r/UpliftingNews • u/ArgentineBeauty • 4h ago

Two Minnesota solar farms planted native grasses and wildflowers beneath their panels. Five years later, flowering plant species had increased sevenfold, native bee numbers more than 20 fold and total insect numbers had tripled, while more bees were also visiting nearby soybean fields.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/two-minnesota-solar-farms-turned-the-ground-beneath-their-panels-into-habitat-and-native-bee-abundance-rose-more-than-20-fold/36680/
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383

u/MrEHam 3h ago

Solar panels above canals also reduces water evaporation.

One major upgrade I’d like to see is shade covering solar panels above sidewalks and bike paths, especially in the warm south or rainy areas.

It will encourage more people to walk or ride bikes and the benefits are huge. Less fossil fuels used, less money spent on gas and car expenses, more exercise, lower traffic for the remaining drivers, and the clean energy generation.

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u/dsac 2h ago

There are hundreds (thousands?) of acres of shadeless parking lots at stadiums, arenas, schools, and government buildings that would be perfect for this

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u/pickle_pickled 1h ago

US alone has enough parking lots to cover about the size of Belgium

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1h2uwub/today_i_learned_the_total_size_of_car_parks_in/

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u/iiAzido 38m ago

Easy, we just put a solar panel over Belgium and route the power over to the states. That way we can protect our beautiful asphalt plains.

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u/ajc89 24m ago

🎶 above the asphalt plains... America! America... 🎶

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u/Evadrepus 1h ago

A few studies have shown that we could take most of the corn produced by Illinois and used in ethanol production and turn those same lands into solar farms and have enough energy to power the nation's power grid. Without all the water and energy used in producing a pollutant.

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u/Candle1ight 1h ago

Isn't the overproduction of corn intentional and part of some military surplus strategy? It's turned into ethanol as a bonus, not a goal.

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u/nubileiguana 14m ago

Not exactly. Corn subsidies have been around for a long time. The government treats Corn as a security crop, or at least that's how it started. Ethanol's not so much a bonus as it is a very, very inefficient justification for the subsidies.

The goal is to keep people planting corn because if something Bad happens, the country would need a lot of sustainable food. So we subsidize corn production to make sure of that.

The problem is that we subsidize it so well that other crops aren't as profitable, which means more farms go all in on corn, which means a higher reliance on the subsidies, which means reinforcing the subsidies, which means other crops aren't as profitable and so on.

We could stop the subsidies and use the money instead to lease farmer's land for solar farms or really anything else. Cheaper for the government, better for the environment, and good for the farmer even though they wouldn't have a farm any more.

But, the price of corn would go up which would destabilize a significant portion of the American diet. Almost everything on the shelves has some form of corn in it and grocery bills would creep up. All meat, for example, would raise in price as ranchers have to pay more for feed.

It's similar to the health insurance problem where we've built a terribly inefficient system and we're too afraid of the sunk cost to fix it.

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u/mpyne 38m ago

No (after all if it were a thing we'd be using it now in response to the Middle East supply chain crunches). But that is how corn farmers tried to sell their brand of taxpayer subsidy so they could plant way morn corn than we can use.

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u/Jaikarr 34m ago

What? The point of subsidies is to ensure if there was a food shortage the country had the infrastructure to combat it. It's got nothing to do with the energy crisis caused by turmoil in the Middle-east

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u/mpyne 23m ago

No, part of them is to over-produce corn for the production of corn-based ethanols which are used in E85 gasoline to this very day. Partially justified as a means of providing energy security, including for the military.

Of course now the U.S. is the #1 oil producer in the world again, so there's much less of a need for it, assuming there was ever a need in the first place.

It would actually be better for energy security to simply "plant" solar panels in those same fields rather than corn intended for use in augmenting gasoline.

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u/Jaikarr 17m ago

You're talking about energy security, I'm pointing out that it's about food security. Two very different vital resources. Just because the corn is used for energy rather than food doesn't change the fact that it could be used to grow food if needed.

You don't need to cover food-producing land with solar panels when there's plenty of land that can't produce food to put them.

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u/wrenwood2018 50m ago

Taking away the most productive farmland is a bad trade relative to parking lots and other industrial options.

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u/ThePublikon 46m ago

Not if the farmland is only being used for inefficient energy production and a more efficient type of energy production is available.

That's even without considering what this post is about, that crops can be grown or animals raised under the panels.

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u/cantadmittoposting 39m ago

the bigger point is we might need that farmland at some point. We already have millions of acres of un-arable land (over parking lots, etc, especially) that can be used for the same purpose, without deleting a potentially important resource for the future.

