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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
Can you imagine how much better the world would be if the GOP could actually control the lies around alternative energy, health insurance, and what is happening at the border?
Show me an example where central planning non-public goods works out. It’s pretty hard.
Oh, please.
California, in some places, produces more solar power in the middle of the day than the grid needs. The grid doesn’t store power, so it is either use or lose it. Selling it to a neighboring state is the alternative to losing it.
Then, later in the day, when California actually needs the power, solar isn’t producing, so California has to buy more power from neighboring states than they sold in the middle of the day.
Solar power is just stupid when a grid for conventional power is available. Solar (and wind, too) is only viable in small, isolated installations that have no grid at all.
Do a search for “solar power duck curve” to educate yourself.
FIFY. I think the GOP could if they would. But establishment donors benefit from centrality and thus the uniParty supports it.
I am really skeptical on alternative energy for this.
Having said that, I definitely buy this on the vast majority of topics. There is just too damn much government and the time to deal with this was in the 90s. All of the Ronald Reagan blah blah blah was dead by the middle 90s.
Mr. C. — electrical engineer and scientist — has done the math on this just to make sure we’re not losing out by not installing (hideous, ugly, virtue-less virtue signaling– my objections) solar panels on our roof. We’re not. You can take that to the bank. And we are.
Interesting documentary on Windmills and Green policy in Ontario.
So wife and I just decided to put a solar roof on our house. But we are using a new system thats just come out. It’s solar shingle roof. Actually looks good. Premium roof ( which we need due to hurricane threat in our area). We were in the market to replace our roof due to age anyway. Not doing this to “save the planet”. Electricity is not going to get cheaper for the forceable future. I lock in the cost with this. I also like not being totally dependent on the grid for power. If we add a battery system later, we can be almost 100% independent of the grid.
I’ve said this before. Hedge fund manager Harris Kupperman has call options on oil going up to $200 through 2025.
The whole planet is basically seven years behind on mineral extraction capital investment. ESG stupidity.
Then throw in so many people that aren’t going to stop having their living standards increased. The west can’t outlaw mopeds in India.
Then throw in all of the money printing that finally shifted from asset inflation to CPI. Then throw in the fiscal picture of every government except Russia. LOL Then throw in almost every single debt to GDP figure you can find.
All of the mistakes have put pressure on government debt. Then the central banks try to take the pressure off. There is no central bank of Mars for the earth to turn to.
There are so many factors to discuss here on why these solar farms are terrible, so I will just stay on this OP topic. Here in central MA land has become very expensive. There is a good portion of land put aside for conservation and a lot of the other acreage is owned by old grouchy people like me. But, for the past 15 years a lot of our pastures have slowly turned into solar farms. Now they are starting to mow down the forests. There are now probably ten solar farms within five miles of my house. I think solar farms here are limited to 2MW or about 10 acres of panels per parcel. My neighbor has 110 acers and is building one near me. He promises to give me a 100’ buffer. Thanks.
A friend of mine owns a large apple orchard. She cut down one field of apple trees and is leasing the land. I told her how I feel about these aluminum farms. She said she is leasing the field for $100k/yr. Her apple crop doesn’t come close to that. That’s hard to argue with.
I feel like everything has flipped. These environmentalists are mowing down everything and building these monstrosities and here I am worried about the destroyed views, trees, and displaced animals.
Coal is more per BTU than oil now, which has never happened in history.
LNG for Europe is driving up the price of natural gas everywhere else.
Yes, Mr. C reminds me he hasn’t done the analysis in quite a while — accounting for new materials and other factors.
However, everything has tradeoffs. We’d think about your system except we live in Colorado where hail is a common occurrence — like on a biblical scale hail. Replacement costs might be prohibitive compared to asphalt shingles. Also, Colorado sits on an ocean of natural gas which is largely untapped.
But, it’s all risk/reward assessment and none of us knows the future. I just happen to believe the greenies will send us back to the stone age if they get their way.
Please stop doing life-giving, well-developed practices and get off the land in favor of ugly, giant, impractical things whose real purpose is to serve The Narrative.
