Upon further review, it appears one of the Silicon Ranch installations is using Korean cells manufactured in Georgia
npr.org
Then last year, Steve Singletary, whose family has owned land in Early County since the 1930s, got a different kind of offer, one he couldn't turn down. Nashville-based Silicon Ranch wanted to buy 1,400 acres, about a quarter of his family's land, to build one of the solar farms that would power the Facebook data center, 200 miles away.
"Hate to see it go," Singletary says, "but things change, and it was a golden opportunity. So we took advantage of it." The timing was right, he explains, since no one in his family farms anymore — they'd been renting the land out to others. The money was good, and the terms seemed sound, he says.
Absent from the discussion with Silicon Ranch was any mention of climate change. It wouldn't have swayed him anyway.
"The world's not coming to an end next week because of climate change," Singletary says. "I'm just skeptical of the whole thing. To me, it's played up way more than the effect it's actually having."
Had there been a golden opportunity to sell a piece of his land for a nuclear plant or a coal plant, Singletary says he probably would have taken that, too.
The transformation of his farm is happening quickly. The last crops were harvested in the fall of 2018, and several months later, construction crews moved in and began preparing the land for what will be 355,124 solar panels, shipped from Hanwha Q Cells in Dalton. The plan is to send power to the grid by the end of 2019. Already, steel posts rise from the ground in neat rows, and giant cardboard boxes holding stacks of solar panels dot the landscape. |
