Fair, but that's still plenty of land for massive amounts of solar without losing much at all

And livestock can eat under the solar panels, so even less corn lost.

It has become a thing in the las 5 years or so. First bifacial modules had to get more popular and overall cost had to go down before it made economic sense to farmers.

They can't be more widespread. They need to be thin and exactly vertical to optimally work.

Sorry, I couldn't resist

Because it can be a pretty steep hit to power output/efficiency compared to angling them to face the sun.

Cost per watt is significantly higher this way compared to what you generally see. It allows more sharing of sun between other uses and solar, but it comes at the expense of not letting the solar get as much sun for the same panel cost.

To the capitalist, everything is an asset that can make money, including land. No money making in returning land to nature, unless a positive externality is introduced by a tax credit or something. Not a perfect solution by far, but rewilding is a necessary pill to swallow because we're in the sixth mass extinction and are using land for things like cows and pigs which is super water and fertilizer intensive.

Only problem is many pasture animals are not compatible with agrovoltaics. Cows tends to rub on the supports and may chew any exposed wires, goats will find their way on top of the panels no matter what you do, pigs will chew on any exposed wire or insulation, and sheep, well they're actually okay for agrovoltaics.

There's the alternate approach of basically using solar panels as fences which might work better for some pastures. Ultimately agrovoltaics is one of those combinations of factors that is going to take time and experimentation to perfect

Large herbivores like cows are going to be capable of damaging traditional solar installations. But this would be great for goats and sheep and stuff.

Chickens would be fine, but you'd have to clip their wings (not surgically) so they can't fly up on them.

It's crazy because ethenol COULD be just a byproduct from food production. Talking to farmers about a decade ago that what they were aiming for. Basically a step before just tilling it or burning it back into the field if it was misshappen (consumers don't buy ugly veggies) or worse infested/rotting.

The subsidy structure messed that up apparently. The subsidized crop insurance made it not worth it, plus the ethanol subsidies required dedicated fields.

I 100% would rather see solar over dedicated ethanol fields and all of the water usage and pollution they represent.

The infrastructure to build a load-bearing roof over a parking lot is significantly more than the concrete footings and supports needed to hold ground-based solar. There are some public lots near me that have solar roofs over them. When I park there I almost feel like I’m pulling into an underground parking garage.

The actual panels are no longer the most expensive part of an install.

This is propaganda. It is intended to make you think worse of ground mounted solar, the carpark side is to make the message palatable, but isn't comparable. But solar farms in fields is the cheapest way of deploying massive solar plants

Carpark solar is limited to the power infrastructure at the carpark, the limit for commerical building solar in my town is 30kW, the solar farm nearest me (on a sheep field) is 13MW

Commercial buildings get to choose: solar on the roof or solar over the cars. Putting it over the cars will more than double the cost.

So this is, or acts as, propoganda, saying "this effective thing is bad, instead we should do this impossible thing"

Oh, to be clear, I don’t think carport solar arrays are fossil fuel propaganda. They’re a useful application where they fit. It’s the idea that solar on fields is harmful that I object to, and I worry that carport solar is being presented without the full context as a red herring, so folks like us who want more solar start objecting to utility-scale ground mount.

Saying it's unreasonable is too far, fair to disagree with it though... Fossil fuel is always happy to push clean energy projects that wouldn't work well at scale to sabotage things. Though personally I'd say calling this out as car propoganda is more important...

You can place ground based solar farms just outside cities where they have access to main power lines that can carry megawatts; inside the city they probably can only push kilowatts per phase.

30kW is the limit for commercial (or any 3 phase) solar generators in my town, that is cheaper to mount on the building roof

The solar farm nearest me, right near the high voltage wires that supply that side of the city, has 13MW of panels, three orders of magnitude more

Thorium makes sense for supplying metropolises and 24/7 heavy industry between sunset and midnight. Uranium doesn't make sense because it's rare and hard to mine. Daytime nuclear doesn't make sense because solar is cleaner, cheaper, and decentralized. And it doesn't make sense for smaller cities, towns, and rural areas because you need to waste a shit-ton of electricity transporting the power of one reactor long distances.

It's easy to forget how wasteful it is to lose 90% of your electricity transporting it long distances when that is what all the 20th century infrastructure was built around. But there are tons of energy storage methods that don't require lithium that are more efficient, provided the electricity is generated locally.

Nuclear is good for baseload, and although it is very clean, it isn’t quite carbon-free either. It’s also very expensive, unpopular, and has a lot of regulations. I agree it’s good and necessary, but solar and batteries are way cheaper and can go almost anywhere, so they’re way easier to deploy. With the pace of climate action we need, I don’t think it’s an either-or, we gotta do both, fast.

nuclear does better for utilities level power than solar.

Define "better." Personally, I think nuclear is too expensive to be a current solution. Let all the existing nuclear plants continue out their useful lives, and extend them as feasible, but constructing new nuclear plants is probably not worth the cost, even compared to solar + enough grid scale storage to cover multiple nights of demand even when days are cloudy.

Terrapower just got approval to build their $4 billion, 345-MW reactor. That's $11.6 million per MW.

NuScale canceled their 462 MW project in Utah when it became clear that the total cost was going to exceed $9 billion. That's $19.5 million per MW.

Solar plants are about $1 million per MW. Grid scale 4-hour batteries are about $750,000 per MW.

And the costs of solar/batteries keep dropping, while nuclear tends to increase in cost over time.

A LIDL opened about 6 months ago near my place... zero panels over the car park... and 1 (one) EV charger... like... you'd think they'd had it pegged by now.

Panels take a decade or more to pay back in savings.

In bulk, maybe. Still... more off-grid autonomy, less grid stressing....

Desert areas can still have rich ecosystems that get severely affected by solar farms.

It’s often mutually beneficial for animals to graze around solar panels. Having them in fields is not inherently wasting the space.