Environmental Impacts of (Clean) Energy Projects

This post is a bit long, focused towards the more Environment/Conservation-oriented folks. If you enjoy being outside, want protect what you love about the outdoors, but also need a better understanding of why it can be so difficult to understand the trade-offs of building clean energy, this is for you. I provide a brief history of the US-environmental movement, compare some impacts of clean energy infrastructure to fossil infrastructure, and end with a heavy dose of reality. I expect push-back, and I welcome it with open arms.

The original Environmental movement

The Environmental movement in the US was predicated on stopping things because cities were choked in pollution, rivers were catching fire, and the countryside was being bulldozed to build houses and freeways with little consideration for anything other than efficient and rapid growth. I explain this history further in my invited talk to the Idaho City Club.

It’s been said the 1960’s era Environmentalism that created our bedrock environmental laws (e.g. Clean Air/Water Acts, Endangered Species Act, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency) had cautious themes to their policy enforcement. Rightly so, one only need to familiarize themselves with Robert Moses as the Power Broker or Rothsein’s investigation on urban development that embedded segregation practices in zoning law from 1920-1970. At that time of rapid growth there were no checks on development, no accountability on decision makers, and maximum pain on pristine ecosystems and to minoritized communities.

In order to correct those injustices, the Environmental movement added many many reforms to the system. And it was increasingly effective. For example, before new (federal) projects started construction, environmental reviews were required to check what impacts they would have. We got lead out of gasoline. Sewage treatment plants became much more common, industrial contamination became far less common, all while more Wilderness areas were being protected. We necessarily became very cautious builders because of our past mistakes and we have seen countless positive results of that advocacy.

Competing versions of Environmentlism

Today’s Environmentalists find themselves in an slightly different position; climate change is a crisis and in order to preserve the ecosystems we’ve spent decades protecting from direct-human impacts, we need to build a lot of new infrastructure. Thankfully, the alpine wilderness areas of the Sawtooth Mountains or Sierra Nevadas will never host wind turbines, but they are seeing less snow pack, fewer trees, and more invasive species because of climate change. Just because there is no direct human touch on these special places, doesn’t mean modern pollution is leaving them untouched (query our inadequate notion of Wilderness where there is abundant evidence of Tribal management pre-European colonization). The reality is that our emissions are disrupting these places faster than they can adapt. If we actually want to save these ecosystems from collapse (or more likely a complete downshift in eco-type from sage-brush to sparse bunch grasses or mixed-conifers to grassland), we need to stop burning stuff for energy. Stopping pollution requires building a lot of new clean energy projects. And we need to build them fast.

We need to build those new energy projects somewhere, and there is no such thing as a zero-impact energy project. The cautious Environmentalism of the 1970’s era is now out of sync with the crisis Environmentalism today. The same environmental rules that helped to stop the bad things (e.g. highway infrastructure, polluting facilities, wetland destruction) in the 1970’s are now being weaponized to stop the good things (e.g. wind/solar/transmission which are also forms of physical infrastructures).

You can read about my real-world examples of these conflicts for large-scale wind and solar projects I dealt with. They happened while working for an environmental non-profit with a history of stopping all kinds of projects in the Mountain West. They often leveraged the impacts to the Greater Sage-Grouse as a way to ensure greater protections for the bird and its habitat. Like most environmental non-profits today, their culture developed a knee-jerk reaction to project proposals that had any negative impacts.

I must reiterate, there’s no such thing as a zero-impact project. You can, however, avoid as much of the harms as you can with appropriate planning. You can then minimize the actual impact with specific tweaks to project design. Finally, after the other two paths are exhausted, you may mitigate these remaining physical impacts by rehabilitating or conserving other (ideally) nearby ecosystems. That ethos should not be throw out, but we–the Environmental community– have yet to acknowledge that we need to build a lot of new stuff to protect our old wins. We need to build enough new stuff to displace the ~75% of dirty fossil energy on our national grid with clean electrons. We need to double or triple our transmission infrastructure. And we need to build all of this fast.

The energy infrastructure in my backyard

To be clear, I am very thankful and sympathetic to the O.G. environmentalists. My tree-hugging roots started because I vacationed every 4th of July to different Wilderness area in the Sierras or Shasta-Trinity’s. From my hometown I can see multiple methane gas plants, petroleum refineries, dilapidated industrial areas, and perpetually congested highways. The Clean Air Act, in particular, required additional pollution control devices on my town’s methane gas peaker plants and the Act likely hastened the recent closure of two oil refineries. Those closures of polluting oil facilities is a sign that the energy transition is happening, but it’s not the only sign.

In less than a 3-minute walk from my house, I cross a high-voltage transmission line that is directly above a park and playground where I played weekend soccer and learned to rollerblade. The transmission line also cuts through the literal backyards of neighborhood homes along a very narrow right-of-way.

