8 ms·

As solar capacity grows, some of America's most productive farmland is at risk

17 points by jameslk 2y ago

Kon-Peki 2y ago
This guy got dollar signs in his eyes and signed the first contract they put in front of him. But even if he wanted to make sure that his land would be protected, Indiana has a massive shortage of rural lawyers [1]. Much of that shortage is self-inflicted; Indiana is one of the most hostile states toward lawyers that want to practice in multiple states. So rural lawyers just across the border in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Kentucky (who deal with the same exact farming issues) don’t even want to bother getting licensed in Indiana. This attitude has consequences. [1] https://www.indybar.org/?pg=GovernmentPracticeNews&blAction=showEntry&blogEntry=79790 https://www.indybar.org/?pg=GovernmentPracticeNews&blAction=...
ProjectArcturis 2y ago
It's hard to argue with land use that will pay an owner 500-600% more than its existing use. But I would worry deeply about the sustainability of those rents. What happens when electricity prices dip and the solar companies go bankrupt? The land will basically never be able to be used as farmland again.
- pinkgolem 2y ago
  Why could you not reuse the farmland? The solar installations are usually not deeply rooted & the land below the panels is usually quit alive & well.. what am I missing?
  - hanniabu 2y ago
    It'd probably be better for farmland because it'll have a break. Then again they'll probably continue spraying nasty herbicides to lower land maintenance around the panels.
    - NewJazz 2y ago
      Crazy how little effort people are willing to put in to maintain a healthy ecosystem on their property. The landscaper at the last apartment I rented literally tore out a perfectly healthy basil plant and sprayed herbicide everywhere.
    - Eric_WVGG 2y ago
      … read the article > Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said. When Reuters visited his farm last year and this spring, much of the land beneath the panels was covered in yellow-brown sand, where no plants grew. "I'll never be able to grow anything on that field again," the farmer said.
      - Robotbeat 2y ago
        ...is that actually scientifically true, or just a random thing a guy said?
      - Retric 2y ago
        That’s a nonsense issue. The plow is literally designed to swap the top layer of soil to kill off the existing plants and sand isn’t toxic. Nobody is wasting money to add a thick enough layer of sand to be a significant issue. And if they did you could just sell the sand. Further the guys making more money leasing the land than farming it, set some aside to pay for cleanup if he’s worried about it.
      - logifail 2y ago
        > … read the article >> "Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said" Where did the fine sand come from, how deep is the [alleged] spreading of it, how much of it did the panel installers [allegedly] bring with them? Can't help wishing we weren't quite so credulous....
    - kwhitefoot 2y ago
      That's weird. The solar farms that I see in Europe all have grass under the panels and in some cases grazing animals. Just let loose a few sheep.
  - Nexxius 2y ago
    You're are not missing anything How Solar Panels Are Changing Agriculture - Agrivoltaics Revisited https://youtu.be/ww-_U7_oQbY?si=Qw6h4oJ5AMx6BoYQ https://youtu.be/ww-_U7_oQbY?si=Qw6h4oJ5AMx6BoYQ
  - ProjectArcturis 2y ago
    You'd have support posts buried every 6 feet. Sure you could remove them, but at a cost of many thousands per acre. When the rent is hundreds per year. It just wouldn't be economically viable.
    - pinkgolem 2y ago
      Removing trees/posts for farmland has been done for 100dred of years and has always been financially viable Most of the farmland we have in Germany started out as forrest
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It seems weird that the cost of the land would be that much. Shouldn't there be plenty of non-agricultural land to use for this? For example, any trees near high voltage transmission lines are cut down so the trees can't fall on the lines, causing them to be in direct sunlight. There are thousands of miles across the country. Why aren't there solar panels under all of them, and why would they be buying other land before using that? The land is already owned by the power company. It's practically free.