Main Takeaways.
- In developed countries today, solar panels use a small fraction of the land relative to agriculture. This fraction is expected to stay small in the next several years even as proposed solar projects get built out. Nonetheless, because it’s often most practical to build solar farms on agricultural land, local conflicts may arise.
- Solar energy is more land-intensive than gas or nuclear power, but not significantly more than coal or hydropower. Additionally, some agricultural land is already used for energy production – to raise crops for ethanol – a process that’s significantly less efficient than solar energy.
- There’s no evidence that solar panels are toxic to the soil. While poor construction practices can degrade the land beneath solar panels, the panels themselves are inert. Solar panels only contain heavy metals in very small quantities, and they are designed to prevent those heavy metals from leaching into the soil even if they are crushed.
- Solar panels can exist on the same plot of land as other agricultural uses, such as cropland or grazing land for livestock. This practice is called agrivoltaics. Only a small number of today’s solar projects use agrivoltaics, but studies have demonstrated that some crops have higher yields when partly shaded by solar panels and that solar panels can help soil recover.
I have lived near two solar projects in Ohio in the last decade.
In both instances the fields had been completely unused for years. With one being completely unmaintained and growing wild, to the delight of all manner of critters I’m sure.
Both had been sold by the property owners, and not to industrial owners. One was even helping power my house and a local hospital when they got it turned on.
Both had people in pickup trucks plow through during construction that damaged a ton of stuff.
Both had sudden extremely vocal opposition out of nowhere, with signs popping up all over yards and intersections about how we should be using farmland “for food, not wokeness”
Both have had drive-by shootings in the middle of the night after completion that ultimately only damaged a couple things (probably because rednecks aren’t exactly accurate when shooting from a moving vehicle, nor do they usually know the important tech bits to target for maximum damage)
I just think it’s interesting that people who have never set foot on a farm suddenly got concerned about a plot of land already not being used for farming that would continue going unfarmed. Especially since some of them I knew personally and up to a point had been praising the solar projects for “freeing people from profit hungry power companies”
Almost like they didn’t know much about it until someone told them what to think…