Sincerely,
The PTB
If paradise didn’t have parking lots, then most people wouldn’t be able to go there. I’m all for paving parking lots in paradise.
Ok, so who controls it? Who runs those solar farms so that they are maintained efficiently?
The state?
I would like it, maybe, but would rather spend the $$ on such edifices in locations where the reservoir fills without having to pump anything into it. Save money on pumps and power input. And we have centuries of experience deploying these things.
The best energy storage for our economy is piles of coal, tanks of petroleum products, and well-contained uranium.
In a fair and economically sustainable system, homeowners who install any solar on a house on the grid would be charged a substantial monthly fee to cover the maintenance of standby power plants and upgrades to transmission hardware imposed by the much more variable load the house now presents on the grid.
Solar and wind power systems should never be connected to the grid. They should only be used in self-contained, battery-leveled applications that justify the complete life-cycle cost. Allowing solar and wind to connect to the grid is a huge subsidy, by itself.
Usually, a heavily-subsidized corporation. Remove the subsidies, and the corporations cease to exist.
Modify the any and I’m with you. You don’t have to connect those solar panels to the grid. If you use them to power your own property and switch to your metered power when the sun isn’t shining, that should not be penalized.
Fair enough. I’m not big on taxpayer funded subsidies, and not just in renewable power.
Yes, it should be penalized. That has the same induced variability on the grid load as just hooking them up.
I would only excuse systems where the solar equipment and its loads are permanently isolated from the grid. If you have some load that you are willing to do without when the sun isn’t shining, you can skip the batteries. But no moving the load over to the grid, by any means, manual or automatic.
An electric utility shouldn’t have that kind of power (authority) over you. You should be able to decide when to accept (purchase) their power and when not.
And how you power your home, whether by a portable generator or solar panel is none of their business.
Now if you sell your own power back to them, that is their business.
To me this is capitalism 101, along with property rights.
I have been watching this topic for years. Big utilities are corrupt because they have a captured audience. The left likes it this way because they can shove whatever they want down everybody’s throats. In my opinion this is what is holding back compact nuclear reactors. The corrupt politicians and the corrupt utility executives wouldn’t be able to do what they do. $$$$$$
I just had another idea, and went to search for articles about fires occurring on solar farms. There are multiple articles.
2022-Fires a major hidden danger of solar farms.
Solar system fires on the rise in the US.
These are just two of the many articles on the first page of results. BTW, I found a new search engine, Freespoke, which offers accurate results, not the “lame stream media” on the first pages.
Nah, it’s not capitalism when the government passes laws to force them to buy the power back.
You’ve covered it in some sense, but it’s not comprehensive. It would be cheaper for people to buy power for their remote farmhouse or whatever, from larger power plants, than from buying windmills etc, IF THEY COULD. But if transmission lines etc don’t exist, then even though a windmill costs more, the alternative is simply not available.
But that’s also why it doesn’t make sense to use huge windmills to feed a power grid. It has to be subsidized, as you say.
The other problem is, that fossil fuels and nukes etc don’t have to become insanely expensive as the natural course of things, market forces, etc. The government can MAKE THEM insanely expensive if it wants to, and has the power to.
The biggest problem with that has to be that there’s no way the solar farms actually produce that much electricity, to justify $100k for your friend, for example. (Which actually means they’re getting way more than that, if they can divvy off $100k to your friend.) It’s coming from subsidies.
You were giving us this really excellent lecture about how oil doesn’t really have that many hours of labor per barrel. It was really educational. That’s what I’m talking about.
But part of the point is that the utility company/grid has to have the capacity available to supply the energy you need when the sun isn’t shining, and it has to be available all the time, even if you’re not using it. That increases the base costs etc to the utility, which you should be paying for in order for that power to be available when you DO need it.
(Actually, I think most if not all electric utilities do bill for such “infrastructure” costs even if your actual electricity usage might be little or none. You would receive a bill even if you used no “grid” power at all, in a given month.)
Otherwise, why not try telling your bank or whoever, “I shouldn’t have to pay the full monthly car payment when I only use it a couple hours a day!”
Really? The transmission lines on the person’s property for the solar panels and wind turbines they own is the bottle neck, here?