How much money does a golf course bring in yearly? How onerous are the regulations?
How much money would a solar farm bring in yearly? How onerous would the regulations be?
How much money would a solar farm bring in yearly? How onerous would the regulations be?
An acre used to make hay might bring in $500/year.
An acre used for PV might bring in $25,000/year.
If PV uses too much land, do we want to talk about what agriculture is doing?
If we’ve worried about land why not go for nuclear? Just plant nuclear reactor seeds add fertilizer and power plants spring up in a few months.
See it doesn’t quite work that way. It brushes away too many variables.
Have you noticed the price of beef going up? It's because we're losing arable land to climate change. It takes a large number of high quality acres to raise a cow on grass.
That's been getting less and less feasible over time between extreme weather and erosion, so the cows get hay instead.
Hay production in places like Texas is disrupted by drought every few years, which means that ranchers have to sell their cattle at a loss or let the cows starve in the fields (assuming they don't die of heat stroke - the cows and the farmers).
After a few bad cycles like that, the ranchers start selling off land, so there aren't enough cows even in good years. Presumably this is bad for hay farmers, since demand attenuates down to what it would be in a drought year.
That brings us to 2026. It's pretty clear what's coming next.
If we normalize by $ instead of by acre, the hypothetical golf course conversion would produce >> 10% of land requirements.