American solar farms
tech.marksblogg.com
tech.marksblogg.com
13.5.3 In most cases, not all wind turbine units within a wind turbine farm need to be lighted. Obstruction lights should be placed along the perimeter of the wind turbine farm so that there are no unlit separations or gaps more than 1/2 SM (0.80 km) (see Figure A-26). Wind turbines within a grid or cluster should not have an unlighted separation or gap of more than 1 SM (1.61 km) across the interior of a grid or cluster of turbines
https://ipf.msu.edu/about/news/solar-carport-initiative-earn...
But what I haven't figured out is if they have to broom them off after a snow or just wait until the sun melts it. By the time I am around in the afternoon time they are always cleared.
It might be enough to just form a thin layer of water, so the whole mass of snow slides off.
It would be great if these costs could come down. Parking lots, animal pastures & other areas could be protected & create energy at the same time.
Lat, Lon: 29.701864, -95.388646
And solar has gotten way cheaper since then. It's a no-brainer.
Curious how people run into solar panels. I wonder how many ER visits say "I ran into a solar panel"
If you include stuff like stop signs, light poles, mailboxes, and fences its probably in the several thousands. Fixed object collisions are super common.
In the US, this is not a problem unless you are drunk. When you are driving drunk, you are violating the law anyway.
https://old.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/myfroy/today_the_14th...
https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/5da1w1/bes...
https://i95rock.com/how-to-avoid-a-car-crash-as-you-approach...
There are 2.75 - 4 billion buildings on this planet. Something will happen a few times or more than few times. Sometimes asteroids hit the planet and most species go extinct.
Where are ya'll from that people are running into stationary structures all the time? If people have an epidemic of running into stationary things, wouldn't there be a 100x problem of them running into moving things - like cars, trucks, trains, airplanes?
Regardless, why is it okay for people to run into any stationary structure but not okay for people to run into structures that hold solar panels? Or is there some effort to remove ALL stationary structures because of this problem?
For example, light posts constantly get bumped in parking lots.
To hold your solar panels you need really strong posts that can both hold them and get bumped into by vehicles. Especially in the USA where you have giant vehicles & tight parking spaces.
This all adds to the cost before you even get to electricity storage & transmission.
I looked once into solar covers for EV charging spots and it would provide like 5% of energy, not worth the hassle.
For parking the convenience is definitely worth it, but economically I don't think supermarkets care that much.
Vertical panels may even be stacked on top of one another. Considering how big a fan of solar panels this administration is, perhaps the Big Beautiful Border Wall can be built with vertical solar panels.
> a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS.
TFG cancelled a fairly far along project to build 6gw of solar in the Nevada desert just a few days ago known as Esmeralda 7.
The ineptitude and grift of this administration will haunt this country for decades.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/feds-appear-to-canc...
> UPDATE: The U.S. Bureau of Land Management responded to 8 News Now on Friday afternoon to clarify the meaning of a “canceled” notice on the Esmeralda Seven Solar Project. A decision to combine the environmental reviews for the seven projects is being changed to give each project the option of submitting their proposal separately. The BLM’s statement: “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada. Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
> The “Cancelled – Cancelled” notice on BLM’s NEPA website applies only to the environmental review stage. The entire project has not been canceled.
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/massive-esmeralda-s...
I do not have a side as I don't know enough.
A great engineer, however, is able to readily admit when one option among others has a far, far greater set of costs than another, for the exact same benefit.
And if said engineer can't decide (for claim of ignorance), they mature to learn that the experience and knowledge of others is the best source for understanding the trade-offs involved to make a decision.
I think its pretty clear solar power has trade-offs. I think it's also obvious solar has far less negatives than all other power generating sources.
Maybe it was a misunderstanding of my intentions to purely share information based on your reply.
If you don't mind, please help me understand. Did it come across as anti-solar in general? That's how I'm interpreting your reply.
