{"id":14581,"date":"2025-09-10T20:11:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/14581\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T20:11:03","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:11:03","slug":"misinformation-fear-and-politics-how-a-south-dakota-county-drove-away-millions-in-solar-energy-south-dakota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/14581\/","title":{"rendered":"Misinformation, fear and politics \u2013 how a South Dakota county drove away millions in solar energy | South Dakota"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most of South Dakota<\/a>, Walworth county is built on farming. To the east of Selby, the county seat, vast fields of soybeans and wheat grow between roads that run straight to the horizon. To the west, beyond the county line, the Standing Rock Indian Reservation spreads across miles of rumpled green prairie studded with creamy erratics and dark clumps of trees.<\/p>\n

Like many farming regions, Walworth\u2019s deeply conservative population has been steadily declining and aging, from roughly 8,000 in the 1960s to 5,200 today. The grain elevator that towers over Main Street in Selby is among the busiest in the region, but most of the squat brick buildings in its shadow are weathered and lifeless.<\/p>\n

When the Good Samaritan Society announced<\/a> it was pulling out of town in 2018, residents collected donations to keep the elder care center open. When Selby\u2019s last grocery store<\/a> shuttered in late 2023, the city became the center of a food desert that stretches 73 miles, from Ipswich to Mobridge. And in May, the area lost another high school<\/a> due to lack of enrollment.<\/p>\n

The most immediate economic challenge, however, is the jail. Selby must accommodate prisoners countywide, but its jail was condemned after inmates sued<\/a> over unsafe conditions. Without the funds to replace it, Walworth spends more than $50,000 a month transporting and boarding prisoners at facilities as far as 70 miles away.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnless you\u2019re a farmer, a hunter, or a fisher, there\u2019s really nothing to do in this area,\u201d said Colton Berens, a 33-year-old US army veteran and fourth-generation farmer. As a result, not many people his age stick around. However, when Doral Renewables<\/a>, an Israeli-owned energy company, contacted his family in 2022 with a proposal to build a 3,200-acre solar array on the Berens\u2019 property, Colton saw a chance for his family to benefit \u2013 as well as an opportunity to breathe life into his \u201cdying\u201d community.<\/p>\n

The Berens\u2019 solar project would have generated about $1m in annual tax revenue<\/a> that would have been split between the county and its school for 35 years \u2013 money that could have gone a long way toward solving some of these challenges. During negotiations with his family over the use of its land, Berens said, Doral also agreed to upgrade the rugged gravel roads its crews would use during construction and to plant native grasses under the panels that could provide fodder for sheep.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made people aware of all that in a public meeting,\u201d said Deb Kahl, Walworth county\u2019s deputy auditor. But once news of the proposal spread, what the family believed to be its private business became a heated, county-wide argument that ultimately killed the promise of solar in Walworth county. In this, the Berenses were not alone.<\/p>\n

Since the Inflation Reduction Act<\/a> passed in 2022, Republican<\/a> districts across the country have received about $200bn in clean energy investment<\/a>. And yet many red communities have also joined a rising tide of resistance against the growth of clean energy, driven by ideological resentment for its inclusion in the liberal agenda. By the end of 2024, according to researchers<\/a> at Columbia Law School, at least 459 counties and municipalities across 44 states had severely restricted renewable energy through things like buffer requirements, fees and bans that limit what their neighbors can do with their land. This is a 16% increase in such restrictions over the previous year.<\/p>\n

Selby, South Dakota. Photograph: Greg Latza\/FERN<\/p>\n

South Dakota\u2019s<\/a> Public Utilities Commission will not permit a project unless it follows local rules, and since Walworth did not have a local ordinance to regulate utility-scale solar when Doral arrived, the Berens\u2019 project was delayed while county commissioners drafted a law to determine how and where an installation could be built. Dozens of farmers, teachers, fishing guides, moms and grandparents turned out to public hearings to voice their opinions. While some supported the project, a vocal opposition won out \u2013 complaining that such a large installation would visually mar the agrarian landscape and relying heavily on alarming misinformation and talking points spread by rightwing activists with roots in the oil and gas industry.<\/p>\n

