You can optimize for different goals. If you want you could optimize for a minimum of new land use. That would however be stupid economic policy as there’s enough land and cheaper energy is more valuable.
Using central planing to enforce more expensive energy production because agrivoltaics are cool and reduce land use is not good policy.
Yeah, this is a US-centric perspective of mine but there’s no shortage of land here. This sounds to me like classic thriftiness about that which is not scarce, which isn’t real thriftiness. I mean, “effective use of both farmland and rooftops”… rooftops? What’s scarce here in the US is labor, not land. Why have all these people climbing up on rooftops? An interesting contrast is Texas (mostly utility solar) vs California (lots of rooftop solar). The interesting number, which I don’t know off the top of my head, is how many people are employed in the solar sector per unit capacity installed. I seem to remember California employs a lot more people, disproportionately to how much more solar it has.
FWIW, I agree with that. But, while land is not scarce in the US, long distance transmission capacity is. There are definitely places where putting solar on roofs is cheaper, or at least faster and easier, than getting large amounts of utility scale solar permitted and building the transmission capacity to bring it to where the demand is.
And I don’t just think agrivoltaics is cool. I think it dodges a lot of usually-bogus-but-impactful objections that so many large scale new construction projects get hit with.
You can optimize for different goals. If you want you could optimize for a minimum of new land use. That would however be stupid economic policy as there’s enough land and cheaper energy is more valuable.
Using central planing to enforce more expensive energy production because agrivoltaics are cool and reduce land use is not good policy.
Yeah, this is a US-centric perspective of mine but there’s no shortage of land here. This sounds to me like classic thriftiness about that which is not scarce, which isn’t real thriftiness. I mean, “effective use of both farmland and rooftops”… rooftops? What’s scarce here in the US is labor, not land. Why have all these people climbing up on rooftops? An interesting contrast is Texas (mostly utility solar) vs California (lots of rooftop solar). The interesting number, which I don’t know off the top of my head, is how many people are employed in the solar sector per unit capacity installed. I seem to remember California employs a lot more people, disproportionately to how much more solar it has.
FWIW, I agree with that. But, while land is not scarce in the US, long distance transmission capacity is. There are definitely places where putting solar on roofs is cheaper, or at least faster and easier, than getting large amounts of utility scale solar permitted and building the transmission capacity to bring it to where the demand is.
And I don’t just think agrivoltaics is cool. I think it dodges a lot of usually-bogus-but-impactful objections that so many large scale new construction projects get hit with.