Trump called renewable energy ‘stupid,’ and red states fell in line

Like most of South Dakota, 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 chalky sandstone and dark clumps of trees.

And like many farming regions, Walworth’s 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.

Downtown Selby, South Dakota. The grain elevator, seen in the distance, is among the busiest in the region.

When Selby’s last grocery store shuttered in late 2023, the city became the center of a food desert that stretches 73 miles, from Ipswich to Mobridge. And when the Good Samaritan Society announced it was pulling out of town a year earlier, residents collected donations to keep the elder care center open themselves. In May, the region lost another high school due to lack of enrollment.

The most immediate economic challenge, however, is the jail. Selby must accommodate prisoners countywide, but its jail was condemned after inmates sued 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.

“Unless you’re a farmer, a hunter, or a fisher, there’s really nothing to do in this area,” said Colton Berens, a 33-year-old U.S. Army veteran and fourth-generation farmer. As a result, not many people his age stick around. However, when Doral Renewables, an Israeli-owned energy company, contacted his family in 2022 with a proposal to build a 3,200-acre solar array on the Berens’ property, Colton saw a chance for his family to benefit — as well as an opportunity to breathe life into his “dying” community.

The Berens’ solar project would have generated about $1 million in annual tax revenue that would have been split between the county and its school for 35 years — money that could have gone a long way toward solving some of these challenges. During negotiations with the Berens family over the use of its land, 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.

Opponents of the solar project made unfounded claims that it would “change the atmosphere,” cause birds to burst into flames, and poison the county’s drinking water.

“We made people aware of all that in a public meeting,” said Deb Kahl, Walworth County’s 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.

Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, Republican districts across the country have received some $200 billion in clean energy investment. 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. In 47 states, Republican-leaning communities have adopted some 400 ordinances that effectively forbid utility-scale solar power through things like buffer requirements, fees and bans that restrict what their neighbors can do with their land.

Walworth did not have a local ordinance to regulate utility-scale solar when Doral arrived, and so the 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 — raising some legitimate concerns but relying heavily on alarming misinformation and talking points spread by right-wing activists with roots in the oil and gas industry. 

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

The new law was a blow to the county’s economic development prospects, Kahl said. “We’re probably not going to get anything except wind or solar,” since Walworth doesn’t have enough employable residents to lure other industries with higher human resource needs. 

For Colton, who feels that his family’s right to develop its own land was violated, it was a shattering blow. “It left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole area,” he said.

South Dakota is almost entirely covered 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 for more than half the state’s total energy production. It helps that the wind is so omnipresent on the plains and that farmers can easily seed and harvest around a turbine’s 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 percent to the total energy generation, though not for lack of potential. 

Transmission lines, which run through pasture and crop land on the Berens’ farm, would have been integral to exporting power from the solar project.

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 300 megawatts, about enough to power 50,000 average US homes.

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’s Solar For All program, which offered $7 billion for solar projects in low-income communities. She also opted out of the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program, which would have given the state $3 million toward reducing emissions after filling out a form less than a page long. Noem’s spokesperson called these Biden administration programs “wasteful spending,” and “the single largest cause of the inflation crisis that our nation finds itself in.”

Now, as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Noem has joined an administration that is outwardly hostile toward clean energy. President Trump has called renewables “stupid,” “ugly,” “inefficient,” and “a disaster.” His One Big Beautiful Bill Act won the votes of lawmakers in the hard-right Freedom Caucus by promising to terminate “those Green New Scam subsidies,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told Politico, and the administration has set about doing just that.

But not all Republicans are on board with the gutting. Some, like Sens. John Curtis of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, 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 $9 billion in renewables investment and some 10,000 potential jobs.

Solar would have provided “35 years of a stable income, through drought, through famine, through everything.”

Colton Berens

In South Dakota, renewable energy provides $40 million 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 $30 million a year in lease payments from renewable energy projects on their lands. Unlike most farm income, this doesn’t dry up under the sun or swing on the whims of agriculture markets.

Financially, compared to most crops, Berens said, “it’s a better use of the land. You have 35 years of a stable income, through drought, through famine, through everything.” This stability could prove especially valuable in the coming years, when experts predict climate change will cause South Dakota’s wheat and soybean markets to stagger.

At 3,200 acres, the Berens’ solar park would have covered just under half the family’s 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.

In May, Trump ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to withhold federal funding for solar panels on productive farmland, and asked state and local governments to do the same. “Those big solar fields, they’re taking our farmland. Our farmers are, like, mortified by it. They hate it,” he said later.

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.

Steve Zabel, who farms land next to the Berens’ property, worries that solar arrays on could eventually ruin the region’s farming industry.

“Farming is what we got out here,” Zabel said of why he opposed the project. “A lot of these kids that grew up in these areas, if they don’t have farms to come back to, they don’t come back.”

He also worried about how solar panels might affect his crops. “We didn’t know if it was gonna bring more rain or deter the rain from getting here, or bring in hail storms,” he said. “You get that size of acreage of glass panels — we were concerned it could just change the atmosphere.”

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 and Citizens for Responsible Solar, an activist group started by a long-time political operative 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’s residents.

