Relevant Technology Connections video. Tl:DW: a good third of the corn grown in the US is for making ethanol to put in cars, a very inefficient use of land. If that land was instead solar, we could cover all of the energy needs from transportation and electricity in the country multiple times over. Plus agrivoltaics shows some crops actually grow better underneath solar panels.
We should be putting panels everywhere that makes sense and as fast as possible
I’m okay with both.
It’s not like they’re cutting down forests to put in solar panels.
Solar can be integrated into agriculture, it’s called agrivoltaics.
Fields are natural habitat, and it has an effect on the local environment.
Let’s cover the heat islands first - we have plenty of them.
Approximately 300 times more fields than parking lots, and that’s only counting agriculture land. There’s probably substantially more than 300x.
yes, it has good effects on the local environment.
This is anti-renewables propaganda, and it’s fucking everywhere now. We need as much as solar as fast as possible, and utility-scale ground mount is the cheapest way to do it. Carport solar is good and necessary, but way more expensive, because the panels are no longer the most expensive part of construction.
do both? solar panels over fields provide shade, and keep the soil from drying out while protecting crops from the sun during the hottest parts of the day. in return, the water vapor emitted by the plants cools the panels, increasing their efficiency. and that’s not the only benefits, either. there’s even a term for it, agrivoltaics.
Let’s also cover roadways and medians. Imagine how much less maintenance and snow removal would be required for a road that has solar panel over it. (Although, then it would turn into solar panel snow removal) It would also reduce glare and result in less accidents.
Just let the snow on the solar panels deal with itself. There’s zero need to remove it.
Yea, I know how any of that works, but I’m sure if the battery infrastructure is in place to smooth out the highs and lows of production, it should work well.
This sounds like solar roadways all over again.
I am talking over the roads, not on them. The on road solar was never practical, and was just a meme/marketing campaign for some get rich quick scheme.
Agrivoltaics is great and should be a central feature of a lot of land. Most of my pollinator gardens would thrive if I had partial shade through the drought months, and it costs like $1000+ a month to power some of our larger parks. Watering those parks, especially near the seating areas with non-functional roofs or exposed benches, is another $1000+ a month. With these installed we could probably reduce both by a double digit percentage while creating more enriching spaces.
As other comments have stated, there are good, beneficial reasons to having solar panels in fields, at least in some number of circumstances. And the car park solar panels fortunately are happening more often. Several of the hospitals and their outlying healthcare offices in my area have done this over their parking lots, and so has the community college. In the latter case it was more of a cynical ploy to get more local libs to vote yes on a measure to give more money for construction on the school even though most of it went straight to raises for the administration, all while they laid off adjunct faculty and cut community programs like the theater arts program and planetarium and tore down the dorms that had been giving students a cheap place to live just to increase the parking spaces - but hey they put solar panels over those parking spaces so stop complaining! There may have been similar shitty motives for the hospitals too that I just don’t know about. But yes, more solar panels over concrete especially when providing a secondary benefit for people (sadly even when it is car-brain adjacent) is good and should be done more.
In the US at least, Opposition to solar farms often comes from energy interests who ran astroturf campaigns for years opposing them.
