I’m a farmer, rancher, and dairyman. This shit pisses me off. You can get dual use out of land. I can grow crops and graze cattle around and often under solar panels. The limiting factor is what the power company will allow me to sell to them. And they don’t want that because bottom lines.
Seriously. The oil industry has been extracting petrochemicals from the earth while we utilize the land above for animals and crops for over a hundred years. Its not difficult. Saying that renewables are using up our land and not allowing dual utilization for other commodities is a lazy and piss poor lie that will not stop and I’m tired of it.
Stop this nonsense bullshit petro propaganda now. Alternative energy can and already does coexist with modern land management and modern farming practices. Full stop.
Farming under the panels can be beneficial in drought conditions.
Putting solar panels above parking lots is still an excellent idea.
Some combos are beneficial for the plants bellow. Either way, any solar plant is better than coal.
Why not both?
Panels on grazing areas and some fields has repeatedly been proven beneficial
Not sure if this was mentioned cause there are quite a few comments on here. California is planning on putting them over the water canals to prevent evaporation and ‘save billions of gallons of water per year’.
That’s a nightmare to maintain. The electricians would need to get hazard pay for the risk of falling and the risk of drowning.
India has been doing it since 2012, and these fuckers are claiming they invented the concept.
“Brandi McKuin, the lead University of California researcher on the project, says dozens of people have told her they had the idea of covering canals with solar panels decades ago.”
Parking lots are already wasted space—might as well make them useful too.
Or maybe downsize them like crazy and use them for native plants or housing and build infrastructure like trains trams and busses to reduce the dependence on cars
Why not both?
From the agricultural perspective- we’ve got billions to feed and that isn’t going to go away. Better ways to use the land we’ve turned into fields is a different subject, but between plant’s need for solar and how they’re harvested it’s a no go. Wind capture is an option though.
For what’s left of our wild spaces- we’ve already fucked so many. Solar may be a lower impact on what remains but there’s millions of acres that have already been converted for our “needs”. We should focus on generating our power in the areas already developed before talking about dropping more manmade structures in the wild.
It’s often mutually beneficial for animals to graze around solar panels. Having them in fields is not inherently wasting the space.
That’s why I referenced plants, not animals. Also, don’t fool yourself. The bulk of your meat is not grazing in a field even if the packaging label makes it look that way. It’s knee deep in shit-mud and shoulder to shoulder with it’s kin in a CAFO or tearing up the native vegetation on the public lands out west.
There are also studies showing certain plants do well too. Also ignoring that a truly massive amount of cropland is being used for ethanol, which is a much less efficient form of energy than solar.
An even greater amount of cropland is being used for animal feed, something ethanol crops double dip in because they use byproduct from that process in feed. Eliminating ethanol and the luxury of cheap meat would go a long way in reclaiming our crop lands.
Animal agriculture, excepting very small symbiotic regenerative practices youve never fucking heard of, ends in any future where we still have humans in a century.
This is not a moral imperative. The future where thats viable is underwater and boiled to a grey lump.
THIS !!!
As a solar engineer myself that started in utility scale solar and just left their first Commercial & Industrial (C&I) solar job, residential, commercial, and industrial solar is the best use.
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you center generation as close as possible to utilization, minimizing transmission and distribution.
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land is re-used, allowing other lands for other uses like rewilding, reforesting, and conservation.
You still have other problems like large power users, but you cannot ignore the benefits.
I hate that this even came to my mind, but I bet a significant percentage of people would actually be discouraged by point 2. I’m all in on it, go team save (and restore) the environment, but it seems like so many people sneer and get turned off just by hearing words such as “rewilding” as if it’s somehow working against their best interests
To the capitalist, everything is an asset that can make money, including land. No money making in returning land to nature, unless a positive externality is introduced by a tax credit or something. Not a perfect solution by far, but rewilding is a necessary pill to swallow because we’re in the sixth mass extinction and are using land for things like cows and pigs which is super water and fertilizer intensive.
Land is their favourite asset because all they have to do own it and charge you for the privilege of being there.
As a side note, landlords are a disease
Theres a cure for them, though.
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I have explanation, but you will not like it.
Parking lots have been built on cheap. Those who have roofs can’t support any added weight, while those who do not have roofs are far away from any serious electrical connection able to give the energy outside.
The whole idea can be done… on new parking lots.
Also - how about instead we build more water-plant power storage? They pump water to the upper reservoir using electricity in the middle of day, and then produce electricity from flowing water at dawn/dusk/night. This would up the demand for electricity when solar panels are overproducing it and push businesses to consider including solar panels in their constructions.
The benefit of pavement being cheap is it’s not terribly expensive to remove or repair bits of it. Cut a square out, drill down with an auger, chuck a sonotube in and pour a footing. Trenching in conduit for power lines doesn’t seem like much of a deal breaker either.
I’d also image a parking lot is closer to an electrical connection than a farm field out in the country.
Okay, I give on the first part, but not on the second.
Farms consume quite a lot of electricity actually, and often electrical grid must be enforced more for a farm than for a suburbs.
Why are you talking about farms?
Ones on roofs are easy, a panel can’t weigh more than a car so you lose a few parking spaces on the roof level and bob’s your uncle. The goal is to reduce car usage so it’s fine. And existing ones are too far away to provide electricity? What? They’re literally beside stores which consume power! Yea I don’t like that answer, it’s dumb as hell.
