I guess I would rather have solar panels covering the local Walmart or Home Depot parking lot and store roof as opposed to cutting down the forest to build a solar array facility.
At least, that seems to be what they do around here in New England.
Rooftops alone would power most of the world.
Japan gets less sun than the USA as a whole.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261925007974
https://x.com/JessePeltan/status/1918722555126382727
Jesse is the man when it comes to he did the maths type posts.
“How much of NYC would you need to cover in solar panels to turn it into a net exporter of electricity?
NYC uses about 50 TWh of electricity per year.
NYC has ~780 square kilometers of land area, and a GHI of 4 kWh/m^2/day, giving a primary solar resource of ~1,100 TWh/year - more than 20x electricity demand.
Let’s assume we only place panels over existing impervious surfaces on buildings and parking lots.
(the impervious part of the first 45.5%)
That brings our area to 261 sq km and our solar resource to 380 TWh/year.
With 23% efficient panels and 14% system losses (for dust, inverter losses, etc.) we get 75 TWh/year.
We would need to cover ~2/3 of the impervious surfaces in the “buildings & lots” category to generate as much electricity as NYC consumes.
This leaves open all existing sidewalks, streets, parks, vacant land, airports, etc. and doesn’t include any vertical surfaces which could allow for capture of a larger fraction of NYC’s primary solar resource.
The power density of solar PV is high enough to turn the densest city in the U.S. into an exporter of electricity.”
“opposed to cutting down the forest to build a solar array facility.
At least, that seems to be what they do around here in New England.”
We have private property rights and those forest owners know they can get paid twice and more in the long run vs growing 50 years worth of trees.
They get paid for the logging to clear it out then get paid again every month for the solar power they produce if they own the systems or get paid a land use fee if they don’t. Either way they get more money in the bank vs having trees just sit there even rotational logging is less as it takes years for the planted trees to grow to market size once logged.
No conservative should support anyone telling any land owner what they can and cannot do with their land or resources.
If you live trees find a way to make them valuable enough to not cut them down for lumber or land use change.