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    They don’t cut down the trees, they trim them. Often with crazy helicopter chainsaws. Transmission lines tend to be in difficult to reach, undeveloped areas. They’re often not owned by the power company but rather used with easements. The power company might not be a generation company either. Building the hookup for thin lines of solar panels might not be cost effective either.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > They don’t cut down the trees, they trim them. They cut down any trees within a certain number of feet of the power lines. This is done when the power lines are installed. Then they come back and periodically trim any trees that grow laterally into that area. > Transmission lines tend to be in difficult to reach, undeveloped areas. Not unlike agricultural land. Also not really true. Transmission lines tend to be near population centers, in order to supply power to them. There are more transmission lines per square mile in, say, New Jersey than there are in Montana. > They’re often not owned by the power company but rather used with easements. Enough of them are owned by the power company that we certainly haven't used them all yet. > The power company might not be a generation company either. In which case they could become one, or lease the land to one, which is free money to the power company but still a low price to the buyer because of the limited number of competing uses. > Building the hookup for thin lines of solar panels might not be cost effective either. Unclear what the layout has to do with anything. It's obviously possible to transfer an arbitrarily large amount of electricity in a straight line. If trying to minimize the number of inverters, panels could be wired in series to raise the DC voltage to whatever is appropriate to reach the distance to the inverter.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Eric_WVGG 2y ago
It's so weird. Anyone who's driven across this nation or even flown knows that we have millions of acres of nothing. Why not just cover Nevada with panels? I'm sure there's a perfectly cromulent answer that I'm too dumb to see…
- ironmagma 2y ago
  Perhaps due to it being federal land and unavailable for use? Most of the west coast is this way.
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    If federal land is available for grazing and resource extraction, a case could be made for solar development also. As the cells need regular maintenance and cleaning, folks would also be around onsite and around it in federal land areas to preserve the environment.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  Nevada has a ton of solar proportionately. You need the power to be able to hook into the transmission grid reasonably close to where it’s needed.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Our distribution grid isn't designed to handle it. Which is totally a solvable issue, it's just that we as a country are seemingly incapable of large infrastructure projects like that anymore. First you spend years arguing that such an investment is even necessary to spend people's taxes on. Then once the political will is there, it takes even longer to get through the permitting process, ecological reviews etc. Kind of insane really because something like this would really be a net win all around - lots of new construction and manufacturing jobs for years, and at the end of it all, a highly resilient grid that can tap into cheap power at its source and bring it to where it's needed.
jondwillis 2y ago
Agrivoltaics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics I wonder who paid for this article.
jncfhnb 2y ago
You could power the entire US using less than 1% of farmland for solar. I can’t see this being a huge issue?
- antisthenes 2y ago
  It's not. There's also enough barren desert space just in Nevada to power the entire continent of North America.
  - logifail 2y ago
    > There's also enough barren desert space just in Nevada to power the entire continent of North America. Q: How do you transport that across "the entire contient of North America"?
    - brk 2y ago
      A: Wires It really is a solved problem.
      - dzhiurgis 2y ago
        But will it impact 0.0000001% of native desert fauna? Perhaps we should keep burning coal then.
      - logifail 2y ago
