11 ms·

Solar Farms Shine a Ray of Hope on Bees and Butterflies

99 points by Breadmaker 8y ago

oneplane 8y ago
After a light skim, this seems like a good match; the land/area isn't used for much else anyway and since PV installations are usually devoid of humans and engines it wouldn't be a bad idea to roll this out on a larger scale.
- corint 8y ago
  Absolutely agreed, I am struggling to think of many downsides. Maybe some wasps or bees start a nest near a panel meaning it's difficult to clean the panel? Hopefully the nest gets left alone & the efficiency lost is tolerated, to let the bees/wasps live.
  - asdf333 8y ago
    even if they had to clear the ones near the panels it sound slike a huge bet win
  - ogrisel 8y ago
    Panel cleaning can be done by robots, no?
    - wongarsu 8y ago
      I expect in 10-20 years most panel cleaning is done by robots similar to window cleaning robots, with small ramps allowing the robots easy traversal over the whole installation. The technology is directly transferable from vacuum robots and window cleaning robots, with the added benefit of knowing the geometry in advance.
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      Yes. Here's a video of one in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b2bnYbkxq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b2bnYbkxq0
  - ghtrytttttnsa 8y ago
    Wasp are f*ckers who deserve no sympathy (not saying that they should not even exist, but they really don't need any sympathy), bees are the good guys. For example, wasps destroy bee colonies.
shereadsthenews 8y ago
There’s a solar power plant in San Benito County, California where you can see something similar. The surrounding area is a blasted hellscape where marginal ranchers graze struggling cattle on BLM land they lease for $1/acre/year. The power plant owns about ten times more land than they need and the difference, after only a few years, between their land and the surrounding ranches is stark. For one thing their riparian habitats are recovering and host many wild species, where as soon as those streams cross the fence they become trampled muddy ditches. This is all on top of the obvious benefits of having a solar power station.
- iso1337 8y ago
  Ironically, environmental groups sued the project and forced it to be 1/3 the original size. https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/21/giant-solar-project-reduced-due-to-environmentalists-opposition/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/21/giant-solar-project-r... Driving down I-5, the smells and sights from some of the cattle operations along the highway are truly horrifying. Harris Ranch just has a bunch of cows standing around in mud (or actually probably their own poop).
  - shereadsthenews 8y ago
    Yes it certainly was a low point for the Sierra Club who have proven unable to grasp the problem of climate change. They are stuck in the Boomer mindset that environmentalism means recycling cans and bottles.
    - iso1337 8y ago
      In California, Sierra Club has apparently been co-opted by NIMBYs who basically use environmentalism as a cover to stop any new development against entrenched interests. The good thing (at least wrt to the posted s article) is that the majority of people like to save money, and solar offers a way to save money. So the forces of economics and good policy at the state level will make more solar and storage projects happen.
      - 8y ago
m-i-l 8y ago
I've heard that one of the challenges of maintaining fields of solar panels is keeping the vegetation around the panels under control. Solutions include using grazing animals such as sheep or even guinea pigs[0]. It sounds like this doesn't solve the management issue, but does claim "a field of wildflowers requires less mowing and pesticides than conventional grass does". [0] https://digital.nepr.net/news/2016/04/01/the-solution-to-solar-farm-vegetation-guinea-pig-lawnmowers/ https://digital.nepr.net/news/2016/04/01/the-solution-to-sol...
- FooHentai 8y ago
  The issue with grazing animals on the land is that it removes the benefit of allowing it to revert to nature - Flowers and brush depth that foster wildlife are stripped away by the grazing stock. Just musing: If you leave a patch of ground alone for an extended period of time, it'll transition through various phases of regrowth and eventually end up back at whatever the wild state of being for that region is. Often the end state is woodlands. So since that conflicts with being a productive PV estate, at some point maintenance is inevitable or you'll end up losing the panels beneath a canopy. That said, the scale of that kind of regeneration might be a century while the useful lifetime of new PV installs is what... ~20-30 years? So on that timescale what issues are you likely to hit allowing the land underneath PV installs to grow wild? Access would need to be maintained, panels would need to be lofted to a height that avoids any overgrowth, fire risks (electricity + dry brush etc) would need to be mitigated. Main question I have though is sunlight coverage - Surely the panels and plant life are going to compete to some extent. What's stopping a PV deployment covering ~100% of the land area, shading it all out just like a forest canopy would?
  - gdubs 8y ago
    One big issue with just letting the land go wild is invasive plants and shrubs taking over. Take a look at himalayan blackberries in the Pacific Northwest – they smother everything else out of existence. A lot of restoration work is really just pausing the ecological succession at some beneficial stage. This is essentially what native Americans did; they 'gardened' the earth to support a diversity of plants and wildlife that was sustainable, and beneficial to people. [1][2] In terms of incorporating solar panels into a more 'wild' habitat, Agroforestry offers a good model. There are a lot of shade tolerant shrubs, etc, that are grown under a canopy of taller trees. [3] Silvopasture, which is a subset of agroforestry, uses grazing animals to obtain the best of both worlds – the animals play a part in sustaining a diverse ecosystem that's also beneficial to people. [4] 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491 2: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6411373-whole-earth-discipline https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6411373-whole-earth-disc... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture
MeteorMarc 8y ago
Maybe it is a little bit cooler on large fields too: a significant fraction of incoming radiation is drained away as electrival power.
- MeteorMarc 8y ago
  OP: bad news for the bees: this Nature study (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070 ) suggests that PV fields are actually heat islands worse than parking lots... But these were not necessarily PV plants with flowers growing around them.
  - ghtrytttttnsa 8y ago
    Bees just love heat and sun although they do have their limits.
gdubs 8y ago
Perfect opportunity to apply Permaculture principles like Guilds, where mutually beneficial plants (and animals) are used to create a system that reduces the need for inputs (labor, chemical, etc). [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Guilds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Guilds
- codingdave 8y ago
  Agreed, but permaculture techniques that work vary by region, even down to the microclimates. If local experts are consulted, it should work well... but if not, there will be some years of trial and error before they get it working well for each installation. Even so, better to start such an effort today and get through those trials, so we're in a better place in 10 years.

