this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Conservatively, using the land currently used for fuel ethanol production in the USA for solar instead would add more generating capacity than the entire capacity of the USA today. It’s a terrible use of land, not to mention energy and chemical inputs.
I'm sure that something can still be grown in the shade of the solar panels, shade houses are a thing after all.
That's a very active area of research, there's a handful of farms on at least the west coast experimenting with utilizing solar in that way. Either to shade certain crops or as shade for livestock, while of course getting the solar energy benefits
Livestock.
Sheep grazing is actually a reasonably common secondary usage of solar farms
I read an article somewhere about how solar panels can (and are by some countries) keep the ground below cool enough to grow plants and crops and such when the climate is otherwise not suitable to do so. Quite interesting indeed!
To say nothing about water usage, which is probably an unsolvable problem.