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It can be really good to cover the fields!
Reduce evaporation, expand the range of plants that can grow and provide subsidies for hard pressed farmers
Protecting food and water resources are going to get increasingly important over the next few decades
Every single time this gets posted: Both is good.
Farmers are the biggest welfare queens in this country. They all bitch and moan about needing subsidies and everything but they all have crop insurance.
how many farmers do you know? You understand many are black and you’re calling them welfare queens, right? I get that people think farmers are republicans or conservative but that’s just admitting you have outdated knowledge. The times have changed
While you aren’t wrong about them being good to use in Ag, the scenario where you can do both is more limited.
You can’t drive a combine harvester under panels, to harvest the crop you just protected for instance, unless you place and design your panels carefully. It’s ok for pasture in that sheep and the like can get in and chow down and it provides shade though.
For a parking lot, it’s easier, as shown, but also fuck cars, they’re their own environmental disaster
They are using them on closed tailings facilities (mining) to add additional land use or gain benefit where there wasn’t really a good land use to begin with.
I think urban settings are where panels will ultimately shine, as you can concentrate them without taking up other land uses - it’s just an add on and doesn’t detract from existing or future uses like using them in an ag field would.
40% of US cornfields are used for energy today. If these fields were turned into solar farms with natural meadows under them, not only would we actually recover more energy per acre than corn ethanol, but we would start restoring the American prairie that has been nearly erased from the continent.
It uses far less materials to build arrays in a field than over a parking lot. The panels don’t need to be mounted as high. There doesn’t need to be as much safety margin and protection of the panels because people won’t be underneath them.
The bigger problem is getting the power from solar farms to where it is needed, but this is also not as big a problem as anti-electrification lobby wants you to believe.
I don’t know. Sheep like to park below panels too.
Woolly engineers hard at work.
How about we don’t cover our fields with car parks?
By and large we don’t. 53% percent of the surface area of the US is farmland. 28% of it is protected federal lands of some stripe or another — national forests and national parks, BLM land, etc. Everything else, all the remaining cities and suburbs and coal burning power plants, freeways, stroads with no bike lanes, Walmarts, and strip malls are all packed into the remainder. Most of that is along the coasts. The US is absolutely full of wide, huge, horizon-to-horizon, enormous expanses with nothing in them.
It’s just that our populated areas, largely along the costs, are utter hellholes.
This is ridiculously untrue and confuses too much of what matters for food
Saw a documentation a few days ago. It was about a berry Farmer who put solarpanels above his berries to shield them from direct sunlight. Works great! And He could replace all his transporters with EVs. :)
I’ve seen plenty of different types of solar panels, some specifically for agriculture use that have small gaps between the solar cells to allow for more sun to reach plants.
I’m not sure how that affects solar panel output/longevity but it can’t be too much of a hit.
It’s called Agrovoltaics and it works pretty damn good,if you do it right.
The pairing can also offer some synergies. Solar panels can help moderate ground temperatures, provide shelter for livestock and help plants retain moisture.[6] For farmers the ability to produce electricity can help diversify their income stream.
Solar panels block light, which means that dual use systems involve trade-offs between crop yield, crop quality, and energy production.[7] Some crops/livestock benefit from the increased shade, obviating the trade-off,[8] such as green leafy vegetables, and spices such as turmeric and ginger, whereas staple crops such as wheat, rice, soybeans or pulses require more sun.[9] Agrivoltaics has also been used at scale in arid and semi-arid regions to stabilize soils, reduce dust storm intensity, increase vegetation cover, provide forage for livestock, and curb desertification, notably in northern China.[10][11]
The picture in the op doesn’t look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I’ve seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.
In the US it makes sense. Much of our corn is grown for ethanol so ot can be used for fuel. Replace that with solar and we reduce our reliance on a monocrop and end up with far far more power.
They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they’ll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.
In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can’t help but think of the forest that could have been there.
If you destroy existing forest to make a farm, maybe. But if it’s an empty field and you want to do something with it, making it into a forest makes little sense. It’s complicated, very expensive, and doesn’t do much. Just let natural forests do their things, allow them to expand if you want more forests, don’t make one from scratch.
Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there’s a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they’ve been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it’s thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.
But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We’d have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it’s not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.