99 points by Breadmaker 8y ago

After a light skim, this seems like a good match; the land/area isn't used for much else anyway and since PV installations are usually devoid of humans and engines it wouldn't be a bad idea to roll this out on a larger scale.

corint 8y ago
Absolutely agreed, I am struggling to think of many downsides. Maybe some wasps or bees start a nest near a panel meaning it's difficult to clean the panel? Hopefully the nest gets left alone & the efficiency lost is tolerated, to let the bees/wasps live.
- asdf333 8y ago
  even if they had to clear the ones near the panels it sound slike a huge bet win
- ogrisel 8y ago
  Panel cleaning can be done by robots, no?
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    I expect in 10-20 years most panel cleaning is done by robots similar to window cleaning robots, with small ramps allowing the robots easy traversal over the whole installation. The technology is directly transferable from vacuum robots and window cleaning robots, with the added benefit of knowing the geometry in advance.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Yes. Here's a video of one in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b2bnYbkxq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b2bnYbkxq0
- ghtrytttttnsa 8y ago
  Wasp are f*ckers who deserve no sympathy (not saying that they should not even exist, but they really don't need any sympathy), bees are the good guys. For example, wasps destroy bee colonies.

shereadsthenews 8y ago

There’s a solar power plant in San Benito County, California where you can see something similar. The surrounding area is a blasted hellscape where marginal ranchers graze struggling cattle on BLM land they lease for $1/acre/year. The power plant owns about ten times more land than they need and the difference, after only a few years, between their land and the surrounding ranches is stark. For one thing their riparian habitats are recovering and host many wild species, where as soon as those streams cross the fence they become trampled muddy ditches. This is all on top of the obvious benefits of having a solar power station.

