Depends on the location. Around me, they’re sometimes close to towns where the land could otherwise be used for homes or businesses in the medium-term future.
Also land is still a limited resource in much of the world. Why not use one piece of land for multiple purposes?
For sparsely populated areas I’ll agree with you. Here in Europe, there’s not a lot of completely unused land and in my country in particular most “unused” land is forests and bogs which have value of their own (sadly only 5% is wetlands nowadays - used to be over 20% before the soviets drained most of it). I’d much prefer those to remain untouched by both agriculture AND solar energy. Doing agriculture in a city is kinda hard, but solar is not. As a bonus, if solar panels in cities displace some of the demand for biofuels, that’s biofuel-related land that could be used for something else.
Or keep the cow and put solar on rooftops, car parks, etc. The cow shits out natural fertilizer which helps the land recover quicker so it can be used to produce more productive (in terms of people fed) crops again while the cow goes and grazes somewhere else where the soil’s no longer very productive.
It’s not a lot of land, sure, but there’s literally zero downside to putting solar in places where shade is desirable anyway. Just mandating solar in car parks alone could provide a ridiculous amount of electricity in more car-dependent cities.
Ground-mount is good economically, but ecologically not so much.
If we can build more Solar + Storage (SS) in suburban and urban contexts, then we can capitalize on the land that’s already being used for human purposes - leaving other land able to be rewilded.
I grew up in the Midwest of the US, and as I got older it was so disheartening to see how chopped up the natural world is in between large fields of corns, soy, and wheat. I don’t want the land that’s being used currently for industrial agriculture to be used for utility-scale solar. But I realize my wishes and dreams don’t mean much when the people that own these properties have financial incentives to build solar anyways.
I think we need to have more legislation about re-wilding and regenerating nature in the US apart from conserving what we have. Building solar on the already built environment is one way to prevent barriers to that regeneration.
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Depends on the location. Around me, they’re sometimes close to towns where the land could otherwise be used for homes or businesses in the medium-term future.
Also land is still a limited resource in much of the world. Why not use one piece of land for multiple purposes?
For sparsely populated areas I’ll agree with you. Here in Europe, there’s not a lot of completely unused land and in my country in particular most “unused” land is forests and bogs which have value of their own (sadly only 5% is wetlands nowadays - used to be over 20% before the soviets drained most of it). I’d much prefer those to remain untouched by both agriculture AND solar energy. Doing agriculture in a city is kinda hard, but solar is not. As a bonus, if solar panels in cities displace some of the demand for biofuels, that’s biofuel-related land that could be used for something else.
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Or keep the cow and put solar on rooftops, car parks, etc. The cow shits out natural fertilizer which helps the land recover quicker so it can be used to produce more productive (in terms of people fed) crops again while the cow goes and grazes somewhere else where the soil’s no longer very productive.
It’s not a lot of land, sure, but there’s literally zero downside to putting solar in places where shade is desirable anyway. Just mandating solar in car parks alone could provide a ridiculous amount of electricity in more car-dependent cities.
As a solar engineer building this stuff daily, I tend to agree with your solution of sub/urban solar rather than agrivoltaics.
Doesn’t mean you can do agrivoltaics in a sub/urban context though ;P
Ground-mount is good economically, but ecologically not so much.
If we can build more Solar + Storage (SS) in suburban and urban contexts, then we can capitalize on the land that’s already being used for human purposes - leaving other land able to be rewilded.
I grew up in the Midwest of the US, and as I got older it was so disheartening to see how chopped up the natural world is in between large fields of corns, soy, and wheat. I don’t want the land that’s being used currently for industrial agriculture to be used for utility-scale solar. But I realize my wishes and dreams don’t mean much when the people that own these properties have financial incentives to build solar anyways.
I think we need to have more legislation about re-wilding and regenerating nature in the US apart from conserving what we have. Building solar on the already built environment is one way to prevent barriers to that regeneration.
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As much as it pains me, I think this should all be our ultimate concern if we want to defeat fossil fuels.