
Solar Farms Shine a Ray of Hope on Bees and Butterflies - Breadmaker
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-farms-shine-a-ray-of-hope-on-bees-and-butterflies/
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shereadsthenews
There’s a solar power plant in San Benito County, California where you can see
something similar. The surrounding area is a blasted hellscape where marginal
ranchers graze struggling cattle on BLM land they lease for $1/acre/year. The
power plant owns about ten times more land than they need and the difference,
after only a few years, between their land and the surrounding ranches is
stark. For one thing their riparian habitats are recovering and host many wild
species, where as soon as those streams cross the fence they become trampled
muddy ditches. This is all on top of the obvious benefits of having a solar
power station.

~~~
iso1337
Ironically, environmental groups sued the project and forced it to be 1/3 the
original size.

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/21/giant-solar-
project-r...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/21/giant-solar-project-
reduced-due-to-environmentalists-opposition/)

Driving down I-5, the smells and sights from some of the cattle operations
along the highway are truly horrifying.

Harris Ranch just has a bunch of cows standing around in mud (or actually
probably their own poop).

~~~
shereadsthenews
Yes it certainly was a low point for the Sierra Club who have proven unable to
grasp the problem of climate change. They are stuck in the Boomer mindset that
environmentalism means recycling cans and bottles.

~~~
iso1337
In California, Sierra Club has apparently been co-opted by NIMBYs who
basically use environmentalism as a cover to stop any new development against
entrenched interests.

The good thing (at least wrt to the posted s article) is that the majority of
people like to save money, and solar offers a way to save money. So the forces
of economics and good policy at the state level will make more solar and
storage projects happen.

~~~
throwaway5752
The Sierra Club is not an enemy of environmentalism. It's not an advocacy
organization for renewable energy, either. It is what it is, and if you are
for development of undeveloped land, you are going to find yourself opposed to
the Sierra Club.

It would seem that you are trying to use environmentalism as cover for other
views that you have ("entrenched interests"? Who cares who cuts down a forest,
and if they are entrenched or not, if the forest ends up cut down?)

I think you should take a hard look at where your personal interests overlap
with the mission of the Sierra Club.

~~~
cobbzilla
> if you are for development of undeveloped land

In SF at least, Sierra Club priorities are (at least facially) decidedly more
“anti-development” than “pro-environment”.

How does one explain their opposition to SB 827 [1] through an environmental
lens? If we don’t build more density _somewhere_ then we inevitably get more
sprawl.

To add some meldodrama, how many people must die in the streets before we move
the lever to help our fellow human? To some, “saving the Earth” can justify
any amount of human suffering.

[1] [https://www.ethanelkind.com/sierra-club-now-opposes-one-
of-t...](https://www.ethanelkind.com/sierra-club-now-opposes-one-of-the-most-
important-climate-bills-in-california/)

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m-i-l
I've heard that one of the challenges of maintaining fields of solar panels is
keeping the vegetation around the panels under control. Solutions include
using grazing animals such as sheep or even guinea pigs[0]. It sounds like
this doesn't solve the management issue, but does claim "a field of
wildflowers requires less mowing and pesticides than conventional grass does".

[0] [https://digital.nepr.net/news/2016/04/01/the-solution-to-
sol...](https://digital.nepr.net/news/2016/04/01/the-solution-to-solar-farm-
vegetation-guinea-pig-lawnmowers/)

~~~
FooHentai
The issue with grazing animals on the land is that it removes the benefit of
allowing it to revert to nature - Flowers and brush depth that foster wildlife
are stripped away by the grazing stock.

Just musing:

If you leave a patch of ground alone for an extended period of time, it'll
transition through various phases of regrowth and eventually end up back at
whatever the wild state of being for that region is. Often the end state is
woodlands.

So since that conflicts with being a productive PV estate, at some point
maintenance is inevitable or you'll end up losing the panels beneath a canopy.
That said, the scale of that kind of regeneration might be a century while the
useful lifetime of new PV installs is what... ~20-30 years?

So on that timescale what issues are you likely to hit allowing the land
underneath PV installs to grow wild? Access would need to be maintained,
panels would need to be lofted to a height that avoids any overgrowth, fire
risks (electricity + dry brush etc) would need to be mitigated.

Main question I have though is sunlight coverage - Surely the panels and plant
life are going to compete to some extent. What's stopping a PV deployment
covering ~100% of the land area, shading it all out just like a forest canopy
would?

~~~
gdubs
One big issue with just letting the land go wild is invasive plants and shrubs
taking over. Take a look at himalayan blackberries in the Pacific Northwest –
they smother everything else out of existence.

A lot of restoration work is really just pausing the ecological succession at
some beneficial stage. This is essentially what native Americans did; they
'gardened' the earth to support a diversity of plants and wildlife that was
sustainable, and beneficial to people. [1][2]

In terms of incorporating solar panels into a more 'wild' habitat,
Agroforestry offers a good model. There are a lot of shade tolerant shrubs,
etc, that are grown under a canopy of taller trees. [3]

Silvopasture, which is a subset of agroforestry, uses grazing animals to
obtain the best of both worlds – the animals play a part in sustaining a
diverse ecosystem that's also beneficial to people. [4]

1:
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491)

2: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6411373-whole-earth-
disc...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6411373-whole-earth-discipline)

3:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry)

4:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture)

------
oneplane
After a light skim, this seems like a good match; the land/area isn't used for
much else anyway and since PV installations are usually devoid of humans and
engines it wouldn't be a bad idea to roll this out on a larger scale.

~~~
corint
Absolutely agreed, I am struggling to think of many downsides. Maybe some
wasps or bees start a nest near a panel meaning it's difficult to clean the
panel? Hopefully the nest gets left alone & the efficiency lost is tolerated,
to let the bees/wasps live.

~~~
ogrisel
Panel cleaning can be done by robots, no?

~~~
wongarsu
I expect in 10-20 years most panel cleaning is done by robots similar to
window cleaning robots, with small ramps allowing the robots easy traversal
over the whole installation. The technology is directly transferable from
vacuum robots and window cleaning robots, with the added benefit of knowing
the geometry in advance.

------
gdubs
Perfect opportunity to apply Permaculture principles like Guilds, where
mutually beneficial plants (and animals) are used to create a system that
reduces the need for inputs (labor, chemical, etc). [1]

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Guilds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Guilds)

~~~
codingdave
Agreed, but permaculture techniques that work vary by region, even down to the
microclimates. If local experts are consulted, it should work well... but if
not, there will be some years of trial and error before they get it working
well for each installation. Even so, better to start such an effort today and
get through those trials, so we're in a better place in 10 years.

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MeteorMarc
Maybe it is a little bit cooler on large fields too: a significant fraction of
incoming radiation is drained away as electrival power.

~~~
MeteorMarc
OP: bad news for the bees: this Nature study
([https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070)
) suggests that PV fields are actually heat islands worse than parking lots...
But these were not necessarily PV plants with flowers growing around them.

