[ExI] What's Wrong With Academic Futurists?

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: Re: [ExI] What's Wrong With Academic Futurists?

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 7:59 PM, spike  wrote:
>>... Ja, unfortunately the existence of tax incentives causes the solar 
> panels to end up in all the wrong places, with your article providing 
> a poster-child example.  Iowa has sufficient rainfall, topsoil and 
> flat arable farmland to make it too valuable for ground based solar.  
> The vast American west is drier, more sunny, more useless for anything 
> else besides collecting sunlight...

>...From the article it doesn't sound as though these farmers think their
solar panels are in the wrong place. They are seeing big reductions in their
large electric bills, and some are almost self-sufficient.
In my experience, farmers are very careful with money - they have to be! And
they think long-term...

Ja, the farmers are getting tax incentives for making solar energy.  I agree
with those incentives and the kind of money big farmers on good land can
make, solar panels are a good bet.

>...Farms have plenty of barn and shed roofs available for solar panels...

For the scale of energy farms use, all rooftops on everything combined make
for a nearly negligible area.  Farms can and do offer a profitable use of
solar energy, but they need to take up some ground to do it.

>...And even if they use a field, sheep will happily graze below panel
arrays...

On the contrary sir.  The grass will not grow without sufficient sunlight.
Farmland sacrificed to ground based solar cannot be effectively
double-purposed.  You could have wind farms with GB solar below.  However,
the cost effective solar support structures physically rest on the ground,
rather than raise them in any case.  So if you did something kinda weird
like feed your sheep on grain in the same field as your PV panels, those two
uses still don't play well together, unfortunately.

>...News rapidly spreads through the farming community. You might be
surprised at how quick they change over...BillK
_______________________________________________

Currently cost-effective GB solar depends on taking advantage of an
oversupply of relatively low-efficiency Chinese manufactured PVs.  If that
pays, I see no problem with using the low-end panels, but here's where I am
going with it.

Imagine you are a Martian, observing Earth.  Your Earthian probes have let
you study the life forms on the blue planet, the soil and rainfall, the
kinds of plants that grow and that beasts eat the plants, and you understand
the humans are the ones building things.  You can't understand their
language or their ways, you know nothing about taxes and nations, but you do
get some things, such as solar power.  You have that back on the home planet
Mars, and you know that Earth is even better for that.

What you find puzzling is that the humans seem to be placing their solar
panels in all the wrong places, way up in the northern hemisphere at
latitudes and climates where they are so limited, all while ignoring some
excellent places for PVs.  You see that solar panels are going in on top of
excellent farmland, while unpopulated sunny wasteland is untouched.  

You and your fellow Martians conclude that humans are apparently smart and
stupid at the same time.

spike