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Hey, Farmers, Let Us Help You Take Your Farmland Out of Production
This advertisement appears in my new edition of the Washington State University Magazine. I graduated from WSU in 1971, and it is the state’s Agriculture University, established by a Morrill Act land grant in the 19th century. As are most colleges, WSU is as woke as it gets. I no longer donate to my alma mater for this reason.
This ad below is horrifying to me. It tells me that the college is in favor of taking productive farm and pasture land out of food production in favor of solar farms to feed power into an increasingly unreliable electric grid. Please note the long list of restrictions on the land, and the weasel words on the income the farmer could receive if he leases to the solar company.
Yes, let’s just take farms and ranches out of producing food, contributing to the coming worldwide food shortages. I wonder what kind of verbal pitches these solar-farm hucksters are using on the wheat farmers and ranchers of eastern Washington, whose grains, vegetables, meat, and wine are feeding people all over the country and the world. I hope those farmers and ranchers throw the hucksters out on their ears.
Our dictator, Jay Inslee, is behind this sort of thing.
Published in Energy
“Let’s go, Jay!”
I, too, am a Wazzu grad. My alumni magazine goes straight into the trash upon arrival.
In the northeast United States even five to ten years ago some areas were becoming concerned about some of the consequences of covering hundreds of acres of farmland with solar panels – aesthetic blight, diminished tax revenues, diminished regional employment, etc.
The farmers need to read carefully before signing, especially for issues like who is responsible for controlling vegetation that might impede the panels’ productivity, and who is responsible for removing the panels at the end of the lease. Some ranchers here in Texas learned the hard way when at the end of some wind farm leases, the wind farm company, consistent with the terms of the lease, just walked away, leaving the ranchers with the giant now unproductive windmills that will cost a lot of money to remove.
Farmer landowners also need to verify that a “solar farm” is consistent with any “agricultural” deed restrictions to which they have agreed, and zoning regulations.
I seriously doubt that solar can actually produce $800 to $1500/month worth of electricity per acre, so where is the real money coming from?
There is a huge issue of abuse of eminent domain regarding farms and properties in Iowa just now. Pipeline companies desiring to ‘capture’ carbon emissions are running over family farms all over Iowa. If you want more info, I’ll dig it up, so to speak.
How long can you subsist on stale crackers? Just asking for a friend who is measuring his basement storage area and trying to pack in enough stuff for 7 lean years.
My Patriot supply stuff is good for 25 years. At minimum, I recommend the kit with powdered butter, milk, and flour.
For the moment, let’s set aside the issue of whether or not solar energy is economically viable with today’s technology. Isn’t a whole lot of eastern Washington desert? Why would you spend the money to take productive farmland out of production when within the same state there is a lot of land that isn’t useful for much of anything?
I don’t see a problem. People who own the land and want to lease it based on their economic analysis of its worth should be free to do so and people wanting to generate solar power should be free to ask.
Abusing eminent domain is another problem entirely.
I won’t go whistling past the solar panel farm without worrying about the impact on the soil and wildlife of the giant swathes of shade underneath those things, not to mention the impact on all the Uighur slaves who build them.
I definitely get the feeling that the “environmental impact” of solar farms etc isn’t measured quite the same as for various less-popular uses.
As dangerous as the shade under them, is the heat above a solar “farm”. Birds are roasted in flight when they encounter a big solar farm (check out the problems at the Ivanpah installation in California). Solar panels are not recyclable either, and contain pounds of toxic metals. The environmental wackos don’t take that into account. Same with the huge batteries needed to “store” solar energy.
Mr. C’s farmer uncles made out handsomely on energy leases in Oklahoma — to petroleum producers. It also required a much smaller footprint to extract the energy than wind or solar.
I despise the “green” agenda.
I read a comment I think here on R> that linked to an article on using solar arrays to power pumps to raise water from a lower reservoir into a higher reservoir during the day and that released the water back down through turbines at night. This, they offered, was the best way to store large amounts of energy.
But it’s still pretty inefficient, with losses in all 3 places: the solar panels, the pumping-up, and the generating-back-down.
And still doesn’t deal with longer periods of cloudy skies etc.