In late 2024, the county adopted an ordinance<\/a> that requires solar panels be at least 1 mile from any occupied dwelling and 1,000 ft from a property line. These restrictions, which are stricter than the state\u2019s regulations, not only quashed the Berens\u2019 project, but stamped out almost any hope that utility-scale solar could bring this economically depressed community in the future.<\/p>\n

The new law limits the county\u2019s economic development prospects, Kahl said. \u201cWe\u2019re probably not going to get anything except wind or solar\u201d since Walworth doesn\u2019t have enough employable residents to lure other industries with higher human resource needs.<\/p>\n

For Colton, who feels that his family\u2019s right to develop its own land was violated, it was a shattering blow. \u201cIt left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole area,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

South Dakota is almost entirely covered<\/a> in farms. Flat, open, connected by roads and linked to power grids, farmland makes a good place to site renewable energy. Wind, in particular, has muscled through the anti-renewables bias over the past decade and now accounts<\/a> for more than half the state\u2019s total energy production. It helps that wind is omnipresent on the plains and farmers can easily seed and harvest around a turbine\u2019s small footprint. Also, the need to space windmills across a vast area requires developers to purchase leases from multiple landowners, securing local buy-in by spreading the economic benefits around. Solar, meanwhile, contributes a paltry 0.26%<\/a> to the total energy generation, though not for lack of potential.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, utility-scale solar was negligible in South Dakota. Then, new interest driven by falling prices and lucrative federal tax incentives like those in the Inflation Reduction Act, helped spur the addition of two solar parks, which bumped production to nearly 300MW<\/a>, about enough to power 50,000<\/a> average US homes.<\/p>\n

In 2023, however, just as the solar industry was getting rolling, then governor Kristi Noem chose not to take advantage of funding through the Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s Solar For All program<\/a>, which offered $7bn for solar projects in low-income communities. She also opted out<\/a> of the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant<\/a> program, which would have given the state $3m toward reducing emissions after filling out a form less than a page long. Noem\u2019s spokesperson called<\/a> these Biden administration programs \u201cwasteful spending\u201d and \u201cthe single largest cause of the inflation crisis that our nation finds itself in\u201d.<\/p>\n

Drone photos of Berens\u2019 pasture and crop land. The transmission lines that run through their land and would have been integral to exporting power from the solar project. Photograph: Greg Latza\/FERN<\/p>\n

Now, as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Noem has joined an administration that is outwardly hostile toward clean energy. Trump has called renewables \u201cstupid<\/a>\u201d, \u201cugly\u201d, \u201cinefficient<\/a>\u201d, \u201ca disaster\u201d and \u201ca blight<\/a> on our country\u201d. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act won the votes of lawmakers in the hard-right Freedom caucus by promising to terminate \u201cthose Green New Scam subsidies\u201d, Chip Roy, a Texas representative, told Politico<\/a>, and the administration has set about doing just that.<\/p>\n

But not all Republicans are on board with the gutting. Some, like John Curtis, a Utah senator, and Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska senator, called for Congress to maintain subsidies for renewable projects, noting that clean energy investment has most benefited red districts. Since Trump took office, red districts have lost more than $11bn<\/a> in renewables investment<\/a> and some 11,000 potential jobs, according to the environmental research group, E2<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In South Dakota, renewable energy provides $40m<\/a> annually in property, state and local taxes, and employs about 6,800 people, according to the Clean Grid Alliance. South Dakota farmers also see nearly $30m a year in lease payments from renewable energy projects on their lands. Unlike most farm income, this doesn\u2019t dry up under the sun or swing on the whims of agriculture markets.<\/p>\n

