When Lakeland officials announced last year that Lakeland Electric planned to phase out its coal-burning plant, there was a push by Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign to persuade them to turn to renewables rather than other fossil fuel alternatives, primarily natural gas.\n<\/p>\n
Based on comments at a committee meeting this week, it appears not much solar will be happening.\n<\/p>\n
Three reasons were advanced at the meeting.\n<\/p>\n
While the expense of solar is coming down, it is still not a good deal compared to other fuel sources. No discussion of the externalities of burning fossil fuels occurred.\n<\/p>\n
Solar farms require a lot of land and there isn’t much available land within the highly urbanized Lakeland Electric service area to accommodate many solar farms.\n<\/p>\n
Solar farms are not esthetically pleasing and there are questions about the disposition of the solar farm components once they need to be replaced.\n<\/p>\n
Some commissioners have discussed considering modular nuclear reactors, but those have been controversial because of the cost and the still unresolved issue of how to handle the radioactive waste.\n<\/p>\n
The discussion is expected to continue.\n<\/p>\n
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When Lakeland officials announced last year that Lakeland Electric planned to phase out its coal-burning plant, there was a push by Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign to persuade them to turn to renewables rather than other fossil fuel alternatives, primarily natural gas. Based on comments at a committee meeting this week, it appears not much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":929,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions\/929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}