A movement is afoot to quash utility-scale solar development on farmland in the US, but the case for rural solar keeps expanding in new and different directions. In the latest example, Lightsource bp has built a pair of solar farms in Colorado that double as carbon sinks and help to preserve 3,000 acres of shortgrass prairie, too.

Solar Farms Are Farms, Too

Solar developers like farmland because it is relatively flat, treeless, and exposed to sun. Roads and transmission infrastructure are pluses, too.

As for local opposition, that is a matter of local concern. However, if the objections come down to aesthetics and appropriate use of land, that is a matter of historical perspective. Farms look bucolic enough on the outside, but beneath those amber waves of grain is formerly virgin land that has been stripped of its natural state, robbed of its biodiversity, commercialized, and industrialized for generations with machines, herbicides and pesticides.

In this […]