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Leaving in Maryland when I drive to the eastern shore and see farm lands cover in solar panels I am some what upset by this… would it not make better sense to j

by taf2 3y ago

Leaving in Maryland when I drive to the eastern shore and see farm lands cover in solar panels I am some what upset by this… would it not make better sense to just reduce the cost or in some way incentivize roof top solar for commercial buildings? Flying into dca I see hundreds of huge warehouses with flat roofs and just think they would be perfect for solar… but farm lands… if they aren’t needed for food then restore them to forests?

thelastgallon 3y ago
You can do farming with vertical solar panels, these are better, will produce mornings and evenings. https://spectrum.ieee.org/agrivoltaics https://spectrum.ieee.org/agrivoltaics
wffurr 3y ago
Photovoltaics are substantially more efficient at turning sunlight into energy than photosynthesis. Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation; not all roofs are built to take extra load; and they don't have the same scale as using acres of flat ground. I agree something seems unsatisfactory about the situation, but the reality of solar energy is getting the installation and supporting infrastructure costs as low as possible for large scale deployment.
- decremental 3y ago
  [dead]
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > Photovoltaics are substantially more efficient at turning sunlight into energy than photosynthesis. Humans can't eat electricity though. > Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation This seems like the problem to solve. For example, can you make some kind of modular panels simple enough to install for the property owner to do it themselves?
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    Rooftops are terrible places to put solar because they're on roofs. They require support, it increases maintainance costs for both the roof and the solar, and you need to have a bunch of infrustructure coexist with everything else the building is doing. Putting your panels on some dirt somewhere just requires some open dirt, of which we have a lot.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Roofs are commonly in direct sunlight and empty. The surface is otherwise-wasted space which isn't good for much else. Open dirt is valuable because you can actually use it for something -- buildings, parks, agriculture, nature, etc. Buildings also tend to be situated near where electricity is used, reducing distribution costs. Especially if the alternative is to use the "open dirt" which is inexpensive, and correspondingly far away from population centers and requiring long-distance transmission. The maintenance cost is the problem to be solved. What you want is the ability for any rando with some basic tools the median homeowner has in their garage to be able to do the whole install in less than an hour, and be able to take them off and put them back on again in a similar amount of time in the event that you have to e.g. replace the roof.
      - idiotsecant 3y ago
        Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. It might be hard to intuit this is you spend most of your life in a city but the vast majority of land is unused, and a great deal of it is not terribly ecologically important. The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. We nearly use all of it. The large majority of land in the continental US is used for agriculture and forestry. The land which is actually unused is in places like Nevada (the desert) and Alaska (permafrost). But there isn't really anything like that within a thousand miles of New York City. What is within a thousand miles of New York City is about 80% of the population of the US. > The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff. I see a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof, so evidently plenty of people think you're wrong, and as far as I'm aware they're not generally losing money. Expecting property owners to not do something in their financial interest -- pay money for solar panels, but less than they'd pay to the power company in the alternative -- seems like a weird thing to expect people to do. Large-scale generators are going to have trouble competing with that because they not only have to pay for the land (which may be cheap but it isn't free), they also have to pass through the cost to cover the distribution grid, whereas the homeowner only has to cover the difference in the installation costs between installing them on a roof and installing them on the ground, and then consumes the power themselves. And since this is clearly not only going to happen but already is happening, it makes sense to optimize the cost by making them easier to install.
