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California Turns To Farming Photons As Water Woes Result In Central Valley Solar Fields
California Turns To Farming Photons As Water Woes Result In Central Valley Solar Fields
California’s Central Valley is going green(er). Thanks to constrained water supplies and the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) which requires over 500,000 acres be taken out of production, some of the Golden State’s more than 77,000 farms are embarking on ambitious solar projects, according to the LA Times.
Converting farmland to solar farms also could be critical to meeting California’s climate change targets. That’s according to a new report from the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit.
Working with the consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics, the conservancy tried to figure out how California could satisfy its appetite for clean energy without destroying ecologically sensitive lands across the American West. The report lays out possible answers to one of the big questions facing renewable energy: Which areas should be dedicated to solar panels and wind turbines, and which areas should be protected for the sake of wildlife, outdoor recreation, farming and grazing?
One takeaway from the report, released this week: California will need hundreds or maybe thousands of square miles of solar power production in the coming decades — and it would make sense to build one-third to one-half of that solar capacity on agricultural lands, mostly within the state. –LA Times
By utilizing land which has already been ‘ecologically degraded’ (saving the state’s desert critters from solar annihilation), California can convert a ton of land to solar panels without harming the state’s $50 billion annual agriculture industry. According to a prior study by UC Berkeley, the state has at least 470,000 acres of “least-conflict” lands in the San Juaqin Valley (the lower portion of the Central Valley) where “salty soil, poor drainage or otherwise less-than-ideal farming conditions could make solar an attractive alternative for landowners,” according to the Times.
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Undamming Rivers: A Chance For New Clean Energy Source
Undamming Rivers: A Chance For New Clean Energy Source
Many hydroelectric dams produce modest amounts of power yet do enormous damage to rivers and fish populations. Why not take down these aging structures, build solar farms in the drained reservoirs, and restore the natural ecology of the rivers?
Hydroelectric power is often touted as clean energy, but this claim is true only in the narrow sense of not causing air pollution. In many places, such as the U.S. East Coast, hydroelectric dams have damaged the ecological integrity of nearly every major river and have decimated runs of migratory fish.
This need not continue. Our rivers can be liberated from their concrete shackles, while also continuing to produce electricity at the site of former hydropower dams. How might that occur? A confluence of factors — the aging of many dams, the advent of industrial-scale alternative energy
sources, and increasing recognition of the failure of traditional engineering approaches to sustain migratory fish populations — raises fresh possibilities for large rivers to continue to help provide power and, simultaneously, to have their biological legacies restored.
The answer may lie in “sharing” our dammed rivers, and the concept is straightforward. Remove aging hydroelectric dams, many of which produce relatively small amounts of electricity and are soon up for relicensing. When waters recede, rivers will occupy only part of the newly exposed reservoir bottoms. Let’s use these as a home for utility-scale solar and wind power installations, and let’s employ the existing power line infrastructure to the dams to connect the new solar and wind power facilities to the grid. This vision both keeps the electricity flowing from these former hydropower sites, while helping to resurrect once-abundant fish runs, as has recently happened in Maine.
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