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.

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.

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.

On a nearby field, they placed panels in a height that cows can still use the field as well - win-win in my book.

Too radical for Americans

With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot?

By and large we don't. 53% percent of the surface area of the US is farmland. 28% of it is protected federal lands of some stripe or another — national forests and national parks, BLM land, etc. Everything else, all the remaining cities and suburbs and coal burning power plants, freeways, stroads with no bike lanes, Walmarts, and strip malls are all packed into the remainder. Most of that is along the coasts. The US is absolutely full of wide, huge, horizon-to-horizon, enormous expanses with nothing in them.

It's just that our populated areas, largely along the costs, are utter hellholes.

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.

The picture in the op doesn't look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I've seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.

Life will adapt

Life will recover:

https://www.ecoportal.net/en/foxes-use-solar-farm-as-natural-habitat/20424/

Sweet rig.

Which make/model of mixing deck is that?

;)

Also a solar park like this is a lot cheaper and thus they can sell the energy for much cheaper. Solar over car parks requires a more complex structure to hold the panels since they are higher up and therefore catch more wind and the structure needs to span a larger gap. So a car or two can park between the pillars. This increases the cost.

Nah, I'd rather leave the fields open for nature or farming.

Obviously we could do the same or better with coal by just burning as much as we can without any attempt to filter it out of the air, encasing the earth in a wonderful shady smog, keeping us all shaded and cool /s

Ooooof course it is

So anything that needs energy should have its own energy supply near where the energy is being used on the body as a design principle?

Sounds good.

Sounds even better than the (relatively) mere incremental improvement in batteries from donut labs.

Even if only painting everything [that needs some electricity] with photovoltaic paint.

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.

In the states, though, solar is woke and gay, and thus doesn’t get any financial help(currently). Farmers that live hand-to-mouth in the old model, getting drip-fed agri-subsidies, don’t have a way to soften the blow of the capex needed to push through the expense barrier, even though the other side is cleaner and more profitable.

Technology connections has a video where part of this is explained.

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?

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?

Around here they're cutting down thousands of acres of trees for them. Tractors are as tall as cars, you have to mow livestock fields. Field installs make a lot of sense for a variety of cases, but there isn't a right answer, neither the poster or your comment.

To me the real issue is the greed, a Florida investment firm buying 1k acres of contiguous woodland, wiping it, installing solar for a casino to but so they can market how green they are. While individual homeowners have to jump through hoops and deal with snake oil salesmen to install, with heavy limits. That transfers the wealth from individuals and small towns to corporate overlords and the ultra wealthy.

Requiring parking lots to have them pushes back on corporations, plus turrets rings of heavy duty light poles in parking lots, people do drive their cars into them, but it's not often and they're not frequently replaced because of it, just designed to withstand.

Lucky. The only solar panels in my local retail parking lots are the ones powering the ALPRs they installed there.

I'm convinced this is astroturfing in the same vein as the "Just stop oil" protesters that do all that trolly shit. The goal is for you to view green technologies negatively by association, and to feel like the science and decision-making behind them is suspect.

Or spaceships for everybody.

I see this dumb shit all over Facebook too.

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...

Parking lots need to be the 6 levels underneath a soccer field anyway.

Solar Freaking Roadways on the other hand, dump all the money into that