- acyou 3y ago
  Sunlight is already energy. Surely you mean something to do with energy conversion? It's upsetting watching millions of acres of fertile land becoming essentially salted with heavy metals. What is really effective at energy conversion is solar to thermal. We're talking 70% efficient, zero heavy metals. If we were to put panels on buildings, it's a crying shame that they are not zero heavy metal, vastly more efficient solar thermal.
  - dalyons 3y ago
    What? How is the land getting “salted”? The small trace amounts of metals in the solar panels stay inside the solar panels. They don’t melt into the soil. And you just take the panels away when they reach EOL.
    - acyou 3y ago
      There are certainly not "small trace amounts" of heavy metals in solar panels. If they sit there for 100 years, the heavy metals will not stay put. Have you visited the rust belt? When cars reach EOL, they often don't get "taken away". Difficult to accept that people don't understand that bringing heavy metals up and putting them everywhere will ultimately result in leaching into groundwater and contamination of food and water.
- citrin_ru 3y ago
  Malls/supermarkets in the US have relatively large parking spaces, why not cover them with solar panels first before taking over agricultural land? It would be more expensive than putting panels in an open field but should not be (much) more expensive than rooftop solar. It would allow to kill two birds with one stone - cars will be heated less under the canopy of solar panels.
  - wffurr 3y ago
    Because it's more expensive. Utility-scale solar is looking for the cheapest possible $ per MW. If you want solar car parks, warehouse roofs, etc. there need to be feed-in tariffs to encourage building owners to do it.
icegreentea2 3y ago
I don't know what the actual economics of farm deployments are, but something that might be interesting to consider is that farming has basically been a giant exercise of risk management and hedging for roughly forever. Once upon a time, a farmer might have satisfied some degree of hedging through crop diversity, however modern systems and economics have heavily incentivized massive scale mono-culture. Being able to deploy solar onto their land basically gives farmers a decoupled revenue stream (obviously there is -some- correlation between solar production and good/bad harvests) that doesn't necessarily tax them the same way doing crop diversity might. Now, obviously we might wish to avoid mono-cultures for other reasons, but I think anything that can help farmers manage their risks without just resorting to more consolidation is probably a good thing as well.
apapapa 3y ago
They will come to your conclusion in 20 years
hnburnsy 3y ago
Walmart tried solar on their warehouse but they had too many fires, thanks to Tesla... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=walmart+solar+fires&t=fpas&iar=news&ia=news&iai=https%3A%2F%2Ffuturism.com%2Fthe-byte%2Fwhistleblower-tesla-buyers-solar-panels-catch-fire&pn=1 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=walmart+solar+fires&t=fpas&iar=new...
- gonzo41 3y ago
  They shouldn't have put it on the building, but rather constructed large shaded areas over parking. It would have helped to reduce the urban heat island effect that you get form miles and miles of pavement.
hattmall 3y ago
I don't know to what extent this is accurate, but the middle area of Georgia has become blanketed in solar panels. Apparently it's a very ideal area for production and mostly on former farm land, but huge swaths miles and miles have recently popped up thanks to incentives. That I know is accurate, what's below I've only seen from random sources and can't independently verify. All the solar farms were presented as having a functional life of 25-30 years. Instead it's turning into more like 4-8, because the area gets monster thunderstorms that produce hail which wrecks the solar panels. But that's not the full problem. The solar panels are then leaching a lot of heavy metals and chemicals. So much so that the recovered land from some of the destroyed solar panel farms is not currently suitable for farming and groundwater in the area is becoming contaminated. They are now however building some enclosed retractable roof type buildings to house panels but protect them from hail.

