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She has carved out a comfortable life in a sprawling mansion set on 10 acres (four hectares) of land, just outside the city of Lafayette, and is known locally for her donations to medical research and her small fleet of deluxe cars with personalized license plates.
The opponents of the solar project, a $1.5bn venture appropriately called Mammoth that is set to span an area almost as large as Manhattan, say they are defying an egregious assault on time-honored farming traditions and are standing up to a newcomer that threatens to warp their pastoral way of life with Chinese-made technology.
The ongoing fight is a sobering reminder of how Biden’s ambitions for a mass transition to renewables, aimed at averting the worst ravages of the climate crisis, will in significant part be decided by the vagaries and veto points of thousands of local officials, county boards and Connie Ehrlich-style opposition across the US.
America’s corn belt, which stretches from Indiana to Nebraska, produces a fifth of the world’s maize, a stunning feat of agricultural might that has deforested large areas, stripped away topsoil and made the land, by one measure, 48 times more toxic than it was 25 years ago.
The Mammoth project – which will generate 1.3 gigawatts of renewable energy, enough to power more than 200,000 households annually in coal-dependent Indiana – is split into three distinct areas encompassing dozens of landowners, which looks on a map like a collection of Jenga blocks scattered on to the landscape.
“As a farmer I take great pride in the beautiful land that God has blessed us with and believe it should stay to be used to grow crops.” Tiede warned that property values would decline if solar arrived – there is somewhat threadbare evidence of this – and raised the spectre of a disastrous fire.
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