        > It really is a solved problem. <chuckle> "Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid." https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/ai-data-centers-power/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/ai-data-c... "Energy experts and analysts have warned for years now that America’s power grid will not be able to accommodate the explosive growth in electricity demand it faces without a huge increase in generation capacity." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/11/green-energy-disaster-grid-renewables-power/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/11/green-ener... "The U.S. electric grid is often described as a vast, synchronized machine — a network of wires carrying electricity from power plants across the country into our homes [...] in reality, there is no single U.S. grid. There are three — one in the West, one in the East and one in Texas — that only connect at a few points and share little power between them. Those grids are further divided into a patchwork of operators with competing interests. That makes it hard to build the long-distance power lines needed to transport wind and solar nationwide." "Many spots with the best sun and wind are far from cities and the existing grid. To make the plan work, the nation would need thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines — large power lines that would span multiple grid regions." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/12/climate/us-electric-grid-energy-transition.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/12/climate/us-el...
magicalist 2y ago
> Developers also argue that in the Midwest, where more than one-third of the U.S. corn crop is used for ethanol production... > In response to Reuters' findings, USDA said that urban sprawl and development are currently bigger contributors to farmland loss than solar... There's a story here about responsible development and environmental management, but the larger narrative seems like concern trolling in light of other types of land use.
llsf 2y ago
All good questions on land use, and competition between food and energy (being corn/ethanol or solar). My understanding is that US produces way too much corn, and it costs taxpayers ($2.2 billion in subsidies per year, source: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-data-says https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...). Maybe instead of artificially propping up the corn industry, we could use few solar farms instead ? That might incidentally help with the US diabetes (55lb of high-fructose corn syrup per american per year, the highest in 42 countries study, source: https://news.yahoo.com/countries-greatest-high-fructose-corn-syrup-more-diabetes-182823674.html https://news.yahoo.com/countries-greatest-high-fructose-corn...)
- jameslk 2y ago
  I’m curious, wouldn’t doing away with such corn subsidies for better farm land usage be another alternative? Seems like a false dichotomy to make this about solar vs corn?
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    There is no appetite to remove the subsidies politically. But yes, these subsidies are both unnecessary and harmful to humans (due to subsidizing food systems that are unhealthy at scale).
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  There is no competition between anything good here. Americans being the most obese, by far, in the world and its subsidized corn production are the same problem. Absolutely nobody needs corn syrup in their diet. Corn is for cattle fodder and we all need to eat a lot less meat in any case. Especially the low quality variety raised on a corn based diet. It simply isn't that good for people (or cattle). Corn syrup in particular is just nasty stuff. You can safely eliminate that as a food group and absolutely nothing bad will happen. Stop stuffing people with corn based produce like fat pigs. It's not that hard. Most of the planet is fine without that crap and about half the size on average. In the same way, ethanol is not a sensible way to do anything about climate change. Just stop burning stuff. Including ethanol produced from corn. It doesn't even come close to canceling out the carbon emissions needed to grow the damn corn to produce the ethanol. It's a completely and utterly pointless endeavor. It's not green. It's not environmentally friendly. It's just subsidized madness. This is not, and has never been, a productive use of land. Not even close. As for solar energy and surface area needed. The world needs a lot less of it than is used for corn farming in the US alone. And that's before you consider the unused surface area in the form of roof tops, parking lots, windows, south facing walls, etc. There's no shortage of surface area to put solar panels on.
hannob 2y ago
If you're worried about energy, land use, and competition with farmland for food, there's one thing you should worry about: bioenergy. If you worry about solar energy and land use, you haven't looked at the numbers.
- ec109685 2y ago