I’m not an expert by any stretch, but through no fault of my own, I know my way around agriculture, and I know my way around planting and removing trees. Making a forest, a proper forest, is probably the furthest thing from “stamping a bunch of seeds into the ground” you can imagine. You can’t even grow trees from seeds manually, that just doesn’t work on any scale. You plant saplings that you spend years caring for, and then they die on you and you start it all over. The way you described is the way to get a wild meadow, but the one dominated by some weed monocrop, and exclusively the one you don’t want. You will have a country-wide infestation of poisonous hogweed that kills all life around it before you’ll get one tree the way you want it to be.
Forest requires very specific amount of biodiversity, soil characteristics, layers of biomass influencing each other, specific insects and animals, it needs tens, and in specific cases, hundreds of kilometers of space, it needs seasonal changes, in some cases cycles of burning, and most importantly, it needs time. Generations of trees need to grow and die and grow and die again in order for a forest to be sustainable and not fragile. Forest isn’t a bunch of trees haphazardly put in an empty parking lot, it’s a life long project that is not guaranteed to succeed by any stretch.
Europe has the deforestation problem because forests are biomes with their own complicated rules, not a bunch of seeds thrown in an area half a kilometer wide between a road and a waste treatment facility.I’ve seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old “real” forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can’t grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.
And as further proof that I don’t live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here’s 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/
Turning it back into a forest will never happen when the land owner needs to pay taxes on the land and thus need to make income of the land. These solar fields are usually on private property. Not public land. Either they put windmills and solar on the fields or they raise cattle or grow crops. Which one is better for the environment overall?
Here’s the largest solar farm in California. It covers sand. Also, solar panels don’t block 100% of the light getting to the ground, so different species of plants and animals can live and thrive under them. The land under solar panels is not lost to natural use. Life will adapt.
That said, solar panels over car parks is also a good idea. Both things can be true.
Life will adapt
Life will recover:
https://www.ecoportal.net/en/foxes-use-solar-farm-as-natural-habitat/20424/
That article has all the hallmarks of AI-generated slop.
Also a solar park like this is a lot cheaper and thus they can sell the energy for much cheaper. Solar over car parks requires a more complex structure to hold the panels since they are higher up and therefore catch more wind and the structure needs to span a larger gap. So a car or two can park between the pillars. This increases the cost.
Pv is around 250-400 times more efficient than energy crops for Bioethanol. So 1ha of pv could free up 249 - to 399 ha of land. Thats an ultimate win!
In the states, though, solar is woke and gay, and thus doesn’t get any financial help(currently). Farmers that live hand-to-mouth in the old model, getting drip-fed agri-subsidies, don’t have a way to soften the blow of the capex needed to push through the expense barrier, even though the other side is cleaner and more profitable.
Shift the subsidy requirement from agricultural to PV migration and that’ll fix itself.
Actually, with climate change in the back of the mind, covering fields with solar panels (not 100%, only partially) will reduce heat damage and water usage in the height of summer, and also protect the ground during cold spells of winter. So it is not that stupid after all.
That covering car parks with solar is a good idea is completely independent of this.
Obviously we could do the same or better with coal by just burning as much as we can without any attempt to filter it out of the air, encasing the earth in a wonderful shady smog, keeping us all shaded and cool /s
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun. Personally all the solar farms I’ve seen just “grow” grass and everything is kept trimmed down to not cast shade on the panels. Putting the panels up higher would still cast any plants grown in deep shade. I think putting them in places deep shade is needed/wanted on the ground makes sense and because cities tend to be hotter due to paving using solar panels to cast shade would help lower the temps in cities, lowering power usage on things like AC. I think integrating solar into urban landscapes is the future
They need direct and indirect light, and agro-panels have a coverage of about 50%. Not enough for high-end farming, but more than enough for grass and similar to grow for grazing. Or some herbs that need shadow to grow properly. Those panels are usually placed on land that can’t be used for high-performance farming, anyway.
Plant butterfly bushes and other pollenator attractants / nectar sources.
One can always do this. Quite some of those plants love shadow and half-shadow environments. And, as i stated in my original post, don’t ignore the climate change. Many plants growing in a given location for ages will have difficulties in the future because of the more extreme weather.
You can either change the plants you are growing (like people in the south of my country who replace wineyards with olive orchards), or you can help historically local plants to survive, and solar panels is actually one way to do this.
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun.
The humble Monotropa uniflora:
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun.
That’s only true, if the solar panels are not properly adjusted to this use case.