iso1337 8y ago
Ironically, environmental groups sued the project and forced it to be 1/3 the original size. https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/21/giant-solar-project-reduced-due-to-environmentalists-opposition/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/21/giant-solar-project-r... Driving down I-5, the smells and sights from some of the cattle operations along the highway are truly horrifying. Harris Ranch just has a bunch of cows standing around in mud (or actually probably their own poop).
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  Yes it certainly was a low point for the Sierra Club who have proven unable to grasp the problem of climate change. They are stuck in the Boomer mindset that environmentalism means recycling cans and bottles.
  - iso1337 8y ago
    In California, Sierra Club has apparently been co-opted by NIMBYs who basically use environmentalism as a cover to stop any new development against entrenched interests. The good thing (at least wrt to the posted s article) is that the majority of people like to save money, and solar offers a way to save money. So the forces of economics and good policy at the state level will make more solar and storage projects happen.
    - 8y ago

m-i-l 8y ago

I've heard that one of the challenges of maintaining fields of solar panels is keeping the vegetation around the panels under control. Solutions include using grazing animals such as sheep or even guinea pigs[0]. It sounds like this doesn't solve the management issue, but does claim "a field of wildflowers requires less mowing and pesticides than conventional grass does". [0] https://digital.nepr.net/news/2016/04/01/the-solution-to-solar-farm-vegetation-guinea-pig-lawnmowers/ https://digital.nepr.net/news/2016/04/01/the-solution-to-sol...

FooHentai 8y ago
The issue with grazing animals on the land is that it removes the benefit of allowing it to revert to nature - Flowers and brush depth that foster wildlife are stripped away by the grazing stock. Just musing: If you leave a patch of ground alone for an extended period of time, it'll transition through various phases of regrowth and eventually end up back at whatever the wild state of being for that region is. Often the end state is woodlands. So since that conflicts with being a productive PV estate, at some point maintenance is inevitable or you'll end up losing the panels beneath a canopy. That said, the scale of that kind of regeneration might be a century while the useful lifetime of new PV installs is what... ~20-30 years? So on that timescale what issues are you likely to hit allowing the land underneath PV installs to grow wild? Access would need to be maintained, panels would need to be lofted to a height that avoids any overgrowth, fire risks (electricity + dry brush etc) would need to be mitigated. Main question I have though is sunlight coverage - Surely the panels and plant life are going to compete to some extent. What's stopping a PV deployment covering ~100% of the land area, shading it all out just like a forest canopy would?
- gdubs 8y ago
  One big issue with just letting the land go wild is invasive plants and shrubs taking over. Take a look at himalayan blackberries in the Pacific Northwest – they smother everything else out of existence. A lot of restoration work is really just pausing the ecological succession at some beneficial stage. This is essentially what native Americans did; they 'gardened' the earth to support a diversity of plants and wildlife that was sustainable, and beneficial to people. [1][2] In terms of incorporating solar panels into a more 'wild' habitat, Agroforestry offers a good model. There are a lot of shade tolerant shrubs, etc, that are grown under a canopy of taller trees. [3] Silvopasture, which is a subset of agroforestry, uses grazing animals to obtain the best of both worlds – the animals play a part in sustaining a diverse ecosystem that's also beneficial to people. [4] 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491 2: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6411373-whole-earth-discipline https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6411373-whole-earth-disc... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture

MeteorMarc 8y ago

Maybe it is a little bit cooler on large fields too: a significant fraction of incoming radiation is drained away as electrival power.

MeteorMarc 8y ago
OP: bad news for the bees: this Nature study (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070 ) suggests that PV fields are actually heat islands worse than parking lots... But these were not necessarily PV plants with flowers growing around them.
- ghtrytttttnsa 8y ago
  Bees just love heat and sun although they do have their limits.

gdubs 8y ago

Perfect opportunity to apply Permaculture principles like Guilds, where mutually beneficial plants (and animals) are used to create a system that reduces the need for inputs (labor, chemical, etc). [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Guilds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Guilds

codingdave 8y ago
Agreed, but permaculture techniques that work vary by region, even down to the microclimates. If local experts are consulted, it should work well... but if not, there will be some years of trial and error before they get it working well for each installation. Even so, better to start such an effort today and get through those trials, so we're in a better place in 10 years.