The article, which I wonder if anyone read, argues local environmental concerns based on the giant size of the solar farm. One of those things was mountain sheep that migrate across the lands. This would be creating a wall of sorts. Another was Native American archeology. What I'm ignorant of is if any of these issues were addressed at all & what the impact is.
In a general sense, I'm a huge fan of solar farms. I think they make more sense than using land to plant corn for energy, which funny enough also got me down votes here.
If you really care about animals, plants, or archeology, you're probably not a fan of coal or natural gas, which are obviously destructive of geology and habitats, and that's _without_ getting into more nebulous and catastrophic climate stuff.
Based on my research, 1/3 of the land that would have had major construction disturbances effecting plants & archeology. A fair counter argument is that construction crews deal with archeology all the time. I would also assume it should be fairly easy to take rare plants into account & make sure there is an equal amount grown & taken care of after construction is completed. I don't know what plants they are concerned about, but solar farms do improve a lot of vegetation by offering shade & reducing evaporation.
The entire area was to be fenced off which would prevent big horn sheep migration. It seems no pathways were offered to be built to help with migration of animals. This seems like something that could be fairly easy to do though it would add expense of fencing & reduce some solar panels possibly.
So many people constantly talk about the costs of solar. If that is all you are contributing to the discussion, you aren't adding much new or interesting, in my opinion.
As an aside, I also just generally hate when commentors link to stuff with nothing else. It feels smug. Start the discussion you want to spark with honesty and earnest thoughts. Those who "just ask questions" engage in this same tactic to derail topics and pretend like they didn't take any side. Just "linking to useful information". What's useful about it? Highlight something to start discussion.
I am not claiming you are doing these things. But surely you are aware of and can appreciate the tactics of those that spread misinformation.
While I was just trying to help understand some opposing reasons, you're right that it didn't add much to the overall discussion.
Also, the rainfall. Some farmers go from morning to night never saying a word that isn't a complaint about the rainfall being wrong.
My best guess it is because it causes them existential dread by demarcating to them that there once was a time without the new feature. Now kids will be growing up always having there been the new feature. Thus highlighting their own inevitable death.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
I like industrial architecture and some plants inspire awe but post-war coal plants are as ugly and boring as it gets. Older ones look much better in my eye and I’m glad that some buildings are preserved after the stations are shut down.
Yes. Some of them use proper rain gauges but some just complain about it. Basically none of them understand the difference between a point measurement and an areal average estimate.
Farmers need rain, but there is never a perfect time for it to rain. There is always something they need to do that can't be done because it rained. If rain was 100% predictable months in advance farmers would just plan to not do those things on rain days (rain days often last a couple days because things need to dry), but it isn't and so they often are in the middle of something that cannot be interrupted when rain interrupts them.
Of course the other problem is sometimes it doesn't rain and then they can get all the jobs done above - but because there is no rain nothing grew (well) and so the harvests are bad...
OOOhh is there a device I can get that tracks this for home?
When they first started, they had to build the infrastructure and stations to collect the power to transport it from the turbines. My mom rented out some rooms of her house to make some cash when that went on for maybe 2 years in total. There was a lot of work and money coming into the area for a moment, but now the only people making money are the farmers who own the land the turbines sit on.
It's always a trip to see a view you have seen for 40 years but with the turbines there in the background. Slowly, these rural areas are losing vital services one by one. The specialists stop coming to the hospital, even on rotation. The dentists and optometrists retire out and unless someone growing up there has a passion for teeth and genetically modified corn then the roles get pushed out to the bigger cities, 30-45m away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgN2G9d0dc
The turbines I saw in Iowa weren't loud enough to drown out distance sounds of the highway. I didn't hear them at all, but I guess there's also tinnitus to be contended with...
Ruin the view,
Lower property values,
Habitat destruction,
Noise from inverter fans
Not just the fans. The transformers, inductors, chokes, capacitors, etc can get extremely noisy as well. I have to plug my ears when I walk by the switchgear at my local Walmart's EV install because it is so loud.
