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Certain crops can benefit think from some shade throughout the day:
The study aggregates the effect of agrivoltaics on crop yields at different sites. Tomatoes saw up to double yield with agrivoltaics, while wheat, cucumbers, potatoes and lettuce showed significant negative impacts and corn and grapes showed minimal impact.
I assume that maximal crop output would happen if you just grow things in their optimal climate, but then you rely more heavily on transportation.
If you put solar panels above your crops, that makes them significantly harder to harvest
Depends on the crop lots of crops are still harvested by hand. Also lots of crops are destroyed by hail, heavy rains or high winds all of which are somewhat protected by solar panels above.
Agrivoltaics are so cool!
Indoor farming is on the rise, as you can have the optimal climate anywhere. It’s more spatially efficient with vertical planting, but it has a far higher energy cost for air conditioning and potentially lighting. At least the farm workers are cooler too 🤷♀️
AFAIK lighting is the biggest energy eater for indoor farming.
Or even better: banning all single story parking lots to have less sealed area. Then putting solar panels above the unsealed area and allowing nature to own everything below the solar panels, instead of agricultural conglomerates who pollute the ground water and produce food for livestock.
You could put solar on both?
Trees and roofs are kinda mutually exclusive.
I live near a school playground in Vancouver. In the summer the kids don’t use it because it’s too hot and sunny. In the winter kids don’t use it because it’s wet.
I feel like a solar panel canopy would be 3 birds with one stone.
Yess, vancouverite here also. How do we get our municipalities to do projects like this? There’s so much space that would be perfect real estate for solar canopies
Depends. Some agro-PV systems I have seen are 50% transparent. The plants get a sufficient amount of light, and are protected from hail and heavy rain.
I have even seen a prototype where the pillars for the panels incorporate a rail system on which sowing, weeding, and harvesting tools can run electrically in instead of being pulled by a tractor.
PV coverings also trap some ambient heat and regulate the surface temperature better than full exposure, acting like a greenhouse that encourages plant growth.
Folks so set on zero sum systems that they ignore synergies.
Most of the growth in solar has been market driven. It’s why Texas has a lot of solar despite them subsidizing oil and gas. It’s free, plentiful energy that hits the ground almost every day. If you have boatloads of land that’s not ideal for farming, yet not too hot for much of the year, it makes economic sense.
If the U S didn’t subsidize corn for ethanol it might make even more sense to build solar instead of grow corn. And then you could grow other crops under the solar panels.
Roofed parking would be pretty sick, compared to having your car baked through in the sun. But multi-story parking decks would be even better, or even just parking lots with trees.
It’s not like we’re actually short on space to build solar panels on. We already have lots of roofs.
Whatever we build, it’ll have a top! And on top should be either something green or solar panels.
Is it prime agriculture land if no one is using it for prime agricultural land?
Yes.
Land use doesn’t determine soil quality, but soil quality often determines land use.
Seems like solar panels can be easily relocated when the land is desired to be used for agriculture. I admittedly don’t know what the loss would be on some of the power infrastructure for routing this would be though.
I believe they are relatively hard to move, but I’m not a solar expert by any stretch (though it’s a different story when it comes to soil).
Somewhat related: putting panels on reclaimed tailings ponds or waste rock dumps is a good idea, in that usually these have an engineered cover (rock/soil/LDPE) That limits rooting depth (don’t want plants reaching what we are trying to protect [toxic waste]) so we plant grasses and shit rather than trees. Grasses + panels is the best of both cover stability and green energy
Is your nation truly food secure if you are relying on imports? Can you be certain that in 20, 50, 100 years that land would still be better as solar panels than farmlands?
son, I cant watch my streaming channels with electricity from wheat fields. we need them photovoltaic cells so I can check my sites
What is it with 50 yr old and Ben hur?
Solar panels aren’t permanent. Seems the land can be used as current needs require.
Likely it was used on parts of them that are actually agricultural, then the fossil fuel industry paid good money to call every hill a prime agricultural land.
The only reason I would be against this is because it disincentivizes removing large parking lots, which are primarily a waste of space. If we could replace some of that wasted space with housing (which could also have solar slapped on it) that would be ideal.
This picture/render looks like it’s in Europe, where that could maybe be feasible. In the US, though, I think we need to take what we can get.
Parking lots ain’t going anywhere.
They are and they must. There is no path forward that doesn’t massively disinvest from personal vehicles.
They must, but they aren’t. The infrastructure investments to make mass transit preferable in sprawling cities will not happen soon enough. The people in power will not compromise their worship of free markets for climate change. Over time, the market will transition that way, but not any faster under the current system.
US auto-domination isn’t even the result of market forces though.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of laissez-faire policy or capitalism in general, but government funded highway lanes are no more capitalist than government funded rail tracks. The current situation in the US required enormous government intervention to establish, in the form of the forced seizure of property to make way for highways, hundreds of billions of dollars (inflation adjusted) to build those highways, mandatory parking minimums for new construction (to store all the cars from the highway), government subsidies for suburban style development and later on tax schemes that resulted in poorer inner city areas subsidizing wealthy suburbs, and zoning laws that made it illegal to build a business in a residential area (which worked together with anti-loitering laws to make it so that if you didn’t live in a neighborhood you had no “legitimate” reason to be there. It’s not a coincidence this happened in the wake of desegregation.)
Similarly fossil fuel production in the US actually receives direct government subsidies at the federal and sometimes state level (some of which have been in effect since 1916).
