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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

There are countless square miles of vacant land in the USA that are unsuitable for farming and ideal for solar. This might be useful in areas where vacant land is actually scarce.

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The US is huge. The problem is efficiency of transmission. But maybe we just install 2x the solar to overcome that? When energy is so low cost we can afford to be a bit less efficient.

More storage too (transmit in time rather than in space).

A huge amount of corn goes into producing ethanol to burn as fuel in cars. We can safely take a small portion of agricultural land out of "food" production and replace it with photovoltaics and electrical production instead of using it to produce ethanol and produce productive stable returns for farmers instead of subsiding corn and fuel.

Yeah, and also you should eradicate sparrows. Each sparrows consumed several kilograms of grain per year, so by eradicating them you will need even less agricultural land.

That vacant land tends to be far away from electricity users. Not always - lots of desert around Las Vegas - but people historically like settling around arable land. Producing electricity close to where you need it is great, both because of transmission losses and because building more long-distance transmission lines is neither easy, cheap nor fast

I feel like starting with parking lots might be better than filling "empty" land though?

It really does seem like a no brainer. They should already be close to other infrastructure and they provide shade for parked cars which reduces the energy spent cooling the cars when people drive away. Even if you make very safe assumptions about the total area of parking lots in the US and their sun exposure, the amount of energy they could generate from solar panels on average rivals the current solar output.

Plenty of rooftop space for solar.

Yes, but not plenty of support or access to make it practical.

its _far_ cheaper to retrofit carparks than it is roofs. generally there is nothing under a carpark apart from tarmac. Unlike a roof which was designed for a specific weather loading (be it wind, rain or snow)

You also need to attach the panels to the roof, its generally simpler to bolt into tarmac compared to bonding to a weather proof seal.

Where i am in the eu, car parks are where its at. Apart from on dirty great field which is being filled with panels for some reason.

The better solution to this vacant land is to remove the regulatory and permitting burden that made it vacant in the first place.

Let the people build.

We should be increasing the amount of wilderness space in the world. Let the people build denser before building wider.

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