Any system that relies on high rate of change of current over time is prone to these issues. Look at the prevalence of coil whine in gaming PCs and workstations now. The level of noise scales almost linearly with current up until you saturate the various magnetic cores. In a multi-megawatt installation of any kind that relies upon inverters, it is plausible that these electromagnetic acoustic effects could cause meaningful habitat destruction on their own.
Traditional synchronous machines (turbines) do not have this issue, but they are not something you want to live next to for reasons on the other end of the acoustic frequency spectrum. Infrasound from a turbine can travel for miles, especially during transient phases of operation. There were a lot of complaints on social media during the commissioning of a new natural gas generator unit in my area last year.
I was on many solar farms, and the only ones that I could hear from the distance were the ones that had classic substations nearby. The 60Hz transformer sound can be heard for quite a distance.
Please. You won't hear it even a couple hundred meters away.
As for habitat destruction, wildlife _loves_ the shade under solar panels. So much that you need to be careful where you step because rattlesnakes also love (to eat) the wildlife.
Moreover, unlike mines and coal power plants, solar plants are mostly build-and-forget installations. They can be completely unmanned, with only occasional visits for maintenance and panel cleaning.
I'm less than $8k in on the solar part of this and it's been more reliable than my neighbor's grid power.
But maybe my enjoyment of the panel set is also a "fringe" opinion. I know folks that live near larger installations with less direct impacts and they seem to have fewer feelings about those plants.
I'm pro nuclear power, but I couldn't resist the pop culture reference. And it's good to remember what can go wrong when people's fallibility interacts with a powerful technology.
(Dialog from a memorable Call of Duty level based on Pripyat, Ukraine, near Chernobyl)
Many old school plants also rely on dams and provide massive ponds. Which sucks during construction when some people have to move. But in my experience after several decades people are pretty happy to live next to those massive ponds. If I'd have to pick living next to a massive lake which allows boats/yachts/etc (which is not so common in my whereabouts) with a plant on the other side of that lake vs. lake-sized solar plant... Former does sound better.
The good news is, they'll rapidly adapt to each new solar farm; the bad news is, they'll forget about all the ones they're used to by the time comes to expand — I've seen anecdotes of the same thing happening with power lines, where people were upset that some proposed new ones would ruin the view, the person proposing them said they wouldn't be any different from the current ones, and the complainers said "what current ones?" and had to have them pointed out.
Farm-scale irrigation is not silent.
Crop Dusters are not silent.
Combines and other tractors are not silent.
Burning fields are both not silent and release a tremendous amount of sooty smoke that spreads far beyond the boundaries of a farm.
Farms make a lot of noise.
Depending upon their other priorities, they may be upset about the loss of hunting access as well. Understandably, people putting up solar arrays don't want people firing guns in the middle of their arrays.
If I were to hazard a guess every person complaining would happily suffer the 'consequences' of a solar farm not being near their neighborhood.
It really should be a no brainer compromise to zone solar as industrial so they're not near where people live. There's in practice infinite amounts of land you can get zoned like this. Living to electrical noise sucks in a way living need next to a wind farm doesn't.
You won't have to hear it, you won't have to look at it except as way off in the distance, you won't have to worry about whether or not your buddy's farm is gonna get taken over by one when they run into financial troubles. Out your backyard you get to look at mostly pristine farmland and wilderness. During this time where there's political will and capital to just ban them outright I think this relatively small concession will make folks not put up too much in a fight as long as it's kept out of sight out of mind.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987251/Charges-aga...
https://www.theroot.com/atlanta-garbage-man-sentenced-to-jai...
That man shouldn't have been personally sentenced to anything, but it's a legitimate complaint to fix.
Like what?
Sure, it's better than a gas refinery or some other things you could find yourself living next to. But let's not ignore what's bad about our current solutions.