Now, we can get into the weeds and talk about how government action is actually a necessary part of capitalism and the intertwined nature of power structures and so on and so forth, but it’s important to remember that there’s nothing inevitable or natural about the mess we’re in right now, as some would have you believe. It required conscious planning and choices, as well as tremendous effort and tremendous injustice to get here.
They are in large cities. Look at aerial photos of, e.g. Washington DC from 20 years ago vs today and you’ll see many fewer parking lots.
Too bad the driving force is gentrification.
Oh yeah buddy what temp is it outside rn?
Asphalt loves heating cities up
This article is literally about shading the asphalt
My comment specified large parking lots for a reason. The amount of space wasted around seldom used, high volume areas (like stadiums) is absurd, and other countries have shown they’re much better served by increased public transit, not giant parking lots that sit empty 300+ days of the year.
Ok but like why wouldn’t a solar farm be an acceptable alternative?
Putting solar farms in urban areas instead of rural ones doesn’t make much sense.
How so? A) Less transmission lines to where it’s needed and b) more qualified/trained staff centralized to the solar installs.
I’m not against rural solar by any stretch but I can’t fathom being against urban solar? We need to solar all the things.
In my post I literally said that solar can be put on top of houses so I’m not sure why you want to argue with me about this. I just think urban areas are better served by homes with solar on top than parking lots with solar on top.
When solar farms are more than like 0.01% of land utilization then maybe its worth caring about.
For the same land you can power a household or get like 14 pounds of beef. who cares.
Just install solar panels where its cheapest, which is going to be an empty field where you can install a ton and get better labor efficiency during the install. Making green energy more expensive to install only benefits fossil fuel companies.
back of napkin math
Average household is about 10000 kWh annually Solar farms conservatively produce 350MWh/year/acre
so 1/35 of an acre to power a home
roughly 3000 pounds of soybeans per acre becomes roughly 500 pounds of beef/acre.
500*(1/35) = 14.2
The amount of area needed for solar does not even begin to approach the amount of farm land. People generally aren’t building solar panels on farmland anyways? The largest instillations in the US are in the middle of the fucking desert.
Also get rid of as many parking lots as possible.
There is just so many layers of false and absurd narrative in this.
You haven’t seen much of the US from ground level have you. There are more and more panel farms being built on good farm land. Sizes ranging from 10 to 40 acres at a time from all the ones I’ve seen.
It might seem small to you, but it does add up.
In Germany they sometimes put solar on the south side of historic trash hills. Seems like a good idea I can’t think of downsides.
This post was maybe referring to agrovoltaics?
The largest instillations in the US are in the middle of the fucking desert.
Still this is obviously worse right? We’re taking untouched wilderness and turning it into a wasteland of blue silica. Deserts are pretty unique biomes with their own set of diverse animal and plant wildlife.
Farm land is already void of most biodiversity and usually used to grow corn or some other form of unnecessary cattle feed - yeah ideally both get rewilded - but it feels better to reuse an already existing bio wasteland instead of creating new ones…
It depends on how you see environment safety.
Either you want to safe dieing species and biomes, or you want to safe somehow the global ecosystem that keeps us alive.
First is illusionary, second is apparently too expensive according to the industrial nations.
If you can place solar in the desert without killing food supply, then do it!
The USA will have a big problem producing food once the Mediterranean climate zone wander north.
Also a lot of USAs food production is supported by a big underwater reservoir that is very close to dry up…
However I never see that they adress this issue…
Not much desert around me. Good farmland is getting leveled and solar put on top when there are parking lots already flat they could do it on. It’s just much, much easier to work with fresh ground. It’s why old warehouses are left to rot and farmland right next to them are razed for new warehouses.
I put some solar on my farm, but made sure to use a plot that isn’t suitable for farming.
People generally aren’t building solar panels on farmland anyways?
At least here in Germany they do
But only in one case sure the farmer get money without doing anything with his field.
Who is gonna tell him that solar panels on roofs exist ☠️☠️☠️
I think you’re kind of missing the point, having solar panels in parking lots would add use to otherwise useless land. There’s plenty of them in the US and it would also create a relief from the concrete hotspots that it makes. I mean have you ever been walking through a parking lot and hating your life because you’re sweating so much?
This idea has been around 20 years…
The problem has always been cost.
Costs that have dropped precipitously over the past 20 years
It’s not the cost of the panels, it’s the cost of the structure to hold them. And the maintenance involved.
There are solar generating facilities literally everywhere now. To mount them high enough to park under is a miniscule cost difference. There are also already massive parking lots with covers all over the place. We have probably 5,000+ covered parking spaces at the airport in my city, for example
That’s already a thing. They’re called solar canopies, and they’re covering school parking lots in CA.
Oddly Costco does this.
Not a bad idea but not sure how they’d handle snowfall.
Sunlight tends to be negligible during snowfall season, anyway.
I could be wrong on this but i thought i remembered some engineer youtuber saying that sun panels naturally emit enough heat to prevent snow from forming? (Fact check me on that)
And they’re hydrophobic. I hear snow is rarely an issue, but would be interested to hear from someone with actual experience.
There’s a train station parking lot where I live which has solar canopies over the car spots.
In the winter, snow and ice accumulates and does fall off. A few years ago a saw a big section of ice/slush slough off and almost hit a kid waiting for their parent to pick them up.
I’m not sure how bad it really is overall, but the photo in this post doesn’t look much like an area which gets snowfall.
Snow will accumulate on solar panels (source - have rooftop solar on Colorado). Panels are glass so snow will slide off depending on angle, and since panels are dark they tend to melt snow quicker once they get started melting, typically causing the snow to slide off dramatically.
Could also cover freeways (also reduce glare during your commute)
But parking lots are a good idea too
