Do solar farms displace food farms?

[OpenD]

Like I said, the utilities are becoming more the brokers than the suppliers of energy. Just the middlemen, suppliers of the grid infrastructure Their role is being reduced, and the rest of the market is being fragmented. And in deregulated states, they're even being faced by direct competition with other companies for the customer's business.

They're definitely not the monolithic monopolies they used to be.

[Mack Knife]

Originally Posted by OpenD

Like I said, the utilities are becoming more the brokers than the suppliers of energy. Just the middlemen, suppliers of the grid infrastructure Their role is being reduced, and the rest of the market is being fragmented. And in deregulated states, they're even being faced by direct competition with other companies for the customer's business.

They're definitely not the monolithic monopolies they used to be.

LOL. Now the utilities aren't the monopolies they used to be. No, they are worse. Now they are headed to controlling renewable energy too.

[ca_north]

Originally Posted by Mack Knife

An interesting article.

Defra admits it cannot say how much farmland solar power is affecting | Environment | The Guardian

Part of the interest is regulations and subsidies affected without hard data. Is there something going on other than a concern about farmlands being removed from production and instead being dedicated to solar energy?

This is no surprise on a finite planet. It seems that Man is destined to develop open space until the only space left is in protected zones or areas slated for logging and farms that can't be relinquished. Indeed, that's why so many national parks are in mountainous areas (harder to develop, scenic or not). Renewable energy in the form of solar thermal plants and wind turbines may become the biggest land-grab ever. I find it to be a tragedy in the making, worse than global warming in many ways.

There's a fable going around that wind turbines use relatively "little land," by virtue of ignoring their access roads and total infiltrated acreage. The presumption is that people somehow only notice the tower pads! That same argument has been used to justify drilling ANWR, with ridiculous claims that oil wells would only take up "2,000 acres" when they'd actually network up to 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain.

I see much of the same "nature is expendable" mentality in the green energy movement as we've seen in the fossil fuel industry. Just different contraptions being built all over our shrinking open space. We should get over the whole idea that construction automatically equals progress because "jobs are created." The old economic indicator of housing-starts has been devouring open space (including a lot of farmland) since America was founded.