I mean, there's just straight up desert that gets tons of sun and if we're talking about mass coverage anyways, is less "useful" than illinois farmland.

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u/ThePublikon 33m ago

I don't think you're getting it, the study was to show how inefficient current use is. Installing solar panels does not "delete" the resource, it multiplies it. You get more energy and more food.

This is all theoretical anyway really, the elephant in the room in transmission losses and redundancy/disaster resilience (i.e. you can't power the nation's grid from a single location because the losses from the resistance of transmission wires are too high and it puts the whole country in the dark if a natural disaster strikes the area.)

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u/ggsimsarah333 30m ago

Most of our cropland is actually used to make feed for livestock. It’s very inefficient (look of the energy efficiency rule). If we stopped eating meat we’d free up a ton of land for growing plants for humans to eat. Go vegan! 🌱💚

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u/boomnachos 41m ago

Alright, well let’s target the bottom 10% then.

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u/Vaeon 22m ago

Taking away the most productive farmland is a bad trade relative to parking lots and other industrial options.

You're not going to believe this... but they have discovered that you can place the solar panels 9 feet (3 m) off the ground... and still grow crops under them.

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u/Bunnyhat 28m ago

What I've read and briefly researched on that it's not really viable monetarily for that. You have to beef up the support structure for the panels many times over compared to having them in an empty field due to the face people can't drive for shit and will run into the supports.

I still think it's a good idea and should be required, but it would have to be regulated to happen and good luck with that when the people running our government are elected by people who think solar panels are stealing the sun's light.

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u/OldDoubt1577 2h ago

Not to mention some plants really don't like full sun and partial sun is better for growth in some species.

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u/trillionaireUnaliver 6m ago

basically no layperson knows this. when my dad got chop-happy around the property i had to explain that, no, cutting down the tree that shades the garden during the hottest part of the day will not make it grow better.

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u/speedingpullet 1h ago

Our local mall has solar structures in the parking lot - it shades our cars in the SoCal heat and also has solar panels on top that collectively help power the mall. I wish all malls did something similar.

Weirdly, I'm actually kind of optimistic that solar and other renewables will finally win out. You see places like those solar farms in MN, and realize just how nice it could be, with a little bit of planning and creative thinking.

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u/ABHOR_pod 55m ago

The problem is that CEOs can't figure out how to raise the price on sunlight, to increase profits and stock value, for the billionaire shareholders who don't need more money, but by god do they feel that deserve more money for having lots of money already. So they actively block the adoption of renewables in favor of the increasingly scarce fossil fuels that we all know are destroying the world, but they can be controlled to generate massive profit.

And none of that is actually a joke.

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u/alwrit 38m ago

No the problem is half of Americans who keep voting for colossal assholes like Trump who try to actively sabotage renewables.

Biden passed a law that heavily subsidized renewables and EVs and then Trump came in and turned all the programs off. I barely got my panels in under the wire to qualify for the tax credits which saved me thousands of dollars without which I could not have bought my panels.

Stop blaming tiny groups of people and recognize the enormous numbers of dumbasses that are your neighbors and family members that vote and vote for dumb shit. They are the true enemy and they must be treated as such.

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u/ABHOR_pod 35m ago

Oh. Why do they do that?

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u/musicaleffervescence 1h ago

in NC, duke energy will not allow it. they will spend every last dollar they have lobbying against solar, and then raise our rates to cover the cost. probably my least favorite monopoly is “public utilities” that arent “public” and can do whatever they want.

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u/Cunninghams_right 59m ago

Eh, it's typically more expensive than just building a longer lasting regular canopy and building a solar farm separately. 

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u/MrEHam 48m ago

Double the land use is less expensive?

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u/Cunninghams_right 27m ago

Yes, land in good solar producing areas is actually pretty cheap. To install a canopy over a sidewalk in a city is on the order of a million dollars a mile. But for that one mile, you have a difficult time installing infrastructure because it's a long narrow path, they'll be trees that shade it, and buildings that shade it. So your actual solar production will be quite low. Mile long solar cover canopy is around 1 acre worth of total coverage. Just the cost of the extra transformers and inverters needed to take the power from the very long strip it cost more than an acre of land, let alone the higher maintenance cost and lesser production

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u/wrenwood2018 52m ago

And parking lots

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u/sungoddaily 27m ago

Parking lots > Scenic views

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u/Moron-Whisperer 34m ago

They also get damaged or wiped away during large water events.  It’s really not a good idea to mix infrastructure like power generation and other things like cars, water, etc.  

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u/sungoddaily 27m ago

As long as it's not obstructing scenic Views.

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u/KindledWanderer 1h ago

Those kinds of installations are expensive and at that point just use the ecologically friendlier nuclear power, tbh.