A significant portion of farmland in the US is used to grow corn solely for ethanol production.
If this land – and this land only – was instead used for solar farms, it would produce several times more electricity than the entire country uses, easily allowing the US to be 100% solar powered. (Not with some hypothetical future solar tech – with the tech we have right now.) Corn production for food and even for livestock food would not be reduced at all, only ditching the cornfields used for ethanol production.
Or just, you know, put some solar farms in the vast desert areas the US has, where there’s even better sun exposure and hardly ever any cloud coverage. Then they’ll be even more efficient, and most of that land isn’t used for anything anyway, except maybe some light cattle grazing. (And light cattle grazing can work perfectly fine alongside solar panels. The cows might even appreciate the shade on hot days.)
Long-distance electricity transport is exponentially lossy, and it makes people dependent on vulnerable centralized infrastructure. So your first suggestion is more practical on a national/continental scale.
Solar panels could also be placed on parking lots of dead malls and other decaying suburban infrastructure.
- logarithmically lossy
Why do you say that? Intuitively every kilometer takes the same fraction of the remaining electicity, which creates an exponential curve. Technically the loss fraction would be 1 minus the exponential curve, but that’s still an exponential function. Is there something about power generation that makes it a log function of distance?
Power throughput follows a logarithm
A significant number of crops can handle up to 30% shading and farms can install solar on frames above the crops. A few plants even do better with some shade (due to heat stress)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-022-00783-7
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00121-w
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/03/made-shade-growing-crops-solar-farms-yields-efficiency
Not to mention as temperatures continue to climb, more will benefit from the shade because 30% shade will be closer to what the plants consider “normal/ideal”
some years ago an article here in Australia interviewing a sheep grazier who had solar a large solar farm, one of the things he said he’d not considered was in times of drought, the many acres of panels had water droplets in the morning condense on the panels and made drip lines of grass for the sheep, apparently enough extra growth it got him through a recent dry spell, that and shade for the sheep
That’s a great point as well… I wish I had enough to make that big of a difference.
Fuck industrialized farmers. Fuck them, no lube, with a spiked bat. They pollute our waterways with their overfertilization, use synthetic urea made in middle-eastern hellholes out of natural gas and then shipped halfway across the planet on the most polluting boats possible, suck up all of our natural water in aquifers for irrigation, destroy natural landscapes and wildlife habitats, spray glyphosate over all our food poisoning consumers with cancer and decimating insect populations, suck up tax dollars to subsidize their pointless bullshit, and fill in wetlands to grow their precious cornfields. Oh, and they use diesel tractors. I seriously think that any farmer crying about agrivoltaics should be shot in the head and have their land eminent domained.
Is there a reason why these just aren’t over large parking lots for covered parking?
Costs a lot more to build a roof than it does to place them in a field
