They are in fact nothing alike.
Land used for rail and roads is used up. Land used for solar may continue being used for whatever else it was doing already.
Please do not make up BS problems.
Land used for rail and roads is used up. Land used for solar may continue being used for whatever else it was doing already.
Please do not make up BS problems.
Solar and wind can be much more opportunistic in using small packets of land.
But most crops do not, and benefit both from reduced heat stress and reduced water loss. Livestock, likewise, benefit from shelter, and the grass grows not less, same reasons.
When you have all of cultivated land available to site solar in, you can choose places to put it where it is most beneficial.
Farm and pasture are not the only places that benefit from shade. Reservoirs and canals lose huge amounts of water to evaporation, and need constantly to fight biofouling.
Roofs, too, last longer in shade.
Maybe a specialized tractor could be built to go around the panels but really you’d want to grow laborious crops that are mostly hand-planted/harvested anyway.
On wheat you may not want to collect too much of the light anyway, because yield might suffer.
Corn is a little harder because it grows so tall. You would need high fencerows, or give up collecting much when the crop gets high.
One merit of these systems is that they produce revenue in fallow years and year-round, while the crops only produce revenue in a spike once a year.
Researchers are experimenting with which plants do best under solar panels and even trying to grow tomatoes and potatoes between rows at existing utility-scale farms, Macknick says.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/solar-panels-he...