Within a 2-mile walk, I get to a Regional Park that I know like the back of my hand because that was my high school’s home cross-country course. That park abuts to private land and both have always had livestock grazing. In the last decade it also hosts new transmission infrastructure that I dodge when mountain biking. From almost any hill in that park I can look north and see the ominous pollution towers of the industrial facilities and a massive electrical substation where all the transmission lines converge. That substation is next to a new mass-transit train stop with solar panels over the parking lots, all surrounded by houses and highways that have been there since the 1950s.

My downtown abuts to a wetland preserve on the Delta. (The area was originally owned by US Steel, then purchased by Dow Chemical, but now named after the newly formed Corteva corporation. The long list of Dow/Corteva’s pollution and contamination issues would occupy the entire space in the Library of Alexandria. All to say that a chemicals and poison manufacturer is not exactly an honest broker even if they administer the preserve.) Looking further north across the San Juaquin River, past the reeds and cranes and turtles enjoying their protected (but certainly contaminated) habitat, I see hundreds of windmills. They’re more obvious at night, their red-blinky lights now a consistent feature of the horizon. Almost every time I’ve driven near the highway that hosts these windmills I also see grazing cows around the turbine footprints and of course more transmission lines.

Not all impacts are the same

There are, as I described above, real physical impacts of all energy facilities. The original (and still persistent) fossil infrastructure continues to cause physical human harms in the form of chemical pollution to our air and waterways. We should be reminded that the Clean Air Act, and its subsequent amendments, have probably been the most life-saving policy in modern times whereby its environmental and health benefits exceed the cost by at least 30 to 1.

Too often I see comparisons that blur the lines between polluting infrastructure and clean energy infrastructure. Living next to oil pipelines, plastics manufactures, or fossil-burning power plants is not the same as living next to transmission lines, solar farms, or windmills. The former pollute the air and water all around you and decrease life expectancy because they constantly release chemical pollution. Clean energy infrastructure does not emit harmful chemicals (as repeated by fossil-fuel disinformation groups), but I concede they can look funny.

Yes, I’m looking at you “environmental justice” groups who are trying to lump in rural-landowners fighting a wind farm many-miles away with folks in cancer alley who’s town remains forcibly unincorporated to make sure they have no political power to stop yet another petroleum plant from being sited nearby. These are not the same harms.

We need to be honest about the fact that rural land owners literally get paid to host infrastructure on their property, often exceeding the revenues of whatever farming/ranching operation they currently have. When you sign a land-lease agreement for wind or solar farms, it’s 25-30 years of substantial guaranteed income. When Russia invades Ukraine and wheat prices drop, or you have an excessively dry season, or you have one freeze event in the middle of the germination period, that can wreck an entire annual harvest and put you further into debt. Commodity prices wildly fluctuate and Mother Nature more often will decide which farms make it in the long-run. So it should come as no surprise that having a tall piece of metal on your property may not look pretty, but if it helps to ensure the family farm stays in the family and allows you to see the road to financial security in retirement, that’s a great deal for most people.

Changing views (of wind power)

The financial stability afforded to folks who host wind projects is just one reason wind power had been relatively uncontroversial from the 1980s through the mid 2000s, even in rural states like Nebraska, Wyoming, Texas, and Idaho (see PURPA project history).

There was always some push back to these projects (if you offer to give everyone a puppy you’ll still have some detractors). But beginning in the mid-2010s is when rural folks really started to sour on wind projects. It didn’t help that the glorified Republican presidential nominee just finished a years-long litigation against the Scottish government for allowing an offshore wind project to be sited in the viewshed of his golf-course. He thought they were “very ugly” and consistently repeated other false claims whenever he gave a public speech. Lying about windmills is one thing, but repeating these lies over and over again is how an alternative reality gets created that scholars have characterized as “hyper-Orwellian”. There are valid reasons to oppose windmills, but we need to face reality that the psyche of many folks have been poised by Trump’s decade-long disinformation campaign.

When I went backpacking as a kid in the Sierra wilderness I never saw satellites. I still remember the first time we saw one, all guessing it was a UFO because it was way too fast and quiet to be an airplane. But now there are constant satellites and airplanes crossing over the Sierras. Not an hour goes by without seeing (or hearing) a few. Is it my right to view a pristine sky like I remember as a child, and thus be empowered to sue Starlink or American Airlines into the ground? Give me a break.

Protecting Americans' homes

New clean energy infrastructure can be seen from afar, while they don’t release harmful chemicals they can be noisy. For a few weeks of the summer the transmission lines by my neighborhood park emit a low hum reminiscent of TV static. Windmills, if you stand close enough, can also be a bit noisy and their shadow flicker can be discombobulating; at night you can always see the towers from far away because of the flashy lights. Substations can similarly be noisy if you’re close enough, they are no doubt an eye sore. Solar panels are silent neighbors, but they can look odd on the landscape.

