The Japanese have figured out that you can cover about a third of farmland and grow food while providing enough to produce solar electricity (or hot water). Turns out, plants use only about 2/3 of the sunlight that falls on them for photosynthesis.
Poor Woodland, NC. Determined to ignorant no matter what.
Well, I live near one in Somerset and my butternut squashes were a real disappointment this year ⌠this explains everything
We Germans call that âFremdschämenâ - âStrangershameâ. Yeah, we Germans have a word for that, please do not ask why.
Bad year for potatoes too. But pears and apples and soft fruit in abundance and giant parsnips. Perhaps solar panels affect plant growth selectively.
Science Teacher? She taught bible belt political science.
Maybe we can suggest that if we install enough solar panels and suck enough sunlight, we can counter climate change. That would really get them going!
Pears and apples grow higher up in trees so they must catch the suns rays before the solar panels steal them.
Itâs an interesting and complicated problem.
Because electricity cannot be stored effectively (and no, Teslaâs boxes are not the answer), solar PV only really works in the daytime. There has to be something to take up the base load. Whether that is offshore wind or nuclear, the power grid has to be big enough to get sufficient power from the remote source to everywhere in the towns, so the presence of solar PV doesnât mean that the grid can be smaller.
One way to achieve that which is still theoretical is small (10-100MW) packaged nuclear plants but, other than the Russians, nobody is really working very hard on that. Politicians look at energy costs, look at how long to the next election, and decide that long term thinking is too difficult.
You can reduce the necessary electrical grid capacity by using lots of packaged gas generators, but then you need a gas grid to supply them. People like me living at 100M above sea level with a drainage ditch at the bottom of the garden in an area of low weather variability might not care too much about continuing use of carbon-based fuels but a lot of others will disagree. Plus, if one thing will kill the plants, itâs the polar migration of their temperature range resulting in a gradual loss of available sunlight.
This seemingly dreadully uninformed woman in North Carolina has it exactly backward; it is business as usual which will suck up sunlight and kill plants.
This sounds pretty stupid, but there are a lot of valid questions to ask about solar projects, like whether you are taking arable land out of commission, where the contractor is getting funding (for example, federal subsidies that could run out before construction is complete), what the true costs of maintaining the project are and who bears them, where the power is going to be sold, what its going to cost, whether migratory bird patterns have been taken into account, and whether local weather patterns will ensure a consistent supply of power. While clearly some major installations have gone up in North Carolina, thereâs a big difference between Apple installing one and a small town where this is the most qualified expert they could wrangle.
Same goes for wind projects, a lot of them have been overpraised, done with sketchy financial arrangements, and virtually no transparency as to their funding, safety records, actual power output, or the environmental impact of maintaining windmills on a mountainside that previously needed no roads, power lines, etc. and just happens to be the home of lots of eagles.
Iâm glad we have so many critical reviewers here on bbs to correct our failures to understand the full complexity of natural phenomena. Can you equally explain why my dwarf crabapple of restricted growth1 has also had a record year but the much taller sloes havenât done so well? Perhaps we have a local solar flux inversion caused by a polar vortex of North Carolina stupid? 
1Correction as per @vnvet_67_68_69.
Her students are the real victims.
Speaking of places that donât get enough sunlight and suck things upâŚ
She was told to teach the controversy, she gets extra credit for making up her own.
Iâm surprised that space doesnât suck up all the sunlight, after all it is a vacuum!
(Iâll let myself outâŚ)
As I recall, the EU did a study some years ago and concluded that solar plants of a thousand square kilometres in Tunisia or Morocco would supply a significant fraction of European daytime electricity demand. To put it into perspective, at 10% net efficiency you are looking at peak around 70MW/sq kM, 70GW for 1000 sq kM. That is one fifth of one percent of the land area of Morocco + Tunisia, taking into account land used for distribution.
To put it another way, land usage would not be vast.
And guess who has votes that count for just as much as a person who isnât deliberately stupid.
Yup. Those guys!
I have no hope for this system.
