[jay-anderson]

This is very neat. I've heard of similar benefits to combining solar panels and agriculture.

I'm glad this is getting some attention. I live in the desert and often I hear from people who don't live here the sentiment that it's useless, dead land, but the opposite is true. The deserts in the southwest US are alive with all sorts of interesting and beautiful plants and animals.

[greggsy]

The recent videos from Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t have focussed on some of the endangered desert habitats and cacti around Texas. His videos are always awesome, but these most recent videos have really opened my eyes about the diversity and fragility of these ecosystems, despite being so hardy in other ways.

[mif]

Do you mind sharing those videos? Thx

[carapace]

https://www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com/

https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt

[murrayb]

They are on YouTube. Thoroughly recommended. Some swearing.

[PaulHoule]

Almost any area builds soil structure if you leave it undisturbed. It’s important to remember that solar installations aren’t an industrial concrete slab but leave space for secondary agricultural use. I have a hayfield which produces better year over years because the roots of the grass are undisturbed.

[justinclift]

> It’s important to remember that solar installations aren’t an industrial concrete slab but leave space for secondary agricultural use.

As a data point, there is ongoing development of the "flat slab on the ground" type of approach too.

eg:

https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...

[grogenaut]

Would love to see a photo of this, is there a term I can google image search or photos?

[doctoboggan]

You can google "no till agriculture" or more broadly "permaculture".

[grogenaut]

What does that have to do with solar panels?

[natmaka]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics

[scythe]

Desert is a funny term. Most of the areas that Americans call desert are really steppe (semiarid) by the Köppen classification, and Phoenix — in a true desert — still gets three times as much precipitation as Tamanrasset in the Sahara. There are very few areas in the Americas (Death Valley, the Atacama, etc) that are as dry as the deserts of the East.

Most people hear "desert" and probably think of the Sahara and Arabian deserts, but the classification includes much less extreme areas as well.

[MichaelZuo]

I've heard India has had some successes combining solar and rural farms/deserts. Though I'm not sure how exactly.

[detritus]

They're also covering water canals with solar panels, which a) makes use of otherwise wasted space, b) reduces evaporation of the water, c) reduces algal and weed growth which causes toxicity and flow problems and d) encourages cool shaded zones beneficial to local wildlife.

[tuatoru]

And e) increases the output of the solar panels - they perform better when cooler, and water is better at doing that than soil.

[asicsp]

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India

There are incentives as well, for example:

>Haryana solar power policy announced in 2016 offers 90% subsidy to farmers for the solar powered water pumps, which also offers subsidy for the solar street lighting, home lighting solutions, solar water heating schemes, solar cooker schemes. It is mandatory for new residential buildings larger than 500 square yards (420 m2) to install 3% to 5% solar capacity for no building plan sanctioning is required, and a loan of up to ₹1 million is made available to the residential property owners. Haryana provides 100% waiver of electricity taxes, cess, electricity duty, wheeling charges, cross subsidy charges, transmission and distribution charges, etc. for rooftop solar projects

[MichaelZuo]

> Haryana provides 100% waiver of electricity taxes, cess, electricity duty, wheeling charges, cross subsidy charges, transmission and distribution charges, etc. for rooftop solar projects

I wonder why it's 'rooftop solar projects' specifically and not also inclusive of on-the-ground solar projects.

[briantakita]

Just make sure the solar panel components contain no heavy metals or other toxic substances. Same with the batteries. These materials do leach & contaminate the ecosystem & water table.

Bonus points if no children were compelled to mine or manufacture the material.

[renewiltord]

Comment made me curious so I looked it up.

They do contain heavy metals and toxic substances. As do the batteries.

Looking it up, it appears that the contamination occurs during disposal so it's not a good idea to dispose of these in the kind of landfill where they can get into the water table, and it's preferable to recycle them.

It appears that mining these materials in formalized industrial mines has no child labour according to Human Rights Watch. It's artisanal independent mines that are risky from this perspective.

Overall, the technology seems safe.