The solar project would have run nearly seven linear miles across tracts owned by the Berens, with breaks for wildlife and views, terminating on a south-facing slope across a dirt road from the New Evarts Resort. 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 lined with about 50 homes with views of the water that constitute the wealthiest community in the county. Near the end of the road is the home of Bud and Jennifer Andree.

Some residents of New Evarts Resort, which sits beside the Missouri River outside Selby, South Dakota, claimed that solar arrays could poison the county’s water supply with heavy metals. Such fears have been largely debunked.

When the Andrees make the 20-mile drive to Selby, Jennifer stops by the county courthouse to check up on her neighbors. “I like to keep apprised of what’s coming into the county,” she said. In January 2023, she was perusing files in the records office when she saw that Doral had applied for leases on the Berens’ land. Doral was the company building Mammoth Solar, a project in Indiana that began as a 300-megawatt installation and grew into the largest solar park in the country, at 1.3 gigawatts.

“We did not want that here,” she said, switching off a TV broadcasting Fox News in a living room filled with Bibles, gospel companion books and porcelain figurines of Christ.

The Andrees moved to Walworth in 2021, seeking a place where Jennifer could escape the “horrific and disabling symptoms” she said she has experienced since being exposed to microwave radiation while living in New Mexico.

“It was the smart meters,” that caused it, she said, referring to devices that measure a home’s energy consumption and transmit the data to utility companies over a wireless network. Andree says her exposure resulted in electromagnetic hypersensitivity, a nonspecific condition with no medically proven cause, and she has joined state and national petitions to stop the use of smart meters, which, she says, “made me extremely ill.” 

Today, she claims that anything with an electrical current causes her headaches, brain fog and pain. From across her living room, my idle cellphone “burns” 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.

“It was never anything personal against the [Berenses],” she said. “I was fighting for my home and for my life.”

The Andrees joined the Concerned Citizens of Walworth County, formed to stop the Doral project by spreading word of the dangers posed by solar installations. The group’s 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.)

In an op-ed titled “The Dark Side of Solar,” published across two installments in a local newspaper, Jennifer used cherry-picked evidence to assert 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 “dirty electricity” and radio interference, displaces wildlife, and raises the ambient temperature.

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, Andree warned that damage to the panels from extreme weather would cause “heavy metal toxins such as lead, and carcinogenic cadmium” 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’s volunteer firefighters weren’t equipped to handle.

Last summer, researchers at Columbia University debunked 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, “which is non-volatile, non-soluble in water, and has 1/100th the toxicity of free cadmium.” 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 — less than a can opener.

But at community meetings organized by the Concerned Citizens, these unfounded fears took center stage.

“It was a lot of worst-case scenario stuff,” 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. “This whole thing would be an economic boon for the county, and they were not considering that,” he said. “They were just fearmongering.”

Jerry Stiegelmeier, a retired farmer in Selby, South Dakota, said opponents of the Berens’ solar project were “just fearmongering.”

Stiegelmeier, who rents 6,000 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.

Meanwhile, Colton 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.

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’s largest active installation, Wild Springs Solar, 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.

“We’ve 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,” Holgard said before the vote in September of 2024. “We might as well just say we don’t want any more businesses coming into Walworth County.”

On the day the vote was held, the Berenses said almost nothing. “We just decided we weren’t going to win,” said Jason Berens, Colton’s father. “We didn’t have any rights as landowners.”

South Dakota has a complex history with land rights, said Chase Jenson, an organizer with Dakota Rural Action, a nonprofit that promotes “healthy … and just food, agriculture, and energy systems.” Corporations looking to install energy pipelines or other development often use a county’s 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 “sacrifice zone” for outside ambitions. And part of the resulting ethos is the reliance on county ordinances, which provide local control.

Colton Berens and his family feel that their rights as property owners were quashed by the county commission’s decision to effectively ban the solar project they wanted to host on their land.

Increasingly, however, Berens’ sentiment is being shared by farmers in similar conflicts across the country. In Ohio, nine landowners, 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’s right 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 with permit restrictions exclusive to wind and solar projects. And Michigan lawmakers are making it easier for local governments to forbid solar on private land.

When it comes to planning for renewables in rural areas, what’s lamentable “is that a lot of these conversations are reactionary,” 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’t 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’s only after a proposal forces the issue that officials and residents must confront this new and complex question, she said.

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

The concerned citizens of Walworth demanded that the commissioners have no contact with Doral while drafting their ordinance. And when Jennifer Andree felt that the county was being too deferential to the company, she threatened 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 Berens can’t help feeling that it was politically motivated. The scope of restrictions they advocated for — effectively banning utility-scale solar anywhere in the county — suggests that siting near their resort home wasn’t the only issue, he said.

The road leading toward the Berens’ farm from Selby.

But Bud Andree said he “couldn’t care less about solar” as long as it goes somewhere else. “Don’t sit there and say we’re trying to hinder or stymie the project because we don’t like solar,” he said. “People will say that it’s the way of the future, even though it’s not, okay. It’s one of the most inefficient energy sources – with the exception of, yeah, you get free energy from the sun – but all the things that it does as an unintended result are not worth it.”

Jennifer maintains that she fought for her health, but also admits that she doesn’t buy into solar as the future of energy, saying, “Our president calls it the ‘Green New Scam.’”

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 1,000 megawatt facility elsewhere in South Dakota, and Walworth is still looking for the funds to build its jail.