Driving around the country roads of Indiana, you often see signs that read, “No Solar Farms.” When a utility scale solar installation is proposed in a county, the response from local citizens is often extremely negative one, sometimes even hostile.
While a lot of this backlash stems from misinformation, I do get where people are coming from with these responses to save farmland. People don’t want to see farmland that is used for food production turned into a solar field. People also don’t want to look out their windows and see development instead of nature. These reactions are understandable.
However, what many people don’t understand is that often, the corn grown in a field is never used for food. It ends up at an ethanol fuel plant and is processed into a fuel additive for our cars.
In Indiana alone, approximately 43% of the corn grown in our fields is used to produce fuel, not feed the hungry. In addition to this, these fields are sprayed with weed killers, pesticides, and fertilizers. The runoff of these chemicals end up in our waterways and cause issues for wildlife and people.
PV solar fields with perennial under-plantings, in contrast, can purify runoff waters and help restore healthy balances in our streams and rivers. Paired with regenerative farming practices, these solar farms can also help repair the soil they sit on.
The vegetative growth under solar panels also provides great habitat for many animals such as pheasants, rabbit, fox and others. The belief that solar modules leak toxic elements into the soil is simply false. Land and water around a solar installation is often cleaner than that around an active agricultural field.
Views of solar arrays can be, and should be, blocked by plantings around the perimeter. This is the type of thing people need to bring up at public meetings where a solar installation is being proposed. Practices such as this preserve the natural views people are used to having around their properties and keep communities looking beautiful and natural. It might even produce an increase in wildlife sightings!
The cost of energy from a field of solar modules is much lower than traditional energy sources and this is something else to keep in mind as we see utility prices continuing to increase. Even growing corn for ethanol is more expensive and uses up more land that could be used for food production.
