The majority of people living near large solar plants wouldn’t mind if another one were built nearby, an analysis of U.S. survey data suggests. The findings challenge conventional wisdom that renewable energy inspires NIMBY-ism (that is, people think it’s a good idea in theory, but don’t want to live near wind or solar farms themselves).
But the study also sounds a note of caution regarding public support for solar development: people who were more familiar with their local solar installation were also more likely to oppose further solar projects in the area.
That’s a concern because lots and lots of solar will be needed to decarbonize the energy grid. According to some estimates, up to 70 gigawatts of solar could be installed each year over the next decade in the U.S. That works out to 1,650 new large-scale projects each year, with each megawatt of solar requiring five to eight acres of land. And there’s some evidence that local regulations and community opposition are increasingly resulting in delays and cancellation of renewable energy projects.
Until now, there has been a lot more research on attitudes about wind energy projects compared to solar, and more studies of support for proposed solar installations than attitudes about existing projects. To fill in the gap, researchers mailed a survey to a sample of 4,861 people living within 3 miles of large-scale solar facilities installed between 2017 and 2021.
They received 979 responses from neighbors of 379 different solar projects across 39 states. The solar installations ranged from 1 to 328 megawatts in capacity and averaged 400 acres in size, with the largest covering more than 2,000 acres (3 square miles). The researchers analyzed the relationship between respondents’ support for additional solar development in their area and a host of other variables.
Overall, 43% of people had a positive view of their nearby solar project, 42% were neutral, and 15% had a negative view, the researchers report in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy. Closely correlated with these attitudes, 43% said they would support a new solar project in the neighborhood, 39% were neutral, and 18% opposed new solar development nearby.
“Twice as many people said they’d support additional large scale solar in their community than those who said they’d oppose additional solar,” says study team member Sarah Mills, director of the Center for EmPowering Communities at the University of Michigan.
Mills suspects this result partly has to do with the fact that many of the solar projects in the study were relatively small in size, and thus easily camouflaged with a screen of trees or the like. “The biggest surprise to me was that so many people (roughly a third) who live within 3 miles of a large-scale solar farm didn’t know it existed,” Mills says.
Mills has worked extensively with communities nearby very large solar projects that sprawl across hundreds of acres. “Folks surrounding these larger projects can’t help but be familiar with them; they are much harder to camouflage.”
In the new study, people who lived near larger solar projects were less likely to support more solar development in the area.
But aside from size, objective variables had relatively little effect on people’s support for new solar projects. Subjective variables such as people’s perceptions of an existing solar project’s impact on their quality of life, landscape aesthetics, and local community priorities were a much bigger driver of people’s attitudes, the researchers found.
Along these lines, people who lived closer to existing solar installations were no less likely to support further development, contradicting the NIMBY hypothesis. On the other hand, people who were more familiar with an existing solar project were less likely to support a new one.
The study’s implications are nuanced, Mills says. “I think some people will read the headline and assume that opposition to solar projects is overblown and that people ‘learn to live with it’ once solar is built, further bolstering the movement in some states for permitting reform to preempt local decisions about projects. That’s not what we found.” In fact, the results suggest that local residents’ perceptions are important, and need to be taken into account to ensure long-term success of solar development.
In the future, Mills and her team aim to investigate how people’s views of renewable energy development change over time, especially the cumulative effect of multiple solar installations built in the same area. They also want to identify best practices for solar project design that are most likely to give local residents a good impression of the effect on quality of life and fit with the community.
Source: Rand J. et al. “More power to them: U.S. large-scale solar neighbors’ support for additional solar.” Frontiers in Renewable Energy Design 2025.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine / AI-generated.