The pumping idea sounds cool, though, and I’m not against it, but dude I’m so tired of “what if we do nothing because we can’t understand the concept of having multiple solutions going at once?”
not near electrical infra
Unlike the average field
Pumped storage can only be feasibly used on existing suitable terrain, and we used most of the easy location.
There is not much left, and with cheap battery storage and power to gas you can go way cheaper. Hydro power and storage is not the future.
Not at scale at least. In rustic situations where ut still needs to be pumped from a well, a small water tower filled during peak makes perfect sense
It’s really not difficult to dig a trench through an existing parking lot to lay down wire.
They can coexist pretty well with animal farming. The animals use them for shelter…
But yeah, absolutely on car parks (or better, get rid of car parks)
I totally agree and I’ve been saying this for a little while. But get this, since there are plenty of unused grassy properties out there in America, there’s somewhere they’re making deals with sheep heard owners where the sheep are regularly brought over to the property to eat grass around and under the solar panels. Apparently trying to keep the grass cleaned up and not overgrowing the panels is a problem because of all the little nooks and crannies, getting mowing done under and around them as a pain in the ass. But the sheep can just come in there get a free meal and do the job perfectly well. It’s win-win.
Here in the West they’re just covering up all the desert areas that are not being used anyways. And they also bring in livestock of various kinds to take care of a lot of the weeds and keep it cleaned up as well. I think it’s a great use of space since there is so much of it in such wide abundance of sun. There’s also quite a few of the car parks here that have been installing solar panels over the cars and that’s a great use as well but that’s also quite a huge expense overall.
Desert areas can still have rich ecosystems that get severely affected by solar farms.
Someone said to me yesterday, why don’t we redirect the Ord River (WAus) down to Kalgoorlie (also WA) and irrigate and farm the desert. Some real-life Fremen mind at work there. My eyes rolled so hard, the “its desert, nothing lives there”, is strong with that one.
Oh I know, I’ve spent my life here. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea.
the sheep, we envision when someone says sheep, wouldnt exist without humanity. its also -like all other bred animal breeds with similar situations- serious damage for their bones to carry 10kg’s of extra fur(bred to be wooly).
So no, this is not a win-win
Not a win because it’s not vegan? Most people don’t share your beliefs.
Most people are happy to use the animals we have spent thousands of years making useful
I see this as a win/win/win - the sheep farmer gets rent for the land the panels are on, the weeds are kept down by the sheep, we get clean electricity, we get wool
Ed. “Animal races” the word is species, races is for the variation in humans, or in fantasy it’s the humanoid species
I suppose it would be reasonable to talk about races of sheep to talk about all the different types of sheep
“most people dont share your beliefs” is not an argument for anything. imagine people saying that for a pro slavery work stance. same with “weve done that before”.
but sure correct my wording after making a fake argument, must be a very good sign for the confidence in your stance. :D Of course youre talking about sheep for wool, what else would you call a “win” here?
And again, it is not a win, reread my first response, it literally already answered. Im sure deep down u see its pretty hard to not derail without addressing that/admitting theres unbendable, simple contradiction
Breeds. When is animals they’re different breeds. Interestingly there’s fewer differences between human ethnicities than between different animal breeds
Among humans I have heard that there is more variety within human races than between them
Music says we’re the whole human race
Goarts then, whatever. You can hang out with goats even if youre not exploiting them more than you would a human.
“No profit, not work-ey” - unless we change the system to make accumulation impossible of course
anything else would be ignorant to compare to the commonness of parking lots - as in not worth to compare to begin with, like the handful of animal sanctuaries or whatever u’d think of here
Maybe we live in a society that just has more goats, and goats are a bigger part of everyones lives.
Id rather not have any parking lots if it were entirely my choice.
look, im car free by choice - couldve owned a newer A4 avant. So we agree on the parking lots in its prevalance are too much.
This doesnt change the fact that the whole sheep input is still absurd - no matter how romanticized the cartoony picture looks like… the realist view on your idealist idea could be “agrar solar” -> here an example picture
There is a big ass vehicle turning the soil in that pic. I dont think thats a phase of modern agriculture typically presented in the pr photos, and its not pretty even when you do it by hand.
i dont follow, maybe its because im not native english/american? id be happy if you could make the point clearer for me here…cause currently youre discribing the thing but there seems to be no full argument without further context?
even for non-vegan people the climate impact of sheep farming should be concerning.
interestingly enough - planetary boundries include more essential parameters than greenhouse gases if people would be interested in more food for thought.
like degradation of soil to a level of unusable (N- & P-cycles) due to 75% of landuse for animal food ( “Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018)” where sheep are “just” a small percentile since we breed thousand of millions of other human-made animal breeds) or usable freshwater supplies getting more and more critical decade after decade…
this post to be fair was about where to put solar panels
No, parking lots need to be developed. We can’t have functional cities when every other plot of land is dedicated to park cars.
Dont cover our car parks. Cover our public transit stations…oh wait. There are none. (USA)
Well, there are. But they’re mostly parasitic like Barbra.
Ever since I was a kid, I used to wonder why roofs of buildings didn’t include, or where made of, solar panels.
Don’t put them over car parks, put them anywhere and everywhere. It’s far more expensive to build both roofs and solar panels.
The field in question is probably being used to crow ethanol so replacing it with solar panels is an improvement if anything.
interesting concept. i think it would be cool if we had solar power cars so we wouldn’t put so much pollution in the environment. but i don’t think the tech is there yet and if it was big oil won’t let it happen.
I mean, functionally we do have the tech, but it’s just solar farms powering the grid/on rooftop, powering an electric car. Probably more efficient than putting the panel on the car anyways.