The solution for that is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics#Spectrally_selective_modulesCrazy thought: put solar panels over A/Cs and tie it into the panel.
How many times is this gonna get posted? It gets dunked on every time too…
both. both is good.
It’s not a bad idea to have energy production near where the energy is being used.
That said, it’s not an either or.
Technology Connections actually did a great video on why using solar panels in place of crops can benefit the crops and actually provides more energy than the crops themselves. At least in the U.S., a huge portion of our crops are used for ethanol in gasoline anyway.
Ooooof course it is
This is emotionally resonant but it’s actually sometimes better to cover fields. The right thing is not always intuitive.
Yup, like, what is it replacing? If it’s food that goes directly to humans, let’s not do that. If it’s corn for ethanol, that has little worth. Covering it with solar panels isn’t terrible by any means.
I feel like people still haven’t internalized just how much of our fields go to corn for ethanol
Exactly, and those take resources to grow. Water, fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, oil, farm equipment, and so on.
Both. Agriphotovoltaik is neat stuff, proctects the more sensitive plants and enables farmers to generate more income, making them less depending on subsidies, bad crops, etc.
Given that :
A : agriphotovoltaism, can drive up most field yields because loads of places are now too dry and too hot in the summer. Solar panels block the excess sun and keep the moisture in the ground. Conversely, you can’t park more cars under solar panels.
B : your average field is much larger than a car park. So installing a solar power plant is more efficient in a field (less paperwork per square meter, spend more time building than moving material around…).
C : car parks are often surrounded by buildings which will block the sun. This doesn’t happen on most fields (which rarely have tall trees)
D : a car raming into your poles is bound to happen and you pretty much have to replace the whole pole. A cow ramming into your pole might happen, the pole won’t give a fuck.
E : installing solar panels above car park is a lot more expensive (taller infrastructure, need more space between poles so need chonkier poles, maintenance high up is way more costly, etc ) And solar panel companies usually work on a much tighter budget than say the petrol industry for exemple. So every dollar counts
Anyway, next time please do some research instead of posting a divisive post and spreading misconception ;)
Edit : as some others pointed out :
- destroying natural environments in order to put up solar panels is not okay. Which i totally agree with. That’s why I was talking of agriphotovoltaism specifically.
- if we get the opportunity, we might as well put up solar panels in both fields and cities. We shouldn’t paint it as an either/or situation because it risks dividing the pro solar population and i don’t need to explain why this is a bad idea
Around here they’re cutting down thousands of acres of trees for them. Tractors are as tall as cars, you have to mow livestock fields. Field installs make a lot of sense for a variety of cases, but there isn’t a right answer, neither the poster or your comment.
To me the real issue is the greed, a Florida investment firm buying 1k acres of contiguous woodland, wiping it, installing solar for a casino to but so they can market how green they are. While individual homeowners have to jump through hoops and deal with snake oil salesmen to install, with heavy limits. That transfers the wealth from individuals and small towns to corporate overlords and the ultra wealthy.
Requiring parking lots to have them pushes back on corporations, plus turrets rings of heavy duty light poles in parking lots, people do drive their cars into them, but it’s not often and they’re not frequently replaced because of it, just designed to withstand.
For the tractor part, some people have started using vertical solar panels which still shield vegetation form wind, excessive sun… But leave much more room for vehicles.
East/West facing vertical panels are pretty impressive. The peak output at noon is lower than south facing angled placement, but there is a boost from East and from West before and after solar azimuth that pushes overall output higher.
The foundations used to support both pictures are the same: W6x9 or W6x10.4 W-beams.
Carports are more expensive, though, because those foundations need to be just as long as the ground-mount ones + 14’ to support the panels above parking spaces. And often, ground-mounts can use alternative foundations like helical piles or ground screws which don’t need to be embedded as deep as W-beams. This shaves down foundation costs.
Then, you have to consider the steel trusses needed to distribute complex carports loads, which are simplified or non-existent with ground-mounts.
Then, you often have concrete encasements around carport foundations to protect the foundations from vehicles collisions.
All of this contributes to carport solar PV being the MOST expensive out of any alternative.
And if anyone is curious, for Commercial & Industrial (C&I) solar in urban/suburban contexts, cost effective PV usually goes roof-mount < ground-mount < canopy-mount. For utility/DG-scale, ground-mount is king.