While not technically a physical harm, negative impacts to the Americans' primary wealth-accumulation vehicle has raised some eyebrows. There are two studies published in 2020 worth examining on home valuations, where the combined analyses incorporate over 4-million housing transactions from the last two decades. The nationally comprehensive study documents a decrease in property values of ~1.5% if you are less than 1-mile away from a solar project, with the effect becoming statistically insignificant as you move further away. These findings were nearly identical to a smaller study focused only on Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

To put that effect size into perspective I checked the Federal Housing Administration Housing Price Index data from 2020-2025Q3. The five states that experienced the smallest appreciation in home values was +26.5% over five years. The five states with the largest appreciation was +65.7%, with an all-national average of +50% over the most recent five years. While there was a statistically significant finding of decreased property value if you’re less than 1 mile away from a solar project, those impacts are negligible given skyrocketing property-value appreciation. For example, that -1.5% home depreciation effect size is still on par with Florida and Colorado’s overall decline in home value in 2025 alone (-2.3% and -1.2% respectively). We must concede, that technically there are measurable impacts to property values, but lets not make a mountain out of a mole hole.

Addressing realistic harms of clean energy

So the “impacts” that remain of new energy infrastructure are largely aesthetics and noise. (I plan to write separately about aesthetic issues, especially place-attachment theory on siting energy infrastructure, which I will link here when available.) These audible impacts (while not considered physical impacts by law, they are considered a form of pollution) can be easily mitigated with setback requirements.

For example, windmill turbines can to be set back 2.5x the max height from any dwellings to prevent shadow flicker and noise impacts. Those annoying red blinky lights are required for aviation safety, but modern technology keeps the lights off unless there are planes in the vicinity thus greatly reducing their visual impact.

Modern solar panels now have anti-glare coatings to prevent the visual issues that plagued the early models. The inverters that are connected to rows of solar arrarys can generate noise, but it is inaudible past ~150 feet away.

Substations, especially in more urban areas, often require noise barriers similar to the sound-mitigation walls along highways. Physical barriers are now a necessary because domestic terrorists targeting substations are increasingly common.

Transmission lines typically require setbacks, but those are waved for right-of-ways. For those two weeks in summer when the transmission lines are audibly humming, there is some level of (financial) mitigation owed to the homeowners who live alongside them. If you live close enough to transmission lines to hear them, maybe utilities should pay for better insulation and updated windows (both of which save money on energy costs, keep noise out, and make your home more comfortable).

To reiterate, of the physical impacts that clean energy projects can cause, they can be minimized and mitigated against, but there will always be some impacts.

Recognize the trade offs & build anyways

This should not deter us from building a new clean energy economy. To the contrary, we Environmentalists need a new paradigm to recognize that opposing clean energy projects because of their hyper-specific “impacts” is like declining an emergency appendicitis surgery because you’re worried about the incision scar. The many reasons I hear for opposing clean energy projects each individually have a small truth embedded within them, but by focusing on those figurative paper cuts we fail to appreciate that the whole house is burning. We in the Environmental community are so paralyzed by making any decision for fear of any negative impact that it creates a de facto license to the oil lobby to keep polluting. There will be trade-offs in the energy transition, but our unwillingness to build clean energy out of fear of some harm is just cementing the status quo.

While the negative impacts are quantifiable and inconvenient today, they are laughably small compared to the destruction that a 2.0°C rise in global temperatures will produce. I have tried to read climate-science fiction, but they are not sufficiently far enough away from our foreseeable catastrophic futures to be considered fiction. If you really want to be transported to a seemingly different reality, read IPCC’s Working Group II report focused on impacts of a changing climate knowing our carbon budget trajectory is indicative of reaching the 2.0°C in the next 24 years at 2023 emission rates (this also assumes decades of prodigious carbon drawdown that remains economically infeasible). If we want better than a two-thirds chance of staying within 1.5°C of warming, then we have less than 4 years to get to net zero (insert lol-sob emoji).

We need to build, and we need to build fast.

There will be direct physical impacts on the landscape, but they pale in comparison to the rapid changes our ecosystems will face in my lifetime. For whatever human-impacts the new infrastructure will cause, they remain minuscule compared to the ongoing violence happening in fossil-fuel affected communities or the soon-to-be-stateless inhabitants of low-lying islands.

Environmentalists need to be honest and sanguine about that reality, and yet continue to push forward past unpopular pro-build stances because the environmental laws that we’ve relied on for a generation are now being weaponized to stop any and all clean energy deployment. I raise this because it requires a cultural shift for environmentalists to recognize this inconvenient reality, only then can we begin to productively work towards a framework that empowers and accelerates clean energy deployment.

Unfortunately as our current regulatory framework stands, and interrogated in Dunkleman’s 2025 book Why Nothing Works, “We are at a moment of history. You could have Robert Moses come back from the dead and he wouldn’t be able to do shit.”