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Stop sharing this bullshit. It is a stupendously simplistic view that is propagated by those wanting to get in the way of cheap renewables.
Yes, it makes sense in some cases to cover parking lots, but it increases the price and complexity many folds and the areas needed in open land are next to nothing compared to the area being used to grow energy crops today.
The meme should be “stop covering our land with fertilized, pesticide covered corn and rapeseed that go into combustion engines, cover it with solar instead”
Technology connections has a video where part of this is explained.
soooo much this. Also stop building parking lots, people using cars need higher pressure to use other means of transportation. Car pool etc.
The meme should be “stop covering our land with fertilized, pesticide covered corn and rapeseed that go into combustion engines, cover it with solar instead”
It’s doubly stupid cause it’s just greenwashing a fucking carpark of all things. Do they not see the irony here?
Covering parking lots has the benefit of also protecting parked vehicles from sunlight and weather, meaning your car isn’t blazing hot when you return to it and you can unload any purchases in peace.
Why would installing panels over a parking lot be many times more expensive than installing them in any other open, flat area? Is it having to bury the power lines?
Because it’s not necessarily correct. There’s so many fields dedicated to growing energy plants that covering just a part of those would be sufficient to electrify the entire transport sector. That’s just fields for plants for Biofuels etc., not a single beautiful picturesque meadow, not a single field that grows food.
Of course covering car parks is a good idea too, but it’s more expensive, and it’s a climate change denier’s strawman that covering fields would supposedly endanger our food supply or ruin our landscapes.
In the EU at least farmers are getting paid to not grow on certain fields in order to hold crop prices stable.
It’s a good idea to put them to produce smething else.
Knowing our great bureaucracy I bet they lose the subsidy if they put solar panels on those fields.
At least there is no Big Chip lobbying against it.
It’s SO sunny here that I’d probably get better results in my garden by shading it under solar panels, there are plenty of places they help ag, not harm it. You don’t have to space them so tightly or have them completely flat like that picture.
I can’t imagine. It’s so cloudy here that many properties are evaluated as unsuitable for solar if they have even the slightest other obstructions. Overall solar has a super low adoption rate because most buyers don’t even break even over the life of the installation.
We have clouds, but in the subtropics solar does pay for itself eventually, the sunlight is so direct. I don’t want panels on my roof (we finally got everything hurricane -rated, metal roof, storm windows, and insurers here will sometimes drop houses with solar panels on the roof) but would like solar carport, back porch, and if it was possible, yeah over the garden but angled for the dappled light - I lose a lot more food plants to too much bright sun, than any other factor.
Car parks are horrible in and off themselves but the American mind cannot comprehend such a take
Korea recently passed a law that parking lots above a certain size need to have solar panels
Also warehouses. Also houses. Also literally any structure that already exists that isn’t nature. If it is an energy consuming building, it should have solar panels on it. Parking lots count because cars are energy consuming devices.
If any of the billionaires actually cared about the planet or the human race, they would just dump money at a huge loss into making solar panels cost pennies.
I want solar panel Venetian blinds on my windows. The entire exterior of my car should be solar panels. Every roof everywhere should be solar panels.
I want the to see so much money poured into it that for $35 I could get a t-shirt with a USBC port that charges my fucking phone when I’m out in the sun.
But that doesnt make money. I guess the lives of a few hundred assholes is more important than making some super awesome shit that benefits everybody.
I fucking hate this time line.
Lemmy ragebait
To be fair in my small town alone there are 2 fields with solar panels. No crops, no animal grazing, just mowed grass and panels. People here act like that doesn’t exist and every green field with pannels is agrivoltaics, which isn’t strictly true. Maybe their newer installations and need a few years to mature? Idk the case was the same last 2 states I lived in, ma and ri both had fields with pannels that were very much single use. I thing agrivoltaics is freaking sweet, just like I think covering car parks, roofs, etc is sick. Why waste any space? ESPECIALLY spaced we have already wrecked, no reason not to have pannels on every roof. I say that without having my own but some day soonish…
I see this dumb shit all over Facebook too.
And roofs. And roads. And maybe roadroofs.
or just cover all the buildings, you already need those roofs
The concept of “our” land is sadly outdated. As Chomsky said : “The fundamental role of the government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains”.
(BTW, I’m not as well read as my quote might imply - I first heard it on a Manic Street Preachers track, but it struck home!)
Two things have lead to that first picture though.
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We’ve been underpaying farmers for a long time. Everyone buys from supermarkets, and supermarkets will pay farmers a meagre amount for produce. Cheap imports are further hammering the farmer. Hard to compete in northern Europe with slavery conditions in southern Spain.
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We’ve been overpaying for solar too. Locking it to the rate of fossil fuel energy means it’s well worth covering a field in solar panels and reaping the rewards.
Both of these should change, but since nobody has any money, it’s a hard sell to make people want to pay more for farm produce, especially when you don’t know who is soaking that extra money up. Capitalism says it’s going to be the supermarket owners taking the lion’s share.
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NIMBY but city-dweller edition. “Stop covering up the farmland that you can’t make money off of and cover my parking lot instead”
It can be really good to cover the fields!