Financially, compared with most crops, Berens said, \u201cit\u2019s a better use of the land. You have 35 years of a stable income, through drought, through famine, through everything.\u201d This stability could prove especially valuable in the coming years, when experts predict climate crisis will cause South Dakota\u2019s wheat<\/a> and soybean<\/a> markets <\/a>to stagger.<\/p>\n

At 3,200 acres, the Berens\u2019 solar park would have covered just under half the family\u2019s total farmland, including its least productive sections. But taking farmable acres out of production is a deeply contentious issue in rural America and an easy target for an administration bent on smothering renewables.<\/p>\n

In May, Trump ordered<\/a> the US Department of Agriculture to withhold federal funding for solar panels on productive farmland and asked state and local governments to do the same. \u201cThose big solar fields, they\u2019re taking our farmland. Our farmers are, like, mortified by it. They hate it,\u201d he said<\/a> later.<\/p>\n

In Walworth, that message resonated with farmers like Steve Zabel, who grows mostly wheat and soybeans on 10,000 acres beside the Berens property. He and his brother have sons returning from college to work on the family farm, and to them, the spread of solar panels across agricultural land represents an existential crisis.<\/p>\n

Steve Zabel on his farm in Selby. Photograph: Greg Latzsa\/FERN<\/p>\n

\u201cFarming is what we got out here,\u201d Zabel said of why he opposed the project. \u201cA lot of these kids that grew up in these areas, if they don\u2019t have farms to come back to, they don\u2019t come back.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also worried about how solar panels might affect his crops. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know if it was gonna bring more rain or deter the rain from getting here, or bring in hail storms,\u201d he said. \u201cYou get that size of acreage of glass panels \u2013 we were concerned it could just change the atmosphere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fears that solar will overtake farmland and cause changes to the weather have been grossly exaggerated in misinformation spread by organizations like No to Solar<\/a> and Citizens for Responsible Solar<\/a>, an activist group started by a longtime political operative<\/a> with ties to high-level conservative politicians and the fossil fuel industry. They have helped disseminate a smorgasbord of unfounded claims, many of which found fertile ground in the anxieties of Walworth\u2019s residents.<\/p>\n

The solar project would have run nearly seven linear miles across tracts owned by the Berenses, with breaks for wildlife and views, terminating on a south-facing slope across a dirt road from the New Evarts Resort<\/a>. The resort offers guided river and ice fishing, a bait shop, RV hookups, and a steakhouse with a full bar beside the Missouri River. Tucked behind its tourist attractions is a secluded road with river views and about 50 homes that constitute one of the wealthiest communities in the county. Near the end of the road is the home of Bud and Jennifer Andree.<\/p>\n

When the Andrees make the 20-mile drive to Selby, Jennifer stops by the county courthouse to check up on her neighbors. \u201cI like to keep apprised of what\u2019s coming into the county,\u201d she said. In January 2023, she was perusing files in the records office when she saw that a green energy company had applied for leases on the Berens\u2019 land. At the time she didn\u2019t know it was Doral, the company building Mammoth Solar<\/a>, a project in Indiana that began as a 300MW installation and grew into the largest solar park in the country, at 1.3GW.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did not want that here,\u201d she said, switching off a TV broadcasting Fox News in a living room filled with Bibles, gospel companion books and porcelain figurines of Christ.<\/p>\n

The Andrees moved to Walworth in 2021, seeking a place where Jennifer could escape the \u201chorrific and disabling symptoms\u201d she said she has experienced since being exposed to microwave radiation while living in New Mexico.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the smart meters\u201d that caused it, she said, referring to devices that measure a home\u2019s energy consumption and transmit the data to utility companies over a wireless network. Jennifer says her exposure resulted in electromagnetic hypersensitivity, a nonspecific condition<\/a> with no medically proven<\/a> cause, and she has joined state<\/a> and national<\/a> petitions to stop the use of smart meters, which, she says, \u201cmade me extremely ill\u201d.<\/p>\n

