simultaneously through an emerging decentralized strategy known as "Bring Your Own Power and Cooling" (BYOP&C). Driven by severe grid constraints from the AI boom, data centers are moving away from public utilities to build on-site microgrids.
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