Plus, relying on the same people to okay making power-generating reservoirs who won’t allow for water-storage reservoirs, doesn’t seem wise.
It takes a lot of water to keep solar panels dust-free. Deserts are dusty. And there isn’t much water. That’s why it’s a desert.
That was my comment! @barkhaherman had written a post about this complicated crane that would lift big concrete blocks up on a tower when there was more electricity being created than the grid needed. Then when more electricity was need, the crane would lower them back to ground level with the crane motor acting as a generator turned by the weight of the descending blocks. I mentioned that decades ago people had talked about — and maybe implemented — a system of moving water with pumps that was a lot simpler.
Also, some of the water pumped uphill would be lost to evaporation. The question isn’t whether or not this system would work great. It is, “Would this be more efficient than using chemical batteries?” Another idea I remember hearing about is using the surplus electricity to compress air and pump it into caves, then release it to spin generators when the electricity is needed.
I’d rather just go with a whole bunch of modular nuclear reactors myself.
Some of those plans could be useful for occasional demand peaks, but not for base load or anything close to it.
I don’t think nuclear is very good for variable or peak loads, and I suspect that would include the modular type.
I’d need to see the math on energy lost from pumping and then lost in hydraulically generating to believe that.
I think the key there is “large amounts.” Large-capacity battery storage is very expensive. For the water thing, the storage capacity is basically limited only by the size of the water reservoir. Nothing the least bit high-tech.
I find it hard to believe that solar power can pump enough water to make much of a difference. Water is quite heavy and solar power is feeble.
Those big solar farms can produce megawatts, but they take up a lot of land and of course they’re useless at night or in bad weather.
In some places I believe they even do the pumping with other power such as coal or even nuclear, if the base load demand allows for it, because the water facility can provide extra power during peak demands.
Batteries are very inefficient. You lose 15% or so charging the battery, and you never get everything back out of the battery. You won’t lose 15% of the water to evaporation
Yes, and the total capacity of the water-pumping system is only limited by how large the reservoir is. It doesn’t need to be filled with lithium or anything.
Making the situation even more tragic is that if solar is done free of corporate-control, and in areas where sunlight is abundant, it is a totally beneficial method of obtaining one’s energy.
With the utility companies poaching our electricity to sell it to other states, using every excuse they can come up with to justify “rolling black outs,” we Californians have gotten fed up with being without power for 12 hours to 4 days.
Those who own their homes started looking into solar. In my little community of 23 homes, 9 now have solar. Everyone who has gone that route is happy with the situation. They no longer have to make sure they have fuel on hand to power up a generator during the black outs.
The solar panels supply heat in the winter and AC in the summer, plus every other amount of energy needed to operate the computers, lights, TV’s, washing machines and dryers we all depend on.
When we don’t have sunny day, then there is usually enough wind to supply the wind turbines which the wiser home owners also hooked up. Unlike the monstrosities that are on exhibit in the wind farms, these beauties are able to squeeze into a space not much larger than the area once carved into the home owner’s roof and attic to house the old fashioned attic fans.
That is interesting.
I heard a physics professor explain the math around this. It will never work out in this sense. Dispersed wind and solar like Carol Joy is talking about has possibilities of working.
It doesn’t get talked about much, but I don’t think feeding it back into the grid really works, even though some people get a lot of money for doing that. It has to be subsidized.
Until fossil fuels and nukes get insanely expensive, they are impossible to compete with, mostly. (Kedavis: feel free to chime in on why this is all wrong. tia)
I liked the water-pumping idea because it’s…water. In other words, if it turns out you don’t need it, you can drink it. Or the critters can.
My area is becoming encrusted with huge solar farms. They take up a lot of space. They’re really ugly. It is hard to believe they’re not doing manifold significant things to the immediate ecosystem (not to mention slave labor, problem of toxic disposal, etc.). Every time I drive past one, I hum Joni Mitchell: They paved paradise and put up a…solar farm.
Um, that’s temporary in all likelihood. There’s talk (if not already action) of raising taxes and fees to help cover the cost of maintaining the grid. It’s like electric cars not paying gas taxes, but taking advantage of the roads built and maintained by them. That free lunch is over at some point.
“There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” Sowell-man
Putting them on your roof is the same as adding another car payment to your budget.