Solar panels on farmland.
Maine DACF seeking public comments on LD 1881 Rulemaking
Maine’s Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry (DACF) has a public meeting scheduled for August 19th, 2024. Details Here.
The image above is a screenshot of part of the 110± acre solar panel installation in Milo, Maine.
The blue polygon is 5 acres, which represents about 1 MW of electric generation for a typical solar field in Maine.
Here is the google maps link to the same location - before the solar panels were installed.
According to The Pisquataquis Observer, this land was formerly in part used as potato fields. I didn’t find any mention of PFAS contamination.
Why the switch from farming food to solar panels? With Net Energy Billing and Tariff Incentives, a farmer with land like this could cease working and still provide for their family. In this case, the land was town-owned - so it has increased their town revenues.
As a society, we have become so removed from the production of the food that any singular example of farmland removed from service seems unimportant. There will always be someone else who wants to grow food, right?
Note that often solar projects are described by their nameplate capacity, which is in Direct Current (DC). This can be confusing, since the grid is (mostly) running on Alternating Current (AC). The nameplate capacity of the Milo project is given as 26.4 MW, but that has a loss factor when converted to AC, resulting in 20 MW AC available to the grid.
Below is a comparison of the land usage required for solar generation when compared to old school oil generation. This is not published as a push to go back to oil generation - but to highlight the simple reality that rural spaces are being obliterated by industrial energy infrastructure, and heavy acreage requirements are a physical property of new systems.
Again - if you want to learn more or provide public comment to Maine DACF: Details Here.
Public meeting scheduled for August 19th, 2024.
Comments due by August 29th 2024.
And please, stop calling these installations solar farms and wind farms! They aren’t. Farms produce food or raise domestic animals. An acceptable, neutral substitution might be: solar panel project. wind turbine project.
Excellent post, thank you. We can't eat solar panels and they don't produce any energy at night. Without battery storage, which is prohibitively expensive, the power they produce is weak and intermittent compared to hydro, gas, oil and nuclear. I say this having lived off grid on solar for nearly 40 years. Sacrificing our farmlands and forests to host industrial scale unreliable renewables is foolish. We need to start using the "nuclear" word if we really want carbon free power sources. Meanwhile, the organic blood of our ancient plants and animals (oil) has powered us for over a century and can do so for another century. CO2 is plant food and all of life on earth would die without it. There are much smarter ways to power us into the future than going back to the days of sailing ships and sealing wax.