  It’s mentioned in the article. 1/3 of corn production goes to ethanol.
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
"Do I think it's the best use of that land? Probably not. But our investors would kill us if we didn't pursue this," he said. Psychotic “investors” have ensured the extermination of humanity
mattgrice 2y ago
No it's not. At a very conservative estimate, solar produces >10 more net energy per acre than corn used for ethanol. If anything this will free up farmland to be MORE productive.
bilsbie 2y ago
Solar could be great dual use with grazing livestock.
johnea 2y ago
It's kind of funny to watch these complaints, when the thing covering farmland isn't in for profit utilitie's interests. Massive real estate development has already covered huge tracts of fertile farmland. See, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John": https://angelicorganics.com/watch-the-movie/ https://angelicorganics.com/watch-the-movie/ With more housing per capita than at any time in US history, somehow we still have a "housing crisis" that requires paving over farmmland, but the possibiity eco disaster somehow doesn't justify the same...
bilsbie 2y ago
Weird they need to present this as a moral panic.
thsksbd 2y ago
Ethanol corn might be stupid stupid, but midwest farming is far more valuable than a stupid government subsidy program (ethanol i mean). The midwest has water. Or at least far more of it than Arizona or California. If we're going to cover the Midwest in silica, it should be to build greenhouses for water extensive crops and not for panels. In fact there shouldn't be an acre of farmland with a solar panel on it until every every inch of roof and parking lot of LA and Phoenix has a solar panel first. EDIT: typo. s/Id/If/
- mtillman 2y ago
  Agree. There are also a lot of factories and warehouses in the Midwest that should be covered in solar first.
  - thsksbd 2y ago
    The midwest has terrible weather (hence the water). A solar panel outside of Southwest is a solar panel that produces a fraction of its potential.
    - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
      From the best to worst places for solar PV in the continental US is only a factor of 2 difference. People have really bad intuitions about this, possibly not accounting for the impact of heat.
- ProjectArcturis 2y ago
  You're ignoring the little problem of transmission.
  - thsksbd 2y ago
    Hardly. CO2 doesn't care where it came from. 1. You preferentially close TPPs in CA, while still offsetting the whole country's emission. 2. Transmission lines are a thing, including HVDC lines 3. There are how many massive metro cities within a 200 mi. radius of LA? Some of them growing. There's plenty of demand.
kkfx 2y ago
Having a small domestic p.v. system I've reasoned a bit about agrivotaic, or how to integrate p.v. AND food production not to inject electricity to the grid but to power local machines, like pumps or even a new form of agricultural machines made to run slowly with less power. It's pure speculation but I think it would be possible push a bit of p.v. to shield some areas to excess of light and keep a bit more humidity while provide enough power for irrigation, plantation of many kind of crops, and some harvesting as well. Unfortunately I suspect most of the people involved in both agriculture AND p.v. do not even think about such integration as people involved in BEV and p.v. do not even think about direct charging since most modern hybrid inverters works with 400V LFP batteries who happen to be same of most BEVs but essentially no damn single player on the market offer a DC-to-DC direct charging instead of an useless DC-to-AC (efficient enough, at least) than AC-to-DC (inefficient as hell) double conversion. It's about time that all people involved realize and understand well a thing: we can't power a national grid on p.v. until we have year-long storage, something that's sci-fi today, so the SOLE reasonable p.v. usage is LOCAL self-consumption and as a result the sole things to do now is try to made anything we can usable in such mode, usable depending on the Sun, able to stop-and-go still producing meaningful results. Crops grow slowly so slow limited machines should not be an issue at all, for instance...
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
The real tragedy here is that modern good practice with solar farms is to let grass (or similar) grow underneath them beceause the transpiration of water cools the panels and increases the output of electricity. So the solar developers have shot themselves in the foot by clearing the land.

