Sorry to bother you with this, but it is illustrative of the life of a geezer in the country. It is something that has been troubling for several years and for a variety of reasons. Refuge Farm is a project of love in a lovely place. You have heard about it in endless paeons of fulsome praise. It is being threatened by some companies that have made tidy profits buttressed by lavish government subsidies to support large intermittent power generation projects that don’t work when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind fails to blow. We have seen this scheme play out in California with rolling black-outs and in Texas when it got cold.

None of what happens in these things is particularly green, since the windmills wear out and pose a significant problem in removal, since they cannot be recycled. There is a perfectly reliable solution to our problems, modern small thorium reactors, but that is another one of those things we are not supposed to talk about these days. I have slept with several naval reactors in my time, and was fine with all of them. I won’t say they improved my sleep, since the lights were out. But the air conditioning was reliable.

The new designs are smaller, safer, and have none of the objections raised over what happened at Three Mile Island, or the Fukushima disaster. But that is forbidden conversation now, and here is what is happening in the Refuge Farm neighborhood to make omeone else Green.

You hear a lot these days about the evil subsidies to the coal and gas industries. We are told we need to squash these, while increasing taxpayer money allocated to the Green New Deal. From what we hear here, the Maroon Solar Project promises to bring us 1,700 acres of Chinese Glass, which will usually produce energy for people who live seventy miles from here. It will be placed on acreage that used to produce trees and oxygen. Why this needs to happen out here is that they are ugly. They have a limited lifespan, this one being advertised at 35 years, before the “renewables” have to be renewed with another 1,700 acres of Chinese glass.

Key issue: I will share one of the lesser delights about rural living. Our county lane has no stripes or posted speed. Our foliage is lush, and once spring arrives, the exit from the farm to the road means one must creep forward to ensure there is a peak at the blacktop in either direction. We do not have much traffic, but the consequences of appearing without warning in front of a horse truck could ruin a whole morning. So, increase the size of the opposing vehicle to that of a heavy construction truck moving swiftly down a narrow road on which I live, a couple times an hour during the work day, is something that fills me with dread.

So, when I heard the Big Project was back, I wrote the following to the local paper in two versions. One is short, at “300 words for letters to the editor.” The other is a whopping 600 words, and could be used as an “Op-Ed.” See what you think.

“I am writing you to express grave concern about the Maroon Solar Project.

I invested in a delightful little horse property in the shadow of Mt. Pony years ago. It met everything I wanted after 27 years in the uniform of our country: Peace. Nice people. History, rich with the stories of the Rapidan Front in the great conflict between the States. My family was here just before it. They landed in Alexandria in 1848 and helped build the Alexandria & Orange Railroad. So, our shovels have been in this soil for 170 years. I do not oppose development or technology. I am looking at a solar array for the roof and accept the intermittent nature of the power it will provide in the event our local coop cannot.

I do oppose a project of this scale that will overwhelm our little rural roads with massive trucks in the construction phase- two an hour, they say, for three years. It is a challenge just dealing with occasional autos, much less industrial traffic which will be overwhelming.

Now, a North Carolina firm has applied to put 1,700 acres of glass in our neighborhood. They say it means three years of heavy trucks on Racoon Ford and Mt. Pony Roads. These are rural roads and not built for it. It will produce only a limited number of local jobs for the construction phase, and then abandoned. The solar panels they will emplace on our pastures and pines are from China. They are constructed with rare earths, mined by children, and built by ethnic minorities in exploitive forced labor. The rare earths used will leach from the panels into the Culpeper soil, and the Rapidan river.

The sprawling installation has a life expectancy of only 35 years. At that point whatever company remains will be responsible for removing what is left of the non-recyclable junk, duplicating the influx of traffic hauling the burned out solar panels to a landfill somewhere near. Or the wreckage will remain on Culpeper’s fields.

The power produced by the 1,700 acre project? Naturally it will be intermittent. That is the nature of the interaction of our sun and the clouds and the long winter nights. But the power is not for Culpeper. It will be shipped to Fairfax on the major Dominion power lines and feed the voracious needs of the northern suburbs. We get nothing long lasting from this plan. It is five times the agreed 300-acre County goal. It has been rejected twice by the County Planning Commission. And if approved by the Supervisors, we will deal with the broad sweep of foreign glass, and the destruction of the historic vistas we have known for generations with little benefit to those of us who live here.

By the way, this is not a “green” project, as so many of these things are termed. It is part of something we have seen elsewhere. The Government showers taxpayer dollars on the Green Machine in subsidies. The practical consequences result in the exploitation of a peaceful rural area for the benefit of a company rich with taxpayer dollars, using technology built overseas, expected to last only a generation, and which provides that necessary but intermittent power to the sprawl of Washington, DC.

Those of us who live here support property rights, sensible development and efficient use of technology. Those are things that are necessary. The destruction of this historic neighborhood an its lovely vistas are not. We do not need the rumble of big trucks on tiny roads to greet the dawn, rumbling inexorably through the working day. Please vote “NO” on this industrial project to forever alter the character of our rural and agricultural land.

Respectfully,

Victor Socotra
Refuge Farm”
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I had a dream last night about doxing myself to the reading public. It featured a small but angry crowd who insisted on my support to building the new Green world. I could provide that, but I really think we have a lot of green right here, and it is fine. Just the way it is.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com