Science - Chinese Gravity Battery Building

Why not? They bring extra money to the farmers and provide shade and mixed environment for the surrounding.

 

I am off the grid and have been for about a year. I originally did this because we thought my wife's Mother was going to to need to come live with us and we needed to be able to make sure we had 24/7 electricity. Since there was no NG available and our HOA required propane tanks be buried, we made the decision to go with solar. When Milton came thru our community was out for almost 4 days, but we had no issues.

 

We’re working that way. I’m on well water and have buried propane for heating and cooking. I’m getting solar panels installed next year, though VA does have a lot of cloudy days.

We’re also growing a lot of foodstuffs. Getting chickens next year for eggs and tick control.

I sound like a prepper.

 

I don’t know any large scale farmers, but I would think that tens to many hundreds of acres of solar panels do not mix well with active farming. Conflicts with sunlight at sufficient levels to optimize plant growth and conflicts with equipment operation under/between structures. They also look like hell compared to pasture or trees or sod or even row crops. Look at Duke Energy’s 700 plus acres of panels at the NW corner of E. Callaway Road and SR 22 in Bay County for an example that I don’t think is a good use of undeveloped or arable land. They can, however, provide beneficial shade over paved surfaces like parking lots.

 

perhaps they aren’t as optically pleasing as row of feed crops or acres of pasture but I doubt they are any less environmentally friendly.

How shading crops with solar panels can improve farming, lower food costs and reduce emissions

 

I stand corrected, but the stand-alone photovoltaic panel “farms” I have seen still look like hell.

 

The version shown in the article I_boy posted doesn’t look as bad as the stand-alone solar farms popping up around here, but they also probably produce only a small fraction of power compared to the packed together solar panels I’ve seen. I haven’t looked into the environmental costs of solar panel manufacturing or decommissioning/disposal but I would guess that there are some environmental drawbacks for those parts of the panel life cycle.

 

if I am understanding the process, they are capturing the hydrogen during the manufacture of the product not after it is in use

 

Cetane booster? 2-ethylhexyl nitrate is the standard and not much h2. Must be something new. Curious. Have always heard EtOH is bad.

 

I can’t speak to how they look, but I’ve seen at least a half dozen articles like this one

Researchers make stunning discovery while testing crops grown under solar panels — here's how it could change how we grow food

This is obviously not true with all types of crops but with some times and some livestock the intermittent shade may actually be a net plus.

 

New distance record for a large industrial truck powered by hydrogen: 1806 miles on one tank of H2.

Hydrogen-powered truck breaks record, travels 1,800 miles on single fill

 

Did you ever drive I-10 before they put up the solar farms? Was there any point at which you pulled over and started taking pictures? Nobody drives on I-10 for the scenery. I-10 is noisy, so no one wants to build housing anywhere near it. This may be the best use of land you can come up with. We need the electricity from the solar farms more than we need the land for anything else.

 

New theory about hydrogen deep below the surface in the North-Central U.S. Enough to power the planet for 5,000 years without near-zero contribution to global warming. Can it be extracted?

US scientists probe potentially massive energy source buried deep underground — and it has potential to power the globe for thousands of years