by taf2 3y ago

thelastgallon 3y ago

You can do farming with vertical solar panels, these are better, will produce mornings and evenings. https://spectrum.ieee.org/agrivoltaics https://spectrum.ieee.org/agrivoltaics

wffurr 3y ago

Photovoltaics are substantially more efficient at turning sunlight into energy than photosynthesis. Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation; not all roofs are built to take extra load; and they don't have the same scale as using acres of flat ground. I agree something seems unsatisfactory about the situation, but the reality of solar energy is getting the installation and supporting infrastructure costs as low as possible for large scale deployment.

decremental 3y ago
[dead]
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Photovoltaics are substantially more efficient at turning sunlight into energy than photosynthesis. Humans can't eat electricity though. > Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation This seems like the problem to solve. For example, can you make some kind of modular panels simple enough to install for the property owner to do it themselves?
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  Rooftops are terrible places to put solar because they're on roofs. They require support, it increases maintainance costs for both the roof and the solar, and you need to have a bunch of infrustructure coexist with everything else the building is doing. Putting your panels on some dirt somewhere just requires some open dirt, of which we have a lot.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Roofs are commonly in direct sunlight and empty. The surface is otherwise-wasted space which isn't good for much else. Open dirt is valuable because you can actually use it for something -- buildings, parks, agriculture, nature, etc. Buildings also tend to be situated near where electricity is used, reducing distribution costs. Especially if the alternative is to use the "open dirt" which is inexpensive, and correspondingly far away from population centers and requiring long-distance transmission. The maintenance cost is the problem to be solved. What you want is the ability for any rando with some basic tools the median homeowner has in their garage to be able to do the whole install in less than an hour, and be able to take them off and put them back on again in a similar amount of time in the event that you have to e.g. replace the roof.
    - idiotsecant 3y ago
      Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. It might be hard to intuit this is you spend most of your life in a city but the vast majority of land is unused, and a great deal of it is not terribly ecologically important. The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. We nearly use all of it. The large majority of land in the continental US is used for agriculture and forestry. The land which is actually unused is in places like Nevada (the desert) and Alaska (permafrost). But there isn't really anything like that within a thousand miles of New York City. What is within a thousand miles of New York City is about 80% of the population of the US. > The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff. I see a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof, so evidently plenty of people think you're wrong, and as far as I'm aware they're not generally losing money. Expecting property owners to not do something in their financial interest -- pay money for solar panels, but less than they'd pay to the power company in the alternative -- seems like a weird thing to expect people to do. Large-scale generators are going to have trouble competing with that because they not only have to pay for the land (which may be cheap but it isn't free), they also have to pass through the cost to cover the distribution grid, whereas the homeowner only has to cover the difference in the installation costs between installing them on a roof and installing them on the ground, and then consumes the power themselves. And since this is clearly not only going to happen but already is happening, it makes sense to optimize the cost by making them easier to install.
acyou 3y ago
Sunlight is already energy. Surely you mean something to do with energy conversion? It's upsetting watching millions of acres of fertile land becoming essentially salted with heavy metals. What is really effective at energy conversion is solar to thermal. We're talking 70% efficient, zero heavy metals. If we were to put panels on buildings, it's a crying shame that they are not zero heavy metal, vastly more efficient solar thermal.
- dalyons 3y ago
  What? How is the land getting “salted”? The small trace amounts of metals in the solar panels stay inside the solar panels. They don’t melt into the soil. And you just take the panels away when they reach EOL.
  - acyou 3y ago
    There are certainly not "small trace amounts" of heavy metals in solar panels. If they sit there for 100 years, the heavy metals will not stay put. Have you visited the rust belt? When cars reach EOL, they often don't get "taken away". Difficult to accept that people don't understand that bringing heavy metals up and putting them everywhere will ultimately result in leaching into groundwater and contamination of food and water.
citrin_ru 3y ago
Malls/supermarkets in the US have relatively large parking spaces, why not cover them with solar panels first before taking over agricultural land? It would be more expensive than putting panels in an open field but should not be (much) more expensive than rooftop solar. It would allow to kill two birds with one stone - cars will be heated less under the canopy of solar panels.
- wffurr 3y ago
  Because it's more expensive. Utility-scale solar is looking for the cheapest possible $ per MW. If you want solar car parks, warehouse roofs, etc. there need to be feed-in tariffs to encourage building owners to do it.

icegreentea2 3y ago

I don't know what the actual economics of farm deployments are, but something that might be interesting to consider is that farming has basically been a giant exercise of risk management and hedging for roughly forever. Once upon a time, a farmer might have satisfied some degree of hedging through crop diversity, however modern systems and economics have heavily incentivized massive scale mono-culture. Being able to deploy solar onto their land basically gives farmers a decoupled revenue stream (obviously there is -some- correlation between solar production and good/bad harvests) that doesn't necessarily tax them the same way doing crop diversity might. Now, obviously we might wish to avoid mono-cultures for other reasons, but I think anything that can help farmers manage their risks without just resorting to more consolidation is probably a good thing as well.

apapapa 3y ago

They will come to your conclusion in 20 years

hnburnsy 3y ago

Walmart tried solar on their warehouse but they had too many fires, thanks to Tesla... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=walmart+solar+fires&t=fpas&iar=news&ia=news&iai=https%3A%2F%2Ffuturism.com%2Fthe-byte%2Fwhistleblower-tesla-buyers-solar-panels-catch-fire&pn=1 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=walmart+solar+fires&t=fpas&iar=new...

gonzo41 3y ago
They shouldn't have put it on the building, but rather constructed large shaded areas over parking. It would have helped to reduce the urban heat island effect that you get form miles and miles of pavement.

hattmall 3y ago

I don't know to what extent this is accurate, but the middle area of Georgia has become blanketed in solar panels. Apparently it's a very ideal area for production and mostly on former farm land, but huge swaths miles and miles have recently popped up thanks to incentives. That I know is accurate, what's below I've only seen from random sources and can't independently verify. All the solar farms were presented as having a functional life of 25-30 years. Instead it's turning into more like 4-8, because the area gets monster thunderstorms that produce hail which wrecks the solar panels. But that's not the full problem. The solar panels are then leaching a lot of heavy metals and chemicals. So much so that the recovered land from some of the destroyed solar panel farms is not currently suitable for farming and groundwater in the area is becoming contaminated. They are now however building some enclosed retractable roof type buildings to house panels but protect them from hail.