Today, she claims that anything with an electrical current causes her headaches, brain fog and pain. From across her living room, my idle cellphone \u201cburns\u201d her legs, forcing her to leave the room. Across the road from her resort community, the prospect of a solar park threatened the peace she had found in one of the most rural places in America. So she took up the fight to stop it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was never anything personal against the [Berenses],\u201d she said. \u201cI was fighting for my home and for my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Andrees joined the Concerned Citizens of Walworth County<\/a>, formed to stop the Doral project by spreading word of the dangers posed by solar installations. The group\u2019s Facebook page featured an image, popular among anti-solar groups, of a solar park ravaged by a storm. (It did not mention that the facility was in Puerto Rico or that the storm had been Hurricane Maria.)<\/p>\n

In an op-ed titled The Dark Side of Solar<\/a>, published across two installments in a local newspaper, Jennifer asserted that solar power comes up short on its economic promises, leaves communities with expensive bills for cleanup, damages roads, degrades lands, causes birds to burst into flames, creates a hazardous glare for passing drivers, produces electromagnetic fields, emits \u201cdirty electricity\u201d and radio interference, displaces wildlife and raises the ambient temperature.<\/p>\n

Her two most dire risks were hail and fire. The plains see punishing storms, and since the project would sit near the banks of the Missouri upstream of an intake for the county water supply, Jennifer warned that damage to the panels from extreme weather would cause \u201cheavy metal toxins such as lead, and carcinogenic cadmium\u201d to leach into the soil and waterways. And if a fire started, she threatened, a chain reaction could set the whole installment ablaze in an inferno that Walworth\u2019s volunteer firefighters weren\u2019t equipped to handle.<\/p>\n

Last summer, researchers at Columbia University debunked<\/a> some of the most pervasive misconceptions surrounding solar energy, including claims that solar development forever destroys farmland and that solar projects would be abandoned without government subsidies. They also found that what cadmium is present in solar panels exists as cadmium telluride, \u201cwhich is non-volatile, non-soluble in water, and has 1\/100th the toxicity of free cadmium\u201d. And, despite fears that a solar installment emits harmful electromagnetic fields, the largest source of EMFs on a solar park, the inverters, were found to emit up to 1,050 milligauss \u2013 less than a can opener<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But at community meetings organized by the Concerned Citizens, these unfounded fears took center stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a lot of worst-case scenario stuff,\u201d said Jerry Stiegelmeier, a retired farmer in Selby who attended a meeting. There were images of shattered PV panels, admonitions of plummeting land values and an unnamed woman who shared a harrowing story of living next to a solar park in Indiana that caught fire repeatedly, leaving her children anemic and the farmland condemned. \u201cThis whole thing would be an economic boon for the county, and they were not considering that,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were just fearmongering.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jerry Stiegelmeier at home. Photograph: Greg Latza<\/p>\n

Stiegelmeier, who rents 2,500 acres to other growers, voiced his own fear that without an injection of revenue like the solar park was offering, Walworth would have to raise property taxes on landowners like him and he would have no choice but to increase rents for his tenant farmers.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Berens did his own research. He spoke with farmers who leased to Doral in other states. He explored the toxic makeup of PV panels and the likelihood that they would leach into a water supply he shares. He confirmed that Doral would maintain a salvage fund to cover the cost of cleanup in the event of damage and that it would train and equip local firefighters to handle a hazmat fire. He offered to plant trees that would hide the panels from view, and he had the company agree to repairing the roads its crews would use during construction.<\/p>\n

Through increasingly vitriolic debates, the commissioners searched for ways to address concerns without creating a law that would ban much needed economic development. One of them, Kevin Holgard, drove four hours to visit the state\u2019s largest active installation, Wild Springs Solar<\/a>, near Rapid City, to see for himself about the noise and heat it produces. In the end, he was the only commissioner to vote against the ordinance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve done all we could to stop all the fires. We took all the batteries out. We took the cadmium out. We tried to take everything out that all the concern was out there about,\u201d Holgard said before the vote in September of 2024. \u201cWe might as well just say we don\u2019t want any more businesses coming into Walworth county.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the day the vote was held, the Berenses said almost nothing. \u201cWe just decided we weren\u2019t going to win,\u201d said Jason Berens, Colton\u2019s father. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have any rights as landowners.\u201d<\/p>\n

