Nice, cutesy feel good stuff Moss, but will mostly Chinese/CCP made solar panels, batteries made of rare earth metals mined by exploited Africans be good for America? Will they make energy in the dark or on sustained cloudy days? How many American energy jobs will be replaced by Chinese jobs?
I‘m more concerned about grid reliability, safety and ethics than sheep.
Since there's about zero solar panel production in the US compared to China already, no US energy jobs will be replaced by Chinese energy jobs, so that argument is moot.
There are battery plants up, going up, or planned to go up in the US. Those are US jobs in the plus category.
Solar jobs in the US have outnumbered all oil, gas and coal jobs combined since at least 2017. Those are not Chinese jobs. They're American jobs.
Coal is toast as an energy source. It's dirty and expensive to maintain. Places that relied on employment heavily in coal are going to have to adapt. That means either their civic leaders are going to have to go after other business to bring into the area (something they should have already been doing for decades) or the people are going to have to leave to seek other employment. They have to retool. That's all there is to it.
And as with just about every other form of employment, automation reduces the number of workers no matter the industry or country.
Do any of us lament the loss of gas station attendant jobs? Elevator operators? Telephone operators? Lamp lighters? Pin setters? Linotype operators? Ice cutters? Etc... All those and plenty more have been replaced by automation and shifts in technology.
It sucks to be on the tail end of a dying technology that you may have planned your entire future around. I know this from personal experience. However, you have to adapt or suffer the consequences.
As for the land itself, solar is easier on the land than conventional agriculture. I spent spent Sunday afternoon at a baseball game with a farmer friend of ours. We talked quite a bit about this and crops. They farm about 10,000 acres. Corn and soybeans, plus 6000 hogs several times a year.
He said soybeans take 6 passes a year with machinery. Planting, herbicides, pesticides, harvest, etc.
When land goes to solar panels, there's less water usage, less chemical applications, less fertilizer applications, less water and wind erosion, less runoff into streams and waterways, more sources of food and shelter for wild animals VS a corn or bean field, pollinators benefit, so crops in and next door to solar farms benefit.
Crops can be grown in solar farms. There's abundant greenways to control erosion and runoff. There are quite a few interesting article on agrivoltaics. Here's an interesting video. Plenty more out there.
Talk to the farmers that are leasing out their land for solar and see how they feel about it. I've spent 20+ years here on TBN listening to folks talk about farmers being the best stewards of the land, so don't interfere with agriculture. What's changed?
I guess it just depends on who's ox is being gored.
