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How hard would it be to buy some land and build a solar farm? As an investment.
by mrfusion 9y ago
How hard would it be to buy some land and build a solar farm? As an investment.
- njharman 9y agoDoing that would be easy, doing that at a profit is hard. There's a reason windfarms are being built instead of solarpanelfarms.
- mcbutterbunz 9y agoI'm not that knowledgeable in this subject, but is it because wind farms provide dual land use? The footprint required to erect and maintain turbine is much smaller and allows existing farmland to continue operation.
- batrat 9y agoAlso can harvest energy 24/7
- maxerickson 9y agoThere's plenty of scrub land available.
- philipkglass 9y agoIn some countries it's much harder to build a profitable solar farm than a profitable wind farm. Both are viable in much of the United States. In 2016, the US installed 8203 MW of wind power: https://www.awea.org/wind-energy-facts-at-a-glance https://www.awea.org/wind-energy-facts-at-a-glance It installed ~14000 MW of solar PV, including about 10000 MW of utility scale projects: https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-data https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-data Given the higher capacity factor of utility-scale wind over solar, wind still has the lead in effective electricity supply added in 2016. But both are being built. Through Q3 in 2017 in the US, solar is actually way ahead of wind in terms of capacity increases. Q4 usually dominates the year for both wind and solar, so it remains to be seen if that's true with full-year data. Large scale solar construction in the US could slow down significantly in the near future depending on how harshly the solar module import tariffs/quotas derived from the Suniva ITC case are set.
- nine_k 9y agoHow hard would it be to sell this amount of electricity? What kind of a transmission line would it take?
- dv_dt 9y agoAdd some data center capacity for a cryptocurrency co-lo.
- vbuwivbiu 9y agoI'm a big fan of solar power, but solar farms are a waste of land; put them on roofs and over parking lots instead
- xyzzyz 9y agoSolar farms are definitely waste of land in urban areas, however US has plenty of land that is pretty much unusable for anything else than solar power generation.
- elihu 9y agoLand isn't such a scarce resource when you get outside the city. A centralized solar farm is cheaper to install and easier to maintain than installing on roofs and parking lots. If people want solar on their roofs or in their parking lots, then by all means they should install it, but if your goal is to deliver the cheapest cost per killowatt-hour, then finding some vacant land away from people and putting up a lot of panels is a good plan.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 9y agoThat depends entirely on your local permitting regime and what arrangements you can make for selling the power. And what latitude you're at.