South Dakota has a complex history with land rights, said Chase Jenson, an organizer with Dakota Rural Action, a nonprofit that promotes \u201chealthy \u2026 and just food, agriculture, and energy systems\u201d. Corporations looking to install energy pipelines or other development often use a county\u2019s bad roads or closing schools as leverage to push through what, to some, looks like a land grab, he said. In response, many here are wary of their state being a \u201csacrifice zone\u201d for outside ambitions. And part of the resulting ethos is the reliance on county ordinances, which provide local control.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, however, Berens\u2019 sentiment is being shared by farmers in similar conflicts across the country. In Ohio, nine landowners<\/a>, including large soybean growers, weathered blistering misinformation aimed at keeping them from leasing their land to a solar company in a state where a landowner\u2019s right<\/a> to extract oil and gas is better protected than their right to generate solar power. In Iowa, concentrated animal feeding operations, which pose well-documented problems for local air and water resources, are approved more often than solar parks. Texas recently passed a bill<\/a> with permit restrictions exclusive to wind and solar projects. And Michigan<\/a> lawmakers are making it easier for local governments to forbid solar on private land.<\/p>\n

When it comes to planning for renewables in rural areas, what\u2019s lamentable \u201cis that a lot of these conversations are reactionary\u201d, said Sarah Mills, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. Farming communities are accustomed to fighting the creep of suburban sprawl and often don\u2019t have the information needed to predict how solar energy will impact grain sales or make up for losses due to decreasing future demand for ethanol, for instance. It\u2019s only after a proposal forces the issue that officials and residents must confront this new and complex question, she said.<\/p>\n

Downton Selby. Photograph: Greg Latza\/FERN<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that companies like Doral have more expertise than residents, government leaders and community associations. When Mills asked rural residents through a survey<\/a> who they trusted for information about renewable projects, \u201cgovernment is low on a list, but not as low as developers\u201d, she said. Amid the information vacuum, locals turned to Facebook<\/a>, where misinformation runs rampant.<\/p>\n

The concerned citizens of Walworth demanded that the commissioners have no contact with Doral while drafting their ordinance. And when Jennifer felt that the county was being too deferential to the company, she threatened<\/a> to report it to the American Civil Liberties Union for not accommodating her disability. Although the Andrees insist their rejection of the solar project was driven by safety concerns, Colton can\u2019t help feeling that it was politically motivated. The scope of restrictions they advocated for \u2013 effectively banning utility-scale solar anywhere in the county \u2013 suggests that siting near their resort home wasn\u2019t the only issue, he said.<\/p>\n

But Bud said he \u201ccouldn\u2019t care less about solar\u201d as long as it goes somewhere else. \u201cDon\u2019t sit there and say we\u2019re trying to hinder or stymie the project because we don\u2019t like solar,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople will say that it\u2019s the way of the future, even though it\u2019s not, OK. It\u2019s one of the most inefficient energy sources \u2013 with the exception of, yeah, you get free energy from the sun \u2013 but all the things that it does as an unintended result are not worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jennifer maintains that she fought for her health, but also admits that she doesn\u2019t buy into solar as the future of energy, noting that, \u201cOur president calls it the \u2018Green New Scam.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

As it happens, Doral pulled out of the project before the county voted on its ordinance, but the commissioners adopted the restrictions anyway. The company is now building a 1,000MW facility elsewhere in South Dakota and Walworth is still looking for the funds to build its jail.<\/p>\n

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network<\/a>, an independent, non-profit news organization<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like most of South Dakota, Walworth county is built on farming. To the east of Selby, the county…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-14581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}