We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
There are so many places we could install solar before we even have to touch agriculture.
Rooftop solar is expensive for a lot of people unfortunately because it's paid by the household installing them (government subsidies help, but even if gvt is paying 50% of your 20k solar install, 10k is still a lot of money). But there's ways for businesses and municipalities to install solar.
Without getting into reducing car dependency (which is also important), I maintain that every car park of any significant size should have solar. We're going electric anyway, this makes the EV chargers slightly cheaper to operate (and when nobody is charging, should make some money back) and there'd be shade in the summer, as well as slight protection from snow in the winter. Everyone wins. The owner of the solar, the people parking, etc.
Mandating rooftop solar on all non-historic government buildings at any level of government would also be helpful. I'm sure there could be countries already doing it - I'm advocating for more countries to start doing it.
Also for businesses and communities to install solar, there's crowdfinancing apps to get loans. Goparity has a bunch of solar projects. I've contributed negligible sums to a few, figuring that it might be a riskier investment than say index funds, but at the very least I'm contributing to something good happening to the planet I live on. There are other alternatives too, that's just the one I'm using.
What they're saying is this is only tangentially agriculture. We grow crops, process them, and make additives for fuel or just fuel. If we stopped doing all that, we could provide enough electricity to make all the cars electric.
This, of course, doesn't take into consideration things such as battery requirements, etc. but it does give perspective on just how much land is being used for some small fraction of car fuel, and how absurd biofuel is, given how little we actually use relative to our overall fuel use.
Edit: everything else you said is true, but even turning biofuel land into grazing land and having it covered by solar panels would be more useful. And we need more batteries.
We're not going battery electric. We're going bus grid electric and bicycle.
Or you could just do ground mount arrays somewhere because it's way cheaper to install and who cares about a 1% or whatever change in land usage.
Ground-mount is good economically, but ecologically not so much.
If we can build more Solar + Storage (SS) in suburban and urban contexts, then we can capitalize on the land that's already being used for human purposes - leaving other land able to be rewilded.
I grew up in the Midwest of the US, and as I got older it was so disheartening to see how chopped up the natural world is in between large fields of corns, soy, and wheat. I don't want the land that's being used currently for industrial agriculture to be used for utility-scale solar. But I realize my wishes and dreams don't mean much when the people that own these properties have financial incentives to build solar anyways.
I think we need to have more legislation about re-wilding and regenerating nature in the US apart from conserving what we have. Building solar on the already built environment is one way to prevent barriers to that regeneration.
In a perfect world sure but I categorically refuse to care about the land usage of solar when we waste so much more land on stuff that is actively harming the planet. Once the cost of moving the grid to 100% renewables is no longer the barrier then we should care about reinstalling the panels somewhere else.
Every MW of solar not built is a MW of natural gas being burned. Until that's not the case building more renewable energy should be the top priority.
As much as it pains me, I think this should all be our ultimate concern if we want to defeat fossil fuels.
Depends on the location. Around me, they're sometimes close to towns where the land could otherwise be used for homes or businesses in the medium-term future.
Also land is still a limited resource in much of the world. Why not use one piece of land for multiple purposes?
For sparsely populated areas I'll agree with you. Here in Europe, there's not a lot of completely unused land and in my country in particular most "unused" land is forests and bogs which have value of their own (sadly only 5% is wetlands nowadays - used to be over 20% before the soviets drained most of it). I'd much prefer those to remain untouched by both agriculture AND solar energy. Doing agriculture in a city is kinda hard, but solar is not. As a bonus, if solar panels in cities displace some of the demand for biofuels, that's biofuel-related land that could be used for something else.
You don't need unused land you just need to displace agriculture. If you have any land used for cattle grazing for example you can have enough grass to feed 1 cow or you can have enough solar to power 20-40 homes. Pretty obvious to me which is the more productive land usage there.
Or keep the cow and put solar on rooftops, car parks, etc. The cow shits out natural fertilizer which helps the land recover quicker so it can be used to produce more productive (in terms of people fed) crops again while the cow goes and grazes somewhere else where the soil's no longer very productive.
It's not a lot of land, sure, but there's literally zero downside to putting solar in places where shade is desirable anyway. Just mandating solar in car parks alone could provide a ridiculous amount of electricity in more car-dependent cities.
As a solar engineer building this stuff daily, I tend to agree with your solution of sub/urban solar rather than agrivoltaics.
Doesn't mean you can do agrivoltaics in a sub/urban context though ;P
Legislation for solar roofs on car parks is a great start. It's a win-win for space usage, just a more expensive installation. Korea just added some legislation