Often these "solutions" introduce more problems than they solve. One example being a solar farm designed to be grazed by sheep where the panels are so low to the ground that farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.
The best solution is still to put solar panels and farmland in different places where each can be optimized without concern for the other.
There's significant evidence "add solar panels" is an optimization to at least some kinds of farmland.
> farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season
That season is typically "winter", and you wind up without much hay to cut at that point.
We could grow some crops in that 1% of land and provide reams of clean power to the world. And the more we restore land to nature, as opposed to our mono-crops and cows, the more co-benefits we reap.
Can they mow a 1,000 acres and get through ruts from feral hogs and everything else? If so, then that's awesome (i really don't know) but you have to think of the scale.
As an example where I think it would work: industrial greenhouses.
But surely only certain places need to do this? for the UK, you need to make hay for the winter, assuming that your meadows flood, or are otherwise muddy. But if your in one of the more temperate areas of the southern USA, surely you don't need to do that?
The silage that you get, then, is basically like a kind of grass sauerkraut, and smells exactly like you'd expect.
That combined with "draff" - distillery mash, the spent malt from brewing "pot ale" for making whisky, and a certain amount of shredded sugar beet tends to make up the majority of winter fodder.
Draff is great because it's still fermenting slowly and generating a lot of heat, so the cows are eating hot food in the winter. It's mostly the fibrey bits of the barley malt, which we can't eat but which cows and sheep - having cellulase in at least one of their stomachs - do incredibly well on. It's absolutely no use for anything else, humans can't eat it and it doesn't really compost down. It just rots, stinks, and emits masses of carbon dioxide and methane when it does. Far better for the environment to lock all that up in a cow.
Ideally your fields don't flood because you plant crops in the autumn that stay in the ground over winter to germinate in the spring, and if they get flooded that's it, you've lost the lot.
You tend not to see soya-based or other leguminous food here very much, because it's expensive, it has to be shipped halfway round the planet, and it's ineffective - you get shitty meat that no-one wants to buy.
You need the cows to graze pasture, chew up the grass, break down all that tough cellulose and poo it out as incredibly highly refined fertiliser.
We eat, just about everywhere in the world, because there's six inches of earth, it rains sometimes, and cows and pigs shit solid gold.
The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.
I think most people want highly distributed, reliable, affordable power. That's why off-grid tech is experiencing such a boom.
I live in a 36' skoolie, so I'm nomad-indexed, but I can confirm that over the past 10 years or so, most RV-lifers have transitioned their focus from recreation / comfort to off-grid experimentation. Essentially everywhere I go in the US, if I'm camped near others, they are going to have minimum viability for boondocking. That was not the case when I started.
Especially amidst the current political instability and apparent looming collapse of the US state, one of the simplest things that most of us can do is stabilize off-grid power in our neighborhoods, and that is quietly happening all over the place.
So, the role of vertically integrated solar (both literally and metaphorically) has more to do with the grid shape that serves our stability needs, and less to do with large-scale differences in efficiency.
What are we comparing against exactly that’s more resilient?
Who cares? One isolated field of solar represents a negligible amount of power at grid scale. Nobody is going to bother to go around attacking each individual field because the "ROI" of attacking a high-voltage transmission line (the kind that brings power from multiple thermal plants to a city) is so much higher.
Can you elaborate, please? What exactly has changed, and over what time period?
Cool, cool.
So what do you run the engine on? How many single points of failure?
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how the real world works.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how things work.
is it?