Our solar farms are not yet visible from space; we don’t yet have patches of desert turning black.
Keep in mind that as best we have researched so far, agrivoltaics enable dual land use, and for some crops in some environments can increase crop yields and lower water consumption. It is not obvious that meeting most electricity demand with solar requires all that much new land, if we start to make effective use of both farmland and rooftops. From what I’ve read it looks like depending on a whole lot of factors you can get about 80% as much electricity as a dedicated solar farm and 80-160% as much crop yield as a regular farm at the same time. This seems to be true even for corn (5-10% decrease in yield) and pasture (increase in yield). When you consider that ~8% of the world’s cropland is used for ethanol production (>30% for corn in the US), this suggests that a switch towards solar electric for vehicles and away from biofuels might plausibly keep land requirements for farming constant or even reduce the total.
I have absolutely no confidence in any government’s capacity to actually structure markets, regulations, and incentives in a way that allows us to realize anything like an optimal food and energy system. But, if there were a food-and-energy-czar actually designing such a system, this problem has several foreseeable solutions. And as both solar panels and batteries continue to get cheaper and pressure to decarbonize increases, I think we’ll stumble towards something like this anyway.
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.
Keep in mind that as best we have researched so far, agrivoltaics enable dual land use, and for some crops in some environments can increase crop yields and lower water consumption. It is not obvious that meeting most electricity demand with solar requires all that much new land, if we start to make effective use of both farmland and rooftops. From what I’ve read it looks like depending on a whole lot of factors you can get about 80% as much electricity as a dedicated solar farm and 80-160% as much crop yield as a regular farm at the same time. This seems to be true even for corn (5-10% decrease in yield) and pasture (increase in yield). When you consider that ~8% of the world’s cropland is used for ethanol production (>30% for corn in the US), this suggests that a switch towards solar electric for vehicles and away from biofuels might plausibly keep land requirements for farming constant or even reduce the total.
I have absolutely no confidence in any government’s capacity to actually structure markets, regulations, and incentives in a way that allows us to realize anything like an optimal food and energy system. But, if there were a food-and-energy-czar actually designing such a system, this problem has several foreseeable solutions. And as both solar panels and batteries continue to get cheaper and pressure to decarbonize increases, I think we’ll stumble towards something like this anyway.
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.