17 points by jameslk 2y ago

This guy got dollar signs in his eyes and signed the first contract they put in front of him. But even if he wanted to make sure that his land would be protected, Indiana has a massive shortage of rural lawyers [1]. Much of that shortage is self-inflicted; Indiana is one of the most hostile states toward lawyers that want to practice in multiple states. So rural lawyers just across the border in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Kentucky (who deal with the same exact farming issues) don’t even want to bother getting licensed in Indiana. This attitude has consequences. [1] https://www.indybar.org/?pg=GovernmentPracticeNews&blAction=showEntry&blogEntry=79790 https://www.indybar.org/?pg=GovernmentPracticeNews&blAction=...

ProjectArcturis 2y ago

It's hard to argue with land use that will pay an owner 500-600% more than its existing use. But I would worry deeply about the sustainability of those rents. What happens when electricity prices dip and the solar companies go bankrupt? The land will basically never be able to be used as farmland again.

pinkgolem 2y ago
Why could you not reuse the farmland? The solar installations are usually not deeply rooted & the land below the panels is usually quit alive & well.. what am I missing?
- hanniabu 2y ago
  It'd probably be better for farmland because it'll have a break. Then again they'll probably continue spraying nasty herbicides to lower land maintenance around the panels.
  - NewJazz 2y ago
    Crazy how little effort people are willing to put in to maintain a healthy ecosystem on their property. The landscaper at the last apartment I rented literally tore out a perfectly healthy basil plant and sprayed herbicide everywhere.
  - Eric_WVGG 2y ago
    … read the article > Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said. When Reuters visited his farm last year and this spring, much of the land beneath the panels was covered in yellow-brown sand, where no plants grew. "I'll never be able to grow anything on that field again," the farmer said.
    - Robotbeat 2y ago
      ...is that actually scientifically true, or just a random thing a guy said?
    - Retric 2y ago
      That’s a nonsense issue. The plow is literally designed to swap the top layer of soil to kill off the existing plants and sand isn’t toxic. Nobody is wasting money to add a thick enough layer of sand to be a significant issue. And if they did you could just sell the sand. Further the guys making more money leasing the land than farming it, set some aside to pay for cleanup if he’s worried about it.
    - logifail 2y ago
      > … read the article >> "Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said" Where did the fine sand come from, how deep is the [alleged] spreading of it, how much of it did the panel installers [allegedly] bring with them? Can't help wishing we weren't quite so credulous....
  - kwhitefoot 2y ago
    That's weird. The solar farms that I see in Europe all have grass under the panels and in some cases grazing animals. Just let loose a few sheep.
- Nexxius 2y ago
  You're are not missing anything How Solar Panels Are Changing Agriculture - Agrivoltaics Revisited https://youtu.be/ww-_U7_oQbY?si=Qw6h4oJ5AMx6BoYQ https://youtu.be/ww-_U7_oQbY?si=Qw6h4oJ5AMx6BoYQ
- ProjectArcturis 2y ago
  You'd have support posts buried every 6 feet. Sure you could remove them, but at a cost of many thousands per acre. When the rent is hundreds per year. It just wouldn't be economically viable.
  - pinkgolem 2y ago
    Removing trees/posts for farmland has been done for 100dred of years and has always been financially viable Most of the farmland we have in Germany started out as forrest
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
It seems weird that the cost of the land would be that much. Shouldn't there be plenty of non-agricultural land to use for this? For example, any trees near high voltage transmission lines are cut down so the trees can't fall on the lines, causing them to be in direct sunlight. There are thousands of miles across the country. Why aren't there solar panels under all of them, and why would they be buying other land before using that? The land is already owned by the power company. It's practically free.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  They don’t cut down the trees, they trim them. Often with crazy helicopter chainsaws. Transmission lines tend to be in difficult to reach, undeveloped areas. They’re often not owned by the power company but rather used with easements. The power company might not be a generation company either. Building the hookup for thin lines of solar panels might not be cost effective either.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > They don’t cut down the trees, they trim them. They cut down any trees within a certain number of feet of the power lines. This is done when the power lines are installed. Then they come back and periodically trim any trees that grow laterally into that area. > Transmission lines tend to be in difficult to reach, undeveloped areas. Not unlike agricultural land. Also not really true. Transmission lines tend to be near population centers, in order to supply power to them. There are more transmission lines per square mile in, say, New Jersey than there are in Montana. > They’re often not owned by the power company but rather used with easements. Enough of them are owned by the power company that we certainly haven't used them all yet. > The power company might not be a generation company either. In which case they could become one, or lease the land to one, which is free money to the power company but still a low price to the buyer because of the limited number of competing uses. > Building the hookup for thin lines of solar panels might not be cost effective either. Unclear what the layout has to do with anything. It's obviously possible to transfer an arbitrarily large amount of electricity in a straight line. If trying to minimize the number of inverters, panels could be wired in series to raise the DC voltage to whatever is appropriate to reach the distance to the inverter.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Eric_WVGG 2y ago

It's so weird. Anyone who's driven across this nation or even flown knows that we have millions of acres of nothing. Why not just cover Nevada with panels? I'm sure there's a perfectly cromulent answer that I'm too dumb to see…

ironmagma 2y ago
Perhaps due to it being federal land and unavailable for use? Most of the west coast is this way.
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  If federal land is available for grazing and resource extraction, a case could be made for solar development also. As the cells need regular maintenance and cleaning, folks would also be around onsite and around it in federal land areas to preserve the environment.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jncfhnb 2y ago
Nevada has a ton of solar proportionately. You need the power to be able to hook into the transmission grid reasonably close to where it’s needed.
int_19h 2y ago
Our distribution grid isn't designed to handle it. Which is totally a solvable issue, it's just that we as a country are seemingly incapable of large infrastructure projects like that anymore. First you spend years arguing that such an investment is even necessary to spend people's taxes on. Then once the political will is there, it takes even longer to get through the permitting process, ecological reviews etc. Kind of insane really because something like this would really be a net win all around - lots of new construction and manufacturing jobs for years, and at the end of it all, a highly resilient grid that can tap into cheap power at its source and bring it to where it's needed.

