Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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