[jeffbee]

Mass-produced PV panels contain hardly any heavy metal. Some of them contain lead in the solder but this is avoidable. Most of the noise is about cadmium, but you will note that CdTe thin film panels enjoyed brief market success before being stomped again by the irresistible decline of the price of Plain Old Silicon. Even CdTe panels are basically inert, coming from the factory as a stable, insoluble glass. If you read the research papers about the possibility of cadmium pollution in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground. Why would anyone do that? Look at the funding for the papers. The "research" was designed as anti-renewable propaganda.

[upsidesinclude]

> in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground.

Sounds a bit off, but consider the effect of having the glass thrown into a landfill where it will be bulldozed, day after day, for several years. It is just jumping to the end of what would be the eventual outcome after a few decades of disposal.

I don't find that to be an arguable study design.

"Anti-renewable propoganda" is certainly a thing, but it's also true that many champions of renewables keep their blinders on when it comes to making assessments.

Solar and nuclear are the demonstrably effective means of producing large scale power, but they don't provide portable energy density (the kind we demand). Battery technology has finally come into the realm of competition, but that has been with extensive and persistent research for decades.

[jeffbee]

If chucking PV panels into landfills were actually a widespread practice, I am sure you could produce some statistics about how much of that has actually occurred.

The fact is that PV panel economic lifetime is way, way longer than reactionary renewable opponents want you to believe. It is not 15 years, or 25 years, it is more like 100-400 years. Nobody needs to decommission them en masse, yet. And even if they suddenly did, it still does not present a disposal issue. Suppose there are 100 million PV panels in California. This is the right order of magnitude for our peak generating capacity. If you took every PV assembly in the entire state, stacked them 50 deep so they were about as high as a man, and just put them in a field, they would not even cover 500 acres. That's less than a square mile. Total non-issue.

[briantakita]

In a perfect world, everything goes according to plan & within specs. In an imperfect world, things break when they are not supposed to in the field, adequate maintenance is not performed & other corners are cut, budgets fluctuate, toxic events are covered up, poorly constructed products are deployed, etc.

The problem is there are studies that show heavy metals polluting the water table. That is what has been observed. I'm of the mindset that not all toxic events are observed, less are documented, & even less are expressed to the public.

Also the toxins released & human rights issues in the supply side have not been addressed in this thread.

It would be great to have better options for energy production, but we have observed some implications of solar cells as the 1st generations reach end of life & the impacts of in field breakages. There is enough of a history to take a sober look at what needs to be improved. Saying it's a "non issue" is frankly an irresponsible approach & makes me question if these issues are taken seriously. Claiming that everyone who brings up issues is anti renewable or an oil shill is also the wrong approach. Is there even proper risk assessment or is this the wild west?

[henearkr]

Almost no PV panels are using CdTe, so that's not even worth arguing about. And newly constructed PV farms certainly do not use this tech.

That's why invoking toxicity of PV panels is just pure anti-renewable propaganda.

[upsidesinclude]

That's a reasonable and fair argument I can accept.

However, I think the idea of the "anti-renewablist" is misguided. There are sceptics who fear advancements for the sake of advancement alone. Plastics are one perfect example (PFAS, PBA, etc). We are only beginning to understand how horribly these things disrupt organic chemical & hormonal balance. Scepticism is not your enemy.

[renewiltord]

Excellent. Thank you for explaining.

[xbar]

I would amend your conclusion to say "Overall, the technology seems to be safely manageable."

Let to rot after funding is depleted is a recipe for disaster. Consider the original decommissioning plan for San Onofre nuclear power plant: https://sanonofresafety.org/nuclear-waste/

[ClumsyPilot]

That kind of true for every human activity. Anything is dangerous if incompetent / malevolent actors are in charge.

Even pig farms cause runoff of manure and fertiliser into rivers, where they cause Eutrophication - massive algae blooms that consume all oxygen in the water, killing all the local fish and fauna and producing massive swaths of hte ocean where the only living thing is Jellyfish.

[briantakita]

Some tech is easier to manage & has been around longer to understand the implications than other technologies though.