Solar gives degraded land a chance to shine

Farmers in California’s San Joaquin Valley that have had to remove thousands of hectares of farmland from agricultural production in most part due to salt build up caused by years of irrigation are calling for the revitalisation of the land by putting it to a new use: renewable power generation.

By installing the proposed “Westland Solar Park” which they claim at peak output would generate as much electricity as several big nuclear power plants they would reuse the land which would have otherwise been useable for years to come. 12,000 hectares have been allocated by farmers from the region and officials at Westlands Water District, a public agency which supplies water to farms in the valley, into what would be one of the world’s largest solar energy complexes if it moved ahead.

As Australian farmland is tackling similar difficulties, the “Westland Solar Park” would be a good example of potential large scale projects – turning a bad situation into a positive outcome for our environment and local farmers.

First reported in the New York Times by Todd Woody, “Recycling Land for Green Energy Ideas” Aug 10th:

The San Joaquin initiative is in the vanguard of a new approach to locating renewable energy projects: putting them on polluted or previously used land. The Westlands project has won the backing of groups that have opposed building big solar projects in the Mojave Desert and have fought Westlands for decades over the district’s water use. Landowners and regulators are on board, too.
“It’s about as perfect a place as you’re going to find in the state of California for a solar project like this,” said Carl Zichella, who until late July was the Sierra Club’s Western renewable programs director. “There’s virtually zero wildlife impact here because the land has been farmed continuously for such a long time and you have proximity to transmission, infrastructure and markets.”
Recycling contaminated or otherwise disturbed land into green energy projects could help avoid disputes when developers seek to build sprawling arrays of solar collectors and wind turbines in pristine areas, where they can affect wildlife and water supplies.

He followed up with this story on the 11th of Aug “For Parched Farmers, a Crop of Electrons“:

In an article in The New York Times on Wednesday, I wrote about an ambitious plan to build one of the world’s largest solar energy complexes on 30,000 acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley of California.
Elsewhere, big renewable energy projects have encountered opposition from farmers, ranchers and environmentalists who worry about the impact of solar power plants on agriculture, wildlife and scarce water supplies.
But farmers in the San Joaquin Valley’s Westlands Water District are embracing solar power as a solution to their water woes. And environmental groups are backing the project as a way to avoid fights over building solar power plants in pristine desert areas.

Source: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Also printed in the AFR, this story can be read online “Green energy scheme to revive unusable farmland”