We Can't Eat Solar Panels

Quote from California farmer who persists in growing food although surrounded by industrial solar farms.

“Food is going to be more valuable than ever in the world we live in now,” Tagg said. “We can’t eat solar panels.”   

Don't miss this article about how even California is struggling to meet its impossible clean energy goals.  San Diego wants to run on 100% clean power, except it doesn't want the economic burden of constructing the infrastructure necessary to support its goal.

Specifically, the researchers analyzed whether rooftop solar, along with small solar parks on urban, potentially polluted land called Brownfields, could meet San Diego’s energy demands. It could, Leslie said, but it might not be economically feasible. 

So they push into the rural areas and gobble up all the productive farmland because it's "cheaper" and "faster."

“We’ve got millions of acres of perfectly suitable land in the desert,” Hamby said, referring to the area east of Imperial’s fertile plain, much of which is federally controlled land. 

“If you’re a developer … there’s all kinds of federal red tape you could go through, but it’s easier to go and buy out a farmer,” Hamby said. 

Still, procuring renewables from Imperial Valley is one of the few ways San Diego could reach its projected energy demand by 2050, the researchers say. The cost of generating energy there is relatively cheap, from $31 to about $42 per megawatt hour, according to the county’s study. And there’s existing infrastructure built by San Diego Gas and Electric to get it to San Diego.  Joe Bettles, who teamed up with Leslie on the study, said though the cost of rooftop technology – the solar panels themselves – has dropped significantly over the years, labor costs are higher as well as the cost of permitting each project.
  
“You need a really big sales machine to go door to door and convince building owners one at a time,” Leslie said. 
 
It’s cheaper, they say, for a utility to build a large solar project on flat rural land.

The icing on the cake is San Diego "Community" Power, a government run public power agency, that doesn't want to build clean energy in its own "community."  Instead...

There are big new sales machines entering the marketplace. San Diego Community Power and Clean Energy Alliance are government-run public power companies with the sole purpose of providing 100 percent renewable energy at a cheaper rate than SDG&E. It’s San Diego Community Power that secured the contract for JVR Energy park, and a 150 megawatt solar project in Imperial near Holtville called the Viking Energy Farm.
 
“Our philosophy is that it’s going to take all of the above. It’ll take rooftop solar, smaller scale and distributive energy systems and utility scales to reach renewable energy goals,” said Cody Hooven, San Diego Community Power’s chief operations officer.
 
Right now, San Diego Community Power doesn’t decide where renewables should be built. The governing documents of San Diego Community Power show there’s a preference for local power, but its boundaries aren’t explicitly defined. In the case of the Viking and JVR project in Jacumba, the public utility basically told the marketplace how much renewable energy it wanted to build, and it’s up to private developers to pitch a project. 

“Down the line we could eventually build our own projects,” Hooven said. 

The "clean energy" goal is being pursued without care towards how it affects land use and interferes with other goals, such as food security.  It's often left up to the local communities to create and enforce sensible restrictions on local land use.  And many do, leading to cancellation of planned projects.

However, our federal government thinks that it can designate "renewable energy zones" wherever it likes and invest hundreds of billions of dollars building transmission roads to nowhere to tap them ahead of building the actual generators.  This is going to lead to an enormous waste of money and huge pile of debt that electric consumers are going to be stuck paying for without receiving any benefits.

If you want renewable power, make it yourself, in your own community.  Keep your fantasies in your own back yard!