By Sammy Roth
MARICOPA, Calif. — Jon Reiter banked the four-seat Cessna aircraft hard to the right, angling to get a better look at the solar panels glinting in the afternoon sun far below.
The silvery panels looked like an interloper amid
a patchwork landscape of lush almond groves, barren brown dirt and saltbush
scrub, framed by the blue-green strip of the California Aqueduct bringing water
from the north. Reiter, a renewable energy developer and farmer, built these
solar panels and is working to add a lot more to the San Joaquin Valley
landscape.
“The next project is going to be 100 megawatts.
It’s going to be five times this size,” Reiter said.
Solar energy projects could replace some of the
jobs and tax revenues that may be lost as constrained water supplies force
California’s agriculture industry to scale back. In the San Joaquin Valley
alone, farmers may need to take more than half a
million acres out of production to comply with the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act, which will ultimately put restrictions on pumping.
Converting
farmland to solar farms also could be key to meeting California’s climate
change targets. That’s according to a new report from
the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit.
Working with the consulting firm Energy and
Environmental Economics, the conservancy tried to figure out how California
could satisfy its appetite for clean energy without destroying ecologically
sensitive lands across the American West. The report lays out possible answers
to one of the big questions facing renewable energy: Which areas should be
dedicated to solar panels and wind turbines, and which areas should be
protected for the sake of wildlife, outdoor recreation, farming and grazing?
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the rest of the story visit: Farming sun