As solar capacity grows, some of America's most productive farmland is at risk
reuters.com
reuters.com
My understanding is that US produces way too much corn, and it costs taxpayers ($2.2 billion in subsidies per year, source: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...). Maybe instead of artificially propping up the corn industry, we could use few solar farms instead ? That might incidentally help with the US diabetes (55lb of high-fructose corn syrup per american per year, the highest in 42 countries study, source: https://news.yahoo.com/countries-greatest-high-fructose-corn...)
In the same way, ethanol is not a sensible way to do anything about climate change. Just stop burning stuff. Including ethanol produced from corn. It doesn't even come close to canceling out the carbon emissions needed to grow the damn corn to produce the ethanol. It's a completely and utterly pointless endeavor. It's not green. It's not environmentally friendly. It's just subsidized madness. This is not, and has never been, a productive use of land. Not even close.
As for solar energy and surface area needed. The world needs a lot less of it than is used for corn farming in the US alone. And that's before you consider the unused surface area in the form of roof tops, parking lots, windows, south facing walls, etc. There's no shortage of surface area to put solar panels on.
> In response to Reuters' findings, USDA said that urban sprawl and development are currently bigger contributors to farmland loss than solar...
There's a story here about responsible development and environmental management, but the larger narrative seems like concern trolling in light of other types of land use.
But even if he wanted to make sure that his land would be protected, Indiana has a massive shortage of rural lawyers [1]. Much of that shortage is self-inflicted; Indiana is one of the most hostile states toward lawyers that want to practice in multiple states. So rural lawyers just across the border in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Kentucky (who deal with the same exact farming issues) don’t even want to bother getting licensed in Indiana.
This attitude has consequences.
[1] https://www.indybar.org/?pg=GovernmentPracticeNews&blAction=...
Q: How do you transport that across "the entire contient of North America"?
Mexico has their own deserts to power their country with solar and Canada is already well ahead on renewables through hydropower.
Don't worry about premature optimization.
It really is a solved problem.
<chuckle>
"Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/ai-data-c...
"Energy experts and analysts have warned for years now that America’s power grid will not be able to accommodate the explosive growth in electricity demand it faces without a huge increase in generation capacity."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/11/green-ener...
"The U.S. electric grid is often described as a vast, synchronized machine — a network of wires carrying electricity from power plants across the country into our homes [...] in reality, there is no single U.S. grid. There are three — one in the West, one in the East and one in Texas — that only connect at a few points and share little power between them. Those grids are further divided into a patchwork of operators with competing interests. That makes it hard to build the long-distance power lines needed to transport wind and solar nationwide."
"Many spots with the best sun and wind are far from cities and the existing grid. To make the plan work, the nation would need thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines — large power lines that would span multiple grid regions."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/12/climate/us-el...
Step 1: Stop worrying about coming up with an idea for a startup...
Step 2: Build "thousands of miles of transmission lines"
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
1) We already build thousands of transmission line miles per year, so describing this as unreasonable is just out of touch
2) the ??? step is just regular transmission utility business. There’s no ambiguity here.
Perhaps we should keep burning coal then.
Leaks are not an eco disaster...
2) Making it near consumers makes little difference to overall land-use. Yes, you can make more solar power from the same area in desert than in more temperate climates, but you're still talking a very small amount of land.
I wonder who paid for this article.
It's pure speculation but I think it would be possible push a bit of p.v. to shield some areas to excess of light and keep a bit more humidity while provide enough power for irrigation, plantation of many kind of crops, and some harvesting as well. Unfortunately I suspect most of the people involved in both agriculture AND p.v. do not even think about such integration as people involved in BEV and p.v. do not even think about direct charging since most modern hybrid inverters works with 400V LFP batteries who happen to be same of most BEVs but essentially no damn single player on the market offer a DC-to-DC direct charging instead of an useless DC-to-AC (efficient enough, at least) than AC-to-DC (inefficient as hell) double conversion.
It's about time that all people involved realize and understand well a thing: we can't power a national grid on p.v. until we have year-long storage, something that's sci-fi today, so the SOLE reasonable p.v. usage is LOCAL self-consumption and as a result the sole things to do now is try to made anything we can usable in such mode, usable depending on the Sun, able to stop-and-go still producing meaningful results.