What I mean is that solar is good, and I support using it in a lot of places. But it's also open to bad decisions like everything else, so I try not to be a zealot about it. It's not the end all perfect cure for energy and it doesn't save the environment in all cases. Just in many.
Vs. almost any other business (farm, mine, oil drilling, warehouse, whatever) would both hire far more local people, and interact far more with the local community.
Or - maybe you're an introvert, or live in a place where it's normal to have no social relationships with your neighbors. If so, try talking to somebody who has lived in a small farming community. It is a very, very different world.
I've had six decades around rural communities, mostly in Australia, often in far flung parts of the world, there are few here that feel solar farms are dystopian giga-scale machines, mostly they think of them as dual use for pasture and additional guaranteed farm income.
Raised panels make the moisture retention better, increase the nutritional value of the ground cover and makes for better wool - all positives.
OTOH, it sounds like your experience is with solar/farming dual-use. Vs. America seems inclined to a "buy the land, kick off the farmers, put up the panels, and post the No Humans Allowed signs" monoculture model. Which can be all to easy to scale up & do, from a Wall Street point of view.
Wall Street isn't exactly the brightest when it comes to optimal approaches.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
( FWiW the counter arguments raised in anticipation in that three plus year old article didn't come to fruition in the time since across many sites - we do pay attention to water tables here in Australia following disastrous effects of over clearing for 80 years that ended some 50 years past )
The largest current complaint hereabouts in the farming community is the looming onset of a mega garbage dump for the nearest city. It's promised to be well sealed and well maintained, but local people are upset by the intrusion of convoys of garbage from the city - more noise and traffic than a few thousand hectares of solar panels.
Personally I like seeing renewables, big or small, cleanly producing energy for us to use. It's a small pro-social signal about environmental responsibility.
(my pet local hate, recently remediated after years of complaints from a twenty mile radius: Mossmorran flaring by Exxon-Mobil https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-5... )
the blue states have a lot of energy solar - while the red ones are sparse. the red ones get a lot of sun while the blue ones don't.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/texas-tops-us-states...
ERCOT has also had a number of spectacular -- and costly -- failures.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
Especially as you install more wind and solar, capturing (or sending) generation across a wider geographic area should regress-to-the-mean production and consumption better without turning on peaking plants that may be on for only hours a year. Or get natgas generation from areas where the natgas infra hasn't frozen solid.
https://www.ferc.gov/introductory-guide-electricity-markets-... ("ERCOT is not subject to federal (FERC) jurisdiction because its grid is not connected to those of other states. Thus, power sales in ERCOT are not considered sales in interstate commerce and not subject to federal (FERC) oversight. That said, ERCOT runs some electricity markets that have similarities to those described herein.")
Edit: This is only up until recently; Texas is seeking to potentially interconnect with neighboring grids, forgoing FERC independence in the process.
Texas Bill [H.B. 199] Opens ERCOT to Grid Interconnection - https://www.environmentenergyleader.com/stories/texas-bill-o... - July 25th, 2025 ("A completed interconnection—either synchronous or non-synchronous—would likely bring ERCOT under partial federal jurisdiction for the first time since its creation. Currently, ERCOT operates almost entirely within Texas to avoid triggering FERC oversight under the Federal Power Act.")
Connecting Past and Future: A History of Texas’ Isolated Power Grid - https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/connecting-past-and-... - December 1st, 2022
Why Texas Has Its Own Power Grid - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it... - August 18th, 2003
> [1] In the 1939 case United States v. Rock Royal Co-op, the Supreme Court had included milk processed and sold entirely within the state of New York within the federal government's purview because the company used a mixture of raw milk from farms within and outside the state of New York.
Like there's no way all of the energy in Texas only comes from Texas supplied materials.
I can't find the court case I want but there's another one about how somebody's local consumption had an effect on the interstate price so growing plants for local use can be federally regulated. And therefore, to me, FERC's existence effects the price of electricity on the rest of the states.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wrightwood_Da....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection (see Ties section)
(Yes, they have to be HVDC or VFT).