jondwillis 2y ago

Agrivoltaics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics I wonder who paid for this article.

jncfhnb 2y ago

You could power the entire US using less than 1% of farmland for solar. I can’t see this being a huge issue?

antisthenes 2y ago
It's not. There's also enough barren desert space just in Nevada to power the entire continent of North America.
- logifail 2y ago
  > There's also enough barren desert space just in Nevada to power the entire continent of North America. Q: How do you transport that across "the entire contient of North America"?
  - brk 2y ago
    A: Wires It really is a solved problem.
    - dzhiurgis 2y ago
      But will it impact 0.0000001% of native desert fauna? Perhaps we should keep burning coal then.
    - logifail 2y ago
      > It really is a solved problem. <chuckle> "Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid." https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/ai-data-centers-power/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/ai-data-c... "Energy experts and analysts have warned for years now that America’s power grid will not be able to accommodate the explosive growth in electricity demand it faces without a huge increase in generation capacity." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/11/green-energy-disaster-grid-renewables-power/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/11/green-ener... "The U.S. electric grid is often described as a vast, synchronized machine — a network of wires carrying electricity from power plants across the country into our homes [...] in reality, there is no single U.S. grid. There are three — one in the West, one in the East and one in Texas — that only connect at a few points and share little power between them. Those grids are further divided into a patchwork of operators with competing interests. That makes it hard to build the long-distance power lines needed to transport wind and solar nationwide." "Many spots with the best sun and wind are far from cities and the existing grid. To make the plan work, the nation would need thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines — large power lines that would span multiple grid regions." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/12/climate/us-electric-grid-energy-transition.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/12/climate/us-el...

magicalist 2y ago

> Developers also argue that in the Midwest, where more than one-third of the U.S. corn crop is used for ethanol production... > In response to Reuters' findings, USDA said that urban sprawl and development are currently bigger contributors to farmland loss than solar... There's a story here about responsible development and environmental management, but the larger narrative seems like concern trolling in light of other types of land use.

llsf 2y ago

All good questions on land use, and competition between food and energy (being corn/ethanol or solar). My understanding is that US produces way too much corn, and it costs taxpayers ($2.2 billion in subsidies per year, source: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-data-says https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...). Maybe instead of artificially propping up the corn industry, we could use few solar farms instead ? That might incidentally help with the US diabetes (55lb of high-fructose corn syrup per american per year, the highest in 42 countries study, source: https://news.yahoo.com/countries-greatest-high-fructose-corn-syrup-more-diabetes-182823674.html https://news.yahoo.com/countries-greatest-high-fructose-corn...)

jameslk 2y ago
I’m curious, wouldn’t doing away with such corn subsidies for better farm land usage be another alternative? Seems like a false dichotomy to make this about solar vs corn?
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  There is no appetite to remove the subsidies politically. But yes, these subsidies are both unnecessary and harmful to humans (due to subsidizing food systems that are unhealthy at scale).
jillesvangurp 2y ago
There is no competition between anything good here. Americans being the most obese, by far, in the world and its subsidized corn production are the same problem. Absolutely nobody needs corn syrup in their diet. Corn is for cattle fodder and we all need to eat a lot less meat in any case. Especially the low quality variety raised on a corn based diet. It simply isn't that good for people (or cattle). Corn syrup in particular is just nasty stuff. You can safely eliminate that as a food group and absolutely nothing bad will happen. Stop stuffing people with corn based produce like fat pigs. It's not that hard. Most of the planet is fine without that crap and about half the size on average. In the same way, ethanol is not a sensible way to do anything about climate change. Just stop burning stuff. Including ethanol produced from corn. It doesn't even come close to canceling out the carbon emissions needed to grow the damn corn to produce the ethanol. It's a completely and utterly pointless endeavor. It's not green. It's not environmentally friendly. It's just subsidized madness. This is not, and has never been, a productive use of land. Not even close. As for solar energy and surface area needed. The world needs a lot less of it than is used for corn farming in the US alone. And that's before you consider the unused surface area in the form of roof tops, parking lots, windows, south facing walls, etc. There's no shortage of surface area to put solar panels on.