Crops grow slowly so slow limited machines should not be an issue at all, for instance...
The midwest has water.
Or at least far more of it than Arizona or California. If we're going to cover the Midwest in silica, it should be to build greenhouses for water extensive crops and not for panels.
In fact there shouldn't be an acre of farmland with a solar panel on it until every every inch of roof and parking lot of LA and Phoenix has a solar panel first.
EDIT: typo. s/Id/If/
A solar panel outside of Southwest is a solar panel that produces a fraction of its potential.
1. You preferentially close TPPs in CA, while still offsetting the whole country's emission.
2. Transmission lines are a thing, including HVDC lines
3. There are how many massive metro cities within a 200 mi. radius of LA? Some of them growing. There's plenty of demand.
How Solar Panels Are Changing Agriculture - Agrivoltaics Revisited https://youtu.be/ww-_U7_oQbY?si=Qw6h4oJ5AMx6BoYQ
Most of the farmland we have in Germany started out as forrest
> Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said. When Reuters visited his farm last year and this spring, much of the land beneath the panels was covered in yellow-brown sand, where no plants grew. "I'll never be able to grow anything on that field again," the farmer said.
>> "Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said"
Where did the fine sand come from, how deep is the [alleged] spreading of it, how much of it did the panel installers [allegedly] bring with them?
Can't help wishing we weren't quite so credulous....
Nobody is wasting money to add a thick enough layer of sand to be a significant issue. And if they did you could just sell the sand. Further the guys making more money leasing the land than farming it, set some aside to pay for cleanup if he’s worried about it.
Just let loose a few sheep.
For example, any trees near high voltage transmission lines are cut down so the trees can't fall on the lines, causing them to be in direct sunlight. There are thousands of miles across the country. Why aren't there solar panels under all of them, and why would they be buying other land before using that? The land is already owned by the power company. It's practically free.
They cut down any trees within a certain number of feet of the power lines. This is done when the power lines are installed. Then they come back and periodically trim any trees that grow laterally into that area.
> Transmission lines tend to be in difficult to reach, undeveloped areas.
Not unlike agricultural land.
Also not really true. Transmission lines tend to be near population centers, in order to supply power to them. There are more transmission lines per square mile in, say, New Jersey than there are in Montana.
> They’re often not owned by the power company but rather used with easements.
Enough of them are owned by the power company that we certainly haven't used them all yet.
> The power company might not be a generation company either.
In which case they could become one, or lease the land to one, which is free money to the power company but still a low price to the buyer because of the limited number of competing uses.
> Building the hookup for thin lines of solar panels might not be cost effective either.
Unclear what the layout has to do with anything. It's obviously possible to transfer an arbitrarily large amount of electricity in a straight line. If trying to minimize the number of inverters, panels could be wired in series to raise the DC voltage to whatever is appropriate to reach the distance to the inverter.
Maybe it could make sense. But with solar development being as aggressive as it is right now it seems unlikely that folks are just missing this idea.
But then you're just referring to specific subsets of them in heavily rural areas. The transmission lines that run parallel to I-95 or the 101 are not particularly difficult to get to.
I'm sure there's a perfectly cromulent answer that I'm too dumb to see…
Which is totally a solvable issue, it's just that we as a country are seemingly incapable of large infrastructure projects like that anymore. First you spend years arguing that such an investment is even necessary to spend people's taxes on. Then once the political will is there, it takes even longer to get through the permitting process, ecological reviews etc.
Kind of insane really because something like this would really be a net win all around - lots of new construction and manufacturing jobs for years, and at the end of it all, a highly resilient grid that can tap into cheap power at its source and bring it to where it's needed.
You need the power to be able to hook into the transmission grid reasonably close to where it’s needed.
Psychotic “investors” have ensured the extermination of humanity
Massive real estate development has already covered huge tracts of fertile farmland. See, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John":
https://angelicorganics.com/watch-the-movie/
With more housing per capita than at any time in US history, somehow we still have a "housing crisis" that requires paving over farmmland, but the possibiity eco disaster somehow doesn't justify the same...