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It’s called Agrovoltaics and it works pretty damn good,if you do it right.
The pairing can also offer some synergies. Solar panels can help moderate ground temperatures, provide shelter for livestock and help plants retain moisture.[6] For farmers the ability to produce electricity can help diversify their income stream.
Solar panels block light, which means that dual use systems involve trade-offs between crop yield, crop quality, and energy production.[7] Some crops/livestock benefit from the increased shade, obviating the trade-off,[8] such as green leafy vegetables, and spices such as turmeric and ginger, whereas staple crops such as wheat, rice, soybeans or pulses require more sun.[9] Agrivoltaics has also been used at scale in arid and semi-arid regions to stabilize soils, reduce dust storm intensity, increase vegetation cover, provide forage for livestock, and curb desertification, notably in northern China.[10][11]
"Noooo don’t replace a tiny part of my monoculture industrial croplands used mostly to feed cattle with the cleanest and cheapest form of energy nooo*
I don’t know. Sheep like to park below panels too.
Yeah I was gonna say:
First of all, we probably should not encourage more parking lots.
Secondly, in the words of that kid in A League Of Their Own who gives Gena Davis a ride who hits on her and then she makes a snide remark about smacking him around instead: “Can’t we do both?”
Woolly engineers hard at work.
Here’s the largest solar farm in California. It covers sand. Also, solar panels don’t block 100% of the light getting to the ground, so different species of plants and animals can live and thrive under them. The land under solar panels is not lost to natural use. Life will adapt.
That said, solar panels over car parks is also a good idea. Both things can be true.
Life will adapt
Life will recover:
https://www.ecoportal.net/en/foxes-use-solar-farm-as-natural-habitat/20424/
This is emotionally resonant but it’s actually sometimes better to cover fields. The right thing is not always intuitive.
Yup, like, what is it replacing? If it’s food that goes directly to humans, let’s not do that. If it’s corn for ethanol, that has little worth. Covering it with solar panels isn’t terrible by any means.
Convert parking lots to fields & sparingly cover them with solar panels?
Parking lots need to be the 6 levels underneath a soccer field anyway.
Oh damn. First time I see this idea. That’s awesome. Great utilization of available space.
Actually, with climate change in the back of the mind, covering fields with solar panels (not 100%, only partially) will reduce heat damage and water usage in the height of summer, and also protect the ground during cold spells of winter. So it is not that stupid after all.
That covering car parks with solar is a good idea is completely independent of this.
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun. Personally all the solar farms I’ve seen just “grow” grass and everything is kept trimmed down to not cast shade on the panels. Putting the panels up higher would still cast any plants grown in deep shade. I think putting them in places deep shade is needed/wanted on the ground makes sense and because cities tend to be hotter due to paving using solar panels to cast shade would help lower the temps in cities, lowering power usage on things like AC. I think integrating solar into urban landscapes is the future
They need direct and indirect light, and agro-panels have a coverage of about 50%. Not enough for high-end farming, but more than enough for grass and similar to grow for grazing. Or some herbs that need shadow to grow properly. Those panels are usually placed on land that can’t be used for high-performance farming, anyway.
Plant butterfly bushes and other pollenator attractants / nectar sources.
Crazy thought: put solar panels over A/Cs and tie it into the panel.
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun
Except for all the plants that evolved and thrive in the low light beneath tree foliage. Evolution is not so picky as a pretty houseplant.
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun.
The humble Monotropa uniflora:
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun.
That’s only true, if the solar panels are not properly adjusted to this use case.
The solution for that is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics#Spectrally_selective_modules
I’ll do you one better
Replace most city car infrastructure by bicycle infrastructure. The few remaining required car parks? Move those underground under buildings and parks. Then those places that used to be car parks, make those actual parks to walk and sometimes cycle in
Then move solar on top of building roofs
bicycle-mostly infrastructure is ableist.
Nobody who’s actually disabled believes that. Knock it off with the dishonest faux white-knighting.
So how is someone who struggles to walk supposed to use a bicycle?
They could use a car and drive on the part of the road infrastructure that haven’t been converted to bicycle infrastructure. The comment didn’t say that all car infrastructure should vanish. Probably not thinking that busses should vanish.
Nobody who’s actually disabled believes that
i believe it
Because with how many parking lots there are in the US it would crash the cost of electricity by sending supply to the moon.
Can’t have that. Oligarch lobbyism go brrr.
cost. it’s significantly more expensive to cover parking lots and roofs than fields, because somebody has to climb a ladder to install it.
also many places are already covering the parking lots. which is mostly as a marketing gag i suspect, or to produce the electricity themselves that they feed to the cars instead of having to buy it over the grid. which might be cheaper if the grid has high profit margins.
It’s not a bad idea to have energy production near where the energy is being used.
That said, it’s not an either or.
Technology Connections actually did a great video on why using solar panels in place of crops can benefit the crops and actually provides more energy than the crops themselves. At least in the U.S., a huge portion of our crops are used for ethanol in gasoline anyway.
Ooooof course it is
They
both. both is good.
Nah, I’d rather leave the fields open for nature or farming.
Agrisolar exists. If the US converted just a few % of the acreage legally mandated for growing corn for ethanol to solar, the energy crisis essentially solves itself.
I’m asking out of genuine ignorance here, but… don’t you have to distribute it?
A lot of people have asked in the past, why can’t we just cover the Sahara Desert in solar panels, and my understanding is that it’s because you can’t get all of that power where it needs to go. So the installments have to be distributed geographically, not all in one place, no?
also what i feel people forget is that you can join windmills and solar panels on the same area. although i don’t know whether that’s usually done.
In America, if we only replaced the fields growing corn for Ethanol production to add to gasoline, leaving every other field alone, we’d have enough energy to power the whole country with a huge surplus to spare. We’re already using the fields for energy production, we’re just being inefficient about it.
They should at least replace the fields producing corn ethanol. Saves the recurring cost of producing the energy, and reduces the emissions of both harvesting and burning.
Huge swathes of land are used just to burn the output.
Farming is much worse for land than PV. PV is almost as good as leaving it untouched, while farming ruins biodiversity through monoculture, nitrate and phosphate pollution, and possibly pesticides.
Large-scale ground-mounted PV is fine and people need to get over it. If you are in the mood to publicly advocate for more environmentally friendly land use, go and protest the grotesque waste of land for crops like corn and sorghum used to produce bioethanol fuels.
On the other hand, I do enjoy eating food
And like I said, vast amounts of farmland are for fuels, not for food. So effectively harvesting energy like PV, just much slower, much less efficient and much worse for the ground and fauna.
Only bc we choose to farm in the most aggressive and anti nature way possible. Other techniques do exist and are being reintroduced in some areas
The most pro-nature approach I can think of is to use farmland for fuel production (a hectare of corn produces 20 MWh/ha/y in bioethanol), convert 3% of it to PV (700 MWh/ha/y) and restore 97% of it to its natural state while still harvesting the same amount of energy. In the US that could be 40 million acres restored to nature. You can improve farming methods for actual food production, but none of that will beat millions of acres of land not being used for farming at all. Another, much more effective measure would be to reduce meat consumption to, again, render millions of acres of farmland ready for renaturalization.
Bro we’re gonna starve.
Or, or, hear me out. Deprioritize cars. Build public transportation/car free spaces/walkable cities, reduce/eliminate parking lots. Require smaller more fuel efficient vehicles. Build solar panels on rooftops/windowpanes. Plant and protect trees and other native plants.