hannob 2y ago

If you're worried about energy, land use, and competition with farmland for food, there's one thing you should worry about: bioenergy. If you worry about solar energy and land use, you haven't looked at the numbers.

ec109685 2y ago
It’s mentioned in the article. 1/3 of corn production goes to ethanol.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

"Do I think it's the best use of that land? Probably not. But our investors would kill us if we didn't pursue this," he said. Psychotic “investors” have ensured the extermination of humanity

mattgrice 2y ago

No it's not. At a very conservative estimate, solar produces >10 more net energy per acre than corn used for ethanol. If anything this will free up farmland to be MORE productive.

bilsbie 2y ago

Solar could be great dual use with grazing livestock.

johnea 2y ago

It's kind of funny to watch these complaints, when the thing covering farmland isn't in for profit utilitie's interests. Massive real estate development has already covered huge tracts of fertile farmland. See, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John": https://angelicorganics.com/watch-the-movie/ https://angelicorganics.com/watch-the-movie/ With more housing per capita than at any time in US history, somehow we still have a "housing crisis" that requires paving over farmmland, but the possibiity eco disaster somehow doesn't justify the same...

bilsbie 2y ago

Weird they need to present this as a moral panic.

thsksbd 2y ago

Ethanol corn might be stupid stupid, but midwest farming is far more valuable than a stupid government subsidy program (ethanol i mean). The midwest has water. Or at least far more of it than Arizona or California. If we're going to cover the Midwest in silica, it should be to build greenhouses for water extensive crops and not for panels. In fact there shouldn't be an acre of farmland with a solar panel on it until every every inch of roof and parking lot of LA and Phoenix has a solar panel first. EDIT: typo. s/Id/If/

mtillman 2y ago
Agree. There are also a lot of factories and warehouses in the Midwest that should be covered in solar first.
- thsksbd 2y ago
  The midwest has terrible weather (hence the water). A solar panel outside of Southwest is a solar panel that produces a fraction of its potential.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    From the best to worst places for solar PV in the continental US is only a factor of 2 difference. People have really bad intuitions about this, possibly not accounting for the impact of heat.
ProjectArcturis 2y ago
You're ignoring the little problem of transmission.
- thsksbd 2y ago
  Hardly. CO2 doesn't care where it came from. 1. You preferentially close TPPs in CA, while still offsetting the whole country's emission. 2. Transmission lines are a thing, including HVDC lines 3. There are how many massive metro cities within a 200 mi. radius of LA? Some of them growing. There's plenty of demand.

kkfx 2y ago

Having a small domestic p.v. system I've reasoned a bit about agrivotaic, or how to integrate p.v. AND food production not to inject electricity to the grid but to power local machines, like pumps or even a new form of agricultural machines made to run slowly with less power. It's pure speculation but I think it would be possible push a bit of p.v. to shield some areas to excess of light and keep a bit more humidity while provide enough power for irrigation, plantation of many kind of crops, and some harvesting as well. Unfortunately I suspect most of the people involved in both agriculture AND p.v. do not even think about such integration as people involved in BEV and p.v. do not even think about direct charging since most modern hybrid inverters works with 400V LFP batteries who happen to be same of most BEVs but essentially no damn single player on the market offer a DC-to-DC direct charging instead of an useless DC-to-AC (efficient enough, at least) than AC-to-DC (inefficient as hell) double conversion. It's about time that all people involved realize and understand well a thing: we can't power a national grid on p.v. until we have year-long storage, something that's sci-fi today, so the SOLE reasonable p.v. usage is LOCAL self-consumption and as a result the sole things to do now is try to made anything we can usable in such mode, usable depending on the Sun, able to stop-and-go still producing meaningful results. Crops grow slowly so slow limited machines should not be an issue at all, for instance...

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

The real tragedy here is that modern good practice with solar farms is to let grass (or similar) grow underneath them beceause the transpiration of water cools the panels and increases the output of electricity. So the solar developers have shot themselves in the foot by clearing the land.