In rural communities, fears amplified by ‘AI slop’ and social media hamper solar boom
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- Iberia Parish Council passed a half-mile setback ordinance in July 2025 that effectively killed the $175 million Acadiana Solar project, developed by Recurrent Energy (a Canada Solar division) on roughly 1,000 acres of farmland.
- Local opposition was largely organized through a 1,200-member Facebook group called "NO Industrial/Utility solar in Iberia Parish," created in 2024 by real estate agent Angela Scott, whose posts claimed panels "contaminate the soil and water" and create unstable weather.
- Alethea, a threat intelligence firm, traced many AI-generated anti-solar posts — including graphics reading "Once Louisiana is gone, there's no way to get it back" — to a network of "AI slop machine" accounts based in Bangladesh that tailored identical messages to Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and other states.
- The local Facebook group fed into a larger 11,000-member hub called "Stop Solar-Wind-BESS-Carbon Capture Scams," founded in 2020 by Indiana resident Franklin T. Wike, which pinned a post recruiting volunteers to "copy and paste" anti-solar links across sites it runs.
- Researchers estimate Louisiana's highest-projected solar buildout would require at most 87,000 acres over the next decade — about 1% of total farmland — undercutting the viral claim that 250,000 acres of sugarcane could be lost to solar.
- Andree McAnally, whose family farm stood to lease land to the project, told the council she once believed the cancer-risk claims herself until her own research changed her mind: "People are fueled by misinformation."
Why it matters: Iberia Parish lost a $175 million solar investment and the lease income that landowners like the McAnally family depended on, after a Bangladesh-based AI slop network manufactured what looked like organic grassroots opposition. Alethea's identification of the foreign-linked accounts came after the council vote, showing how cheaply coordinated AI content can shape rural U.S. land-use policy before fact-checkers arrive.
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