Reduce evaporation, expand the range of plants that can grow and provide subsidies for hard pressed farmers
Protecting food and water resources are going to get increasingly important over the next few decades
Yes. Both, not either or. Where is that shitty competition thinking coming from?
A lot of it comes from conservative AstroTurf.
And, unfortunately, a lot of it comes from farmers and other people living in rural areas, who see fields of crops being turned into solar farms and think “these panels are ugly, these panels are industrial, these panels are taking up fertile farmland” and see it as just one more way the government is exploiting rural areas for the benefit of the cities.
They’re wrong, of course, but rural America has been abandoned and neglected and made the dumping ground for all sorts of polluting industries for so long I can’t blame them for thinking that way.
It’s the way the typical American thinks
'Muricans have a habit of seeing things as zero-sum, because that’s what their shitty system relies on
The cynic in me suspects it’s an attempt to sow division within pro-solar panel groups. Get them arguing amongst themselves over where to put them, rather than uniting to push for more panels.
Yeah I really hate this post, and how often it seems to surface on lemmy. Agrivoltaics is good for energy and for the plants*!
*Some exclusions apply. Not all plants grow better with the added shade.
In Switzerland, there was a vote on a petition requiring new houses to include solar panels. Conservatives opposed it, arguing that construction costs were already too high without such regulations. Instead, those same people want to build massive solar farms on untouched natural landscapes. To me, the reason is obvious: energy companies want to maintain control over a centralized power infrastructure. This way, they can keep charging us high electricity prices while pocketing subsidies for infrastructure projects.
Ding ding ding that is correct!
no, it’s one thing to allow solar panels on houses, but a completely other thing to require them. i’m against the requirement as well. there’s absolutely no sane reason for that besides making people uncomfortable if they don’t want them. if they want them, they can already get them.
A lot of the big building companies, in Europe, treat solar panels as a premium option and so charge a larger profit margin on them. Installing solar, while constructing the house is a LOT cheaper and easier than retrofitting them later.
The panels have gotten cheap enough that it’s no longer a real cost burden, Vs the cost of the house.
Put them everywhere. I don’t care where they go. I want my son and daughter to have a planet to enjoy and raise a family in.
Every single time this gets posted: Both is good.
Farmers are the biggest welfare queens in this country. They all bitch and moan about needing subsidies and everything but they all have crop insurance.
how many farmers do you know? You understand many are black and you’re calling them welfare queens, right? I get that people think farmers are republicans or conservative but that’s just admitting you have outdated knowledge. The times have changed
Generally speaking these are the large companies doing this while pretending to be small farmers.
Farmer A through F are family members. They each have their “own” farm, just inside the limit to make it a small farm. Farmer A also has a “small” farm with Farmer B, and C, and D, and E, and F, each qualifying as a “small” farm. Do the same with the rest of the mixes.
The reality is that these “small” farms are really one 400 acre farm run by the same people, worked by the same people (migrants being taken advantage of with illegally low wages).
The actually small farms do benefit from a lot of the programs, and that can be a really good thing. Its unfortunate though that there are enough loopholes that large scale corporate farming finds ways to abuse the system by cosplaying as “small farm” owners.
While you aren’t wrong about them being good to use in Ag, the scenario where you can do both is more limited.
You can’t drive a combine harvester under panels, to harvest the crop you just protected for instance, unless you place and design your panels carefully. It’s ok for pasture in that sheep and the like can get in and chow down and it provides shade though.
For a parking lot, it’s easier, as shown, but also fuck cars, they’re their own environmental disaster
They are using them on closed tailings facilities (mining) to add additional land use or gain benefit where there wasn’t really a good land use to begin with.
I think urban settings are where panels will ultimately shine, as you can concentrate them without taking up other land uses - it’s just an add on and doesn’t detract from existing or future uses like using them in an ag field would.
40% of US cornfields are used for energy today. If these fields were turned into solar farms with natural meadows under them, not only would we actually recover more energy per acre than corn ethanol, but we would start restoring the American prairie that has been nearly erased from the continent.
It uses far less materials to build arrays in a field than over a parking lot. The panels don’t need to be mounted as high. There doesn’t need to be as much safety margin and protection of the panels because people won’t be underneath them.
The bigger problem is getting the power from solar farms to where it is needed, but this is also not as big a problem as anti-electrification lobby wants you to believe.
Technology connections did the math out on this. He found that acre for acre, even assuming very poor fuel mileage for an electric car, the same land used to produce electricity instead of corn for fuel would be about 70x more efficient.
He also found that if we used only ethanol corn fields for solar panels and no other land, we would produce 7x the current total power demand of the United States.
I don’t know. Sheep like to park below panels too.
On a nearby field, they placed panels in a height that cows can still use the field as well - win-win in my book.
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?”
we probably should not encourage more parking lots
I don’t think anyone was suggesting that we build new parking lots just to install solar on them.
Woolly engineers hard at work.
Saw a documentation a few days ago. It was about a berry Farmer who put solarpanels above his berries to shield them from direct sunlight. Works great! And He could replace all his transporters with EVs. :)
I’ve seen plenty of different types of solar panels, some specifically for agriculture use that have small gaps between the solar cells to allow for more sun to reach plants.
I’m not sure how that affects solar panel output/longevity but it can’t be too much of a hit.
