With Some Careful Planning, Solar & Biodiversity Can Go Hand-In-Hand – CleanTechnica

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The sun’s energy is becoming a popular renewable source for everyday power. To meet increasing demand, thousands of acres of solar farms are expected to be developed over the next few decades. Co-locating arrays and agriculture on the same land — known as “agrivoltaics” — can create pollinator habitats in an important and necessary symbiosis of solar and biodiversity.

Agrivoltaics promote more sustainable agriculture while harvesting clean energy from the sun. Plants under the panels can invite a host of environmental benefits — but the practice also has some problems that need to be acknowledged and addressed.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels are composed of semiconductors that convert sunlight into electricity. The US solar manufacturing industry is growing like never before. The US installed 32.4 gigawatts of solar in 2023 from its 2021 capacity of 8.3 gigawatts, and that number is anticipated to rise even more by the end of this year due to incentives within the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). As a result, US solar manufacturing capacity is nearly equal to its pace of deployment.

Climate change and biodiversity erosion are the most pressing issues of the Anthropocene. As solar energies are considered carbon neutral, or at least during their operational phase, they are anticipated to play a major role in replacing more traditional carbon-intensive power plants (such as coal- or oil-fired power plants) and can help cut global anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Yet critics of wind solar routinely raise concerns about how much land would be required to decarbonize the US power sector. Higher land use requirements add to the anthropogenic demands placed on limited land resources, which can threaten species with extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation. Solar farms, when seeded with a diverse mix of native plants, can decrease erosion, nourish the soil, and store planet-warming carbon. They can also help to save biodiversity loss.

Insects and birds are pollinators that support life on Earth, but they are quickly reducing in overall population due to habitat loss. In declines that scientists call “staggering,” the North American bird population is down by 2.9 billion breeding adults, with devastating losses among birds in every biome. In 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) has entered the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as Endangered.

Solar and Biodiversity Agendas Must be Balanced

It’s important to explicitly consider the effects of climate change mitigation strategies at the planning stage of renewable projects. Solar energy infrastructure development and land use change should be analyzed in conjunction with their influence on biodiversity. The construction of solar energy facilities can have positive or negative impacts on biodiversity depending on siting and associated land use transitions.

What are some possible effects on nature from solar construction?

• Negative effects: To ease the biodiversity crisis, more land is needed to be segregated to protect nature and natural processes. If the construction of solar energy involves the removal of natural land cover that provides habitat for wildlife, this transition can have immediate, negative environmental impacts.
• Positive effects: The construction of solar arrays may benefit biodiversity and native ecosystems. The selection of lower quality or degraded agricultural areas for solar energy installations doesn’t impact carbon storage or food production yet provides opportunities for native plant and pollinator restoration. Co-locating solar energy with existing infrastructure, when possible, is also optimal from a conservation perspective. For example, the EPA’s RE-Powering America’s Land initiative encourages renewable energy development on current and formerly contaminated lands, landfills, and mine sites when such development is aligned with the community’s vision for the site.

Ultimately, solar and biodiversity installations should be implemented in a “Right Action, Right Place” framework. After all, biodiversity is a global asset that must be cherished and protected.

What does it mean to have solar and biodiversity in balance so there’s profitability and pollinator friendliness? The answer is still being debated, with few standards yet set.

• Some big projects delegate pollinator habitat to tiny corners of their sites due to concerns about landscaping maintenance. Then again, pollinator-friendly landscaping actually saves money because it needs far less mowing.
• A seed mix of several native grasses and a smaller amount of native clover is better than turf grass, a monoculture, but it is not adequate to be called a diverse, pollinator friendly solar site.
• It’s also important to note that even high-quality seeding cannot equal the ecological value of an intact ecosystem, especially in places where solar panels would require the removal of trees or shrubs.

How Solar and Biodiversity can be Symbiotic

Consider what such symbiosis could look like — how fighting the climate crisis could mean not only mainstreaming renewables but also tackling global biodiversity collapse. Ground-mounted solar PV sites can positively influence biodiversity in situations where previous land managers haven’t taken ecology into account. Those lands are often monocultures with weak biological variability. Instead, properly sited, sensitively designed solar installations can incorporate biodiverse plantings beneath and around the panels.

Afterward, if the system is carefully managed, ecological preservation can yield successful solar and biodiversity symbiosis. The panels will convert energy from the sun into power, and the land can develop a habitat network for pollinating species, provide ecosystem services, and infuse pest management for local crop production.

Envision, if you will, a solar farm embraced by a meadow filled with colorful wildflowers and native grasses. Butterflies, bees, dragonflies, and birds flit from bloom to seed pod. What makes this meadow possible is the height of the panels — the higher, the better for optimal growing conditions. Tall panels allow for a sharp increase in native vegetation species and invite more ecological diversity, John Gantner, the director of engineering and delivery for ENGIE’s smaller-scale sites, told the New York Times. But many other projects, especially big utility-scale sites, avoid the taller panels to keep their profitability in line.

A Pollinator-Friendly Solar Scorecard is currently established in at least fifteen US states, and the Nature Conservancy has a guide to pollinator-friendly solar.

“On one side, we want to protect biodiversity and pollinators. On the other side, we need the most efficient way to get kilowatt hours to customers, to power at the plug,” explains Jessica Fox, a conservation biologist with the Electric Power Research Institute. “So we’re doing this work now to find where is a middle space.”