A model for the world or a cautionary tale.

April 27, 2023 9:01 PM

India's Quest to Build the World's Largest Solar Farms. "Every morning in the Tumakuru District of Karnataka, a state in southern India, the sun tips over the horizon and lights up the green-and-brown hills of the Eastern Ghats. Its rays fall across the grasslands that surround them and the occasional sleepy village; the sky changes color from sherbet-orange to powdery blue. Eventually, the sunlight reaches a sea of glass and silicon known as Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park. Here, within millions of photovoltaic panels, lined up in rows and columns like an army at attention, electrons vibrate with energy. The panels cover thirteen thousand acres, or about twenty square miles—only slightly smaller than the area of Manhattan."

"The wind gusted and overhead power lines hummed. Around 1 p.m., the park’s electricity output peaked at more than two thousand megawatts—enough for millions of homes."
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"“Solar people are building schools in all the villages, building roads,” Varshitha Gopala, an eighteen-year-old who lives in Vollur, told me. “For people, they haven’t done anything.” Gopala’s family lives in a Dalit-majority area, and her mother, Alvelamma, told me that Dalits were given farmland to work generations back. Before solar came, all women who could work did work, she said, whether on their own lands or as laborers for their landowning neighbors. But this arrangement had never come with a deed, which meant that Dalits were ineligible for a lease agreement and lost access to the land. Their landed neighbors now earn lease income, but the jobs are gone. Instead, Alvelamma picks up agricultural work in far-off villages, and the family relies on income from its small shop, a tiny shipping container coated with peeling blue paint."

posted by storybored (5 comments total)

That's a whole lot of fancy words.

There's every reason why solar should be combined with continuing farming. Solar gets put into regions with lots of sun - generally too much sun for farming. Providing additional shade is good for the microclimate at ground-level, where the crops and animals are.

We need solar and we need farming. There's every reason to do both, in the same place and the same time.
posted by happyinmotion at 10:22 PM on April 27, 2023 [12 favorites]

What is occuring in India is almost certainly a decision to use solar arrays as a tool to dispossess people - this is inevitable where classism/racism already entrenched. I wouldn't be surprised to see this occuring within the UK either, or anywhere 'landed gentry' systems exist.

But with more open minds a win-win is possible where (some) shading enables more plant growth and supports more people to live on and from the land.

Agrivoltaics / mixed grazing-solar farming is even happening in New Zealand - cattle grazing with solar, or there's the American Solar Grazing Asoc.

I've seen an Australian study (cannot find link at mo') showing significant weight gain increase in lambs growing within an agrivoltaic system (due to less heat stress and animals able to make meat instead of all energy going to cooling).
posted by unearthed at 11:06 PM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

I recommend Matt Farrels "How Solar Panels Are Changing Agriculture - Agrivoltaics Revisited". It is all works well, then farmers gain not only the revenue from solar power but also benefit from reduced water usage and increased yield on crops (not all crops. but many) - which are shielded from the most intense sun. It can generate or retain farming jobs too. That can be helped along by various technological developments like that in LSC (semi transparent) panels - which let the light that plants need pass through while drawing power from this parts like infra-red which they don't.

So - there is potential for a solution which has all kinds of benefits to governments, farmers and those who seek affordable food and energy. The current problem is price: you need lots of costly equipment that is not yet standardised or produced at the required scale. Farrel mentions that China has now apparently banned use of farmland exclusively for energy production - allowing it only for the kind of mixed use we see from agrivoltaics - so I think there are some grounds to see regulations like this help speed things along.
posted by rongorongo at 12:37 AM on April 28, 2023 [9 favorites]

I visited a solar farm in Spain somewhere around a decade ago. I think it may have been in the Murcia region, but I don't remember exactly. What I do remember is the sheer desolation of the place.

This particular installation used movable mirrors that track the sun ("heliostats"). The mirrors reflect the rays of sunlight towards a central tower, where the collected energy is used to produce steam from boiling water.

I don't recall there being a single person on-site the day we went to take a look. Maybe there was a guard? I'm guessing there was a guard. I don't remember. It doesn't really matter, either. If there was a guard, their presence just underscored the utter desolation of the place. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but cracked land, parched dry. And then this alien ocean of gleaming, glinting mirrors, all of them pointing towards a tall, white tower with a single glowing eye, like Sauron.

Walking around the facility, squinting in the shimmering air, I did see some signs of life. A grasshopper, a yellowed stalk of grass. A broken solar panel. But mainly just a deathly quiet, interrupted periodically by the electrical click-whirr of the mirrors around me, as they minutely traced the path of the sun across the sky. Devoted worship...

The whole experience made me reconsider our civilization demands for energy. The impact of it all. Certainly, without a doubt, solar and wind energy improve on the Faustian bargain that fossil fuels impose. But at the scale and convenience we demand, the efficiencies required just don't seem to leave any room for the spontaneous succulence that is the spice of life.
posted by dmh at 1:31 AM on April 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

Given the extent to which the current Indian administration is dominated by religious-nationalist fuckwits, I am completely unable to be surprised every time I see another instance of an otherwise laudable policy goal being implemented in such a way as to enrich its billionaire class ever further at the direct expense of its poorest.

Democracy though it may be, India has struck me as the opposite of fundamentally egalitarian for as long as I've been paying any attention to it (which, since my father was born there, has been as long as I've been alive).
posted by flabdablet at 1:35 AM on April 28, 2023 [12 favorites]