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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

If farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost of most processed foods).

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This can be confounded heavily by the riding “agrivoltaics” trend of finding ways to use solar panels while continuing to farm the same land. The most common example are ranching (e.g. letting sheep enjoy the shade under panels) but some crops actually benefit from lower sun intensity.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/feb/22/k...

However, that’s probably unnecessary: just converting the land used to produce ethanol to solar farms would produce an enormous amount of electricity with no impact on food production.

> Through spatial analyses, we determined that converting just 3.2% of land currently used for corn ethanol would increase the share of utility-scale solar energy in the US from 3.9 to 13%.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2501605122

I sometimes wonder what would happen to our other resources if energy was abundant and "free". For example desalination plants running for free could perhaps be used to refill an aquifer.

Of course there are markets and balances in the real world. The idea that energy is always scarce and that we shouldn't produce more than I as an individual need always feels a bit like maintaining scarcity.

often energy storage has a lot of losses in the the conversion. but if you produce 10x of what you need for "free". Would that really matter? I'm sure we will get there at some point.

This is why we have to invest so much more into solar. Any kind of fossil fuel or even nuclear energy is constrained by scarcity.

You put in a natural gas power plant, now you are reliant on someone going out and digging for oil, shipping it back, you burning it, and repeat indefinitely.

I put Nuclear in this group because firstly it’s incredibly expensive to build and operate nuclear plants. And you are still consuming water and fuel, and producing waste. That’s a huge production chain just to keep it operating.

There is scarcity at every step to operate these plants. Scarcity of labor, scarcity of fuel that you’re going to burn, scarcity of water, scarcity of waste storage, scarcity of parts to maintain the plants. There is a limit to how cheap it can get.

With solar, you can buy a panel for cheap, leave it on the grass, and get power for 30 years with practically no maintenance. Even wind or hydro have moving parts to service. For solar, the most you ever have to do is the equivalent of cleaning a window.

There is practically no scarcity. Even if it’s just being able to buy a panel… well, the supply of panels only ever increases. They are increasingly recyclable. They are not consumable, complicated products that you burn up or which break apart in a couple years.

Yes, if farms went 100% from agriculture to solar we wouldn't have enough food :-) And we'd have anywhere from 100x to 1000x the entire power demand of the planet in energy. Solar has a $/acre value (which at the moment is pretty high in California) but as more Solar came on line that would go down. And like any crop they would figure out what they needed to maximize profits.

It might also spur the development of 100% electric Farm vehicles (tractors, planters, combines etc) as the Farm could make it own electricity and not have to pay diesel costs for fueling that. At the extreme, if you have enough 'free power' on your farm you can use it for electrolysis of Ammonia to make nitrates. (fertilizer). That would be because you could make money offsetting the other costs of farming to make your cost of goods lower than your neighbors farm and increase your total $/acre.

So the short summary is "no" is isn't going to change how much food is available. Farmers pick crops all the time that aren't "food" for you, they are exports or added to some other product (corn syrup, cotton), because they are in demand. That balances out by regular market dynamics.

Why not both? Agrivoltaics or dual-use solar has farmers putting solar panels on the fields, and sometimes finding it improves their yields!

Is it just me or do you desperately need electricity to live?

In my original comment I linked the nature study that looked at farmers doing both. The "but if we don't plant crops we'll starve!" argument is just silly for a number of reasons, one I pointed out which is if we used all land arable land just in California for solar panels + batteries we'd have 1,000 times as much power available as the entire world demand today. Who would even buy that power? Nobody. The thing that keeps this from happening is that as more solar power comes online its cost goes down and it becomes uneconomical to add more (farmer's won't put it in because they can make more money growing beans or something). So no, allowing farmers to put in solar instead of crops will never lead to a famine due to nobody growing food. People are too greedy :-). There is a large ConAgra farm in the central valley that lobbies a lot (they want more water for Almonds because $$) and a back of the envelope calculation shows they could convert half their acreage to solar, use that to desalinate water off the coast of Point Magu, and pump it to the other half of their acreage and not need any water delivered from the California watershed. It sounds crazy but its the new reality of what you can do with solar and batteries. China (as a government policy directive) has figured this out before anyone else btw.

You could only allow the conversion for farms that grow corn for ethanol at first. Isn't that around 10 million hectares on the low estimates?

There’s also the possibility of famine. But hey at least we’d have AI.

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