Quebec operates like Texas does, for political reasons too, with ample export and import capacity (import/export capacity = 15/20% of peak consumption)
And still, we've seen a massive amount of green energy installed here. Both windmills and solar farms.
But when you look at a grid map you pretty quickly understand why that's the case.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NW-IPCO/live/fif...
Right now, about 6% of my power comes from natural gas. That's the only fossil fuel power I'm currently using. Everything else is solar/hydro/wind. Not sure why nuclear isn't listed, I thought we had an active plant here. But you get the picture.
For my grid, new solar or wind is simply not needed so why would we be anywhere near the top of installation? Batteries is what we actually need.
There is a point where it's a bad idea to install more renewables.
They have a plan to be 100% renewable by 2030 and I believe they'll actually hit that target given how close they already are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler_Ridge_Wind_Farm
We also have a ton of solar. We could be doing much better as we also have an enormous amount of coal plants.
wind turbines are wonderful things to look at. but yeah some of those were constructed in the years there was a "blue" admin n I guess market forces took over too.
Saudi Arabia generates ~41% of its electricity from oil, 59% from natgas and <1% solar. Talk about mismanagement...
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/SAU/electrici...
The curious thing is that so many of these kinds of claims can be disproven in literally seconds to minutes in any debate, yet they persist.
Certain tendencies aside, republican and conservatives types aren't utter idiots and do know how sidestep some rally talk to serve their own benefit if they think it's practical, profitable and useful.
Not to mention that many conservatives love the field of off-grid prepping to this day and would certainly know about the value of solar, wind, hydro and any other robust renewable power technology. You're not going to build a coal plant or an oil refinery next to your deep-woods Utah cabin.
I'd imagine a lot of the lack of solar farms in the rural midwest and southwest is due to land use conflicts with ag and ranching. I don't have data to back that up though, just a hunch.
What money? Power bills won't go down. The solar panel factories aren't in that county. The installers will be brought in from out of state contractors.
Source: the butt tons of wind farms that sell their power to the state next door and the fact that our power bill has doubled in that time frame.
This is something I don’t really get. There’s always concern around change of course. But tending to renewables sounds so much nicer than fossil fuel issues. Like clearing snow off the panels doesn’t sound fun exactly, but it is outdoors… realistically for these giant fields of panels it should be a fairly mechanized process, so somewhat low impact… compare to black lung or, whatever, petrochemicals causing your tap water to catch fire.
If there's a foot of snow on the panels they don't catch any sun, don't get warm, and it doesn't melt off.
More than about 3 inches needs to be manually cleared.
Often exceeding the energy gained in the winter.
Oconto County averages between 4 and 5 feet of snow every winter. You need pretty heavy duty equipment to move that much snow out of a large field.
Most of Wisconsin doesn't actually get that much snow, though.
It just seems like a less unpleasant and less unhealthy job than pretty much anything related to petrochemicals, haha.
> 1/3 of corn is used for fuel - https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...
> Corn raises temp & humidity - https://extension.illinois.edu/news-releases/corn-fields-add...
> Corn destroys farmland & requires very high fertilizer & pesticide inputs, plus extra fuel to to apply all those - ask any old farmer but this one has a lot of sources
Also solar farms can easily be hidden. They don't need to be next to a public road way and you can put trees around them. They're also great for dual use land with small animals &/or certain crops.
Not sure why they are whining. Sounds like job creation to me!
On the other hand, at the federal level Republican admins tend to cut renewable subsidies and that sort of thing.
Red states have a lot of open space and ought to be ideologically in favor is loose regulations; it would be kind of nice if Republican national politicians would fully embrace cronyism and identify renewable subsidies as an easy way to give money to their supporters. “Oh we did the environmental survey it turns out we should plop down a bunch of subsidized renewable installations in Red states.” Plenty of room for pork and might actually help the country as a side effect…
I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete.
Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.
On flip side the orangutang cut green energy subsidies on grade A farmland, which most likely wasn't happening anyway.
Looking at, say, wind energy, the top 4 states are all red states. Their cumulative amount handily is more than the next so many states.
That's absolute energy. If you want to go by percentage of energy that is wind, it's the same - the top 4 are red states. In fact, 7 of the top 10 are:
https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/wind-generation-by-...
I haven't looked at solar, but it doesn't seem there's a clear divide.
Electricity in SF is now more than $0.50/kWh OFF peak.
It is certainly not a coincidence that CalISO has contracted with the most solar generators.
Notably, the municipal power companies mostly are far lower. It's PG&E and SoCal Edison who are that high, because they're shoving the costs of doing 75 years worth of deferred system maintenance all at once onto current ratepayers instead of their investors taking the hit. It's too bad that there wasn't a viable legal framework whereby the investor-owned utilties' shareholders could be wiped out as they deserved to be, and the utility infrastructure transferred to municipal ownership. Around PG&E's bankruptcy there were rumblings, but Sacramento couldn't figure out how to do it, so they propped them up and created a Wildfire Fund paid for by ratepayers to keep bailing them out.
On top of that the subsidies for solar installations are mostly frontloaded, since the costs are frontloaded. Annual tax breaks are transferrable, so they get sold at the beginning of the project to offset investment cost, lowering interest payments. Even removing tax breaks would not make existing installations less profitable.
Some people also complain about Solar being front loaded. But a power plant is also paid for up front. I'd like to see life time costs, minus subsidies.
This administration is openly touting “beautiful clean coal” (doesn’t exist) for powering servers. Renewables are yet another front where people are divided based on politics. It has little to do with efficacy or practicality. I still have family members convinced that offshore wind power is mass-killing whales because of Carlson.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
And if they are anything like the people I've talked to, they never once cared about whales (or any sea life) before this. Same with the "wind turbines kills birds" or even "trans women are ruining women's sports". Ahh yes, a whole list of things you've never cared about, made fun of, or derided in the past but now suddenly care about because of some talking head. It's exhausting.
Colleges already have the facilities to host games so it seems like an easy steal as there's actually a lot of money in (certain) woman's sports (i.e. USMNT and USWNT in soccer have similar revenue but different salaries) but the salaries are low so its an easier target then say the NFL.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...
>The following month, the president said his administration would not approve solar or wind power projects. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” he posted on Truth Social. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”
Realisitically, solar is dead in America and China is the undisputed worlds #1 solar superpower. The US might hook up a few little projects here or there, but functionally the US is in full retreat on solar, cedeing the industry and technology to China.
For example, there basically will not be large scale solar in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, etc under this administration. You know, some of the highest value spots.
I'm also not clear how cheaply the US could make its own PV in the event of arbitrary trade war (let alone hot war) between the USA and China.
(The good news there is that even in such a situation, everyone else in the world can continue to electrify with the panels, inverters, and batteries that the USA doesn't buy, but the linked article obviously isn't about that).
https://acretrader.com/resources/farmland-values/farmland-pr...
2. If the profit per acre is low, surely this just means they don't have a better use for the land?
3. Even if you assume they're all idiots who could make more profit if they thought harder about better uses for their land, I'm not clear why the reason for the land being what it is, is supposed to matter?
Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields, they’re taking marginal land used for grazing and using that for solar fields. Productive farmland can have wind turbines within it, due to the smaller footprint of the turbine tower.
Productive farmland is $10k+ an acre, more if it’s irrigated. The cost of rural land is based on the economic rents/value that can be extracted from the land.
Given the rate at which the aquifer is being depleted, they should. There are some water districts in CA that have encouraged conversion to solar but it's controversial.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/07/california-agricul...
(And I didn't even say in which direction it would change, or exactly what will change.)