5 DAYS LEFT: Double Your Impact.
🌳 Save the Planet — we’ll double the trees you plant every month.
🌎 Save the Amazon — we’ll double the acres of rainforest you protect every month.
At San Juan Solar in New Mexico, early results from a multi-year research project used tracking collars to discover that wild pronghorns (Antilocapra americana) will sometimes choose to move through an active grid-scale solar farm. National electric codes currently require fences around grid-scale solar arrays, but San Juan (which replaced a coal plant) chose to put multiple smaller fences around nine individual arrays instead of one big one around the whole site. Early data now shows that pronghorns have chosen to move through all of the existing “passageways” between solar arrays to varying degrees.
This is just one of many recent examples of solar/wildlife coexistence!
The Gemini Solar Project in Nevada has become a haven for the endangered threecorner milkvetch plant! Scientists found 12 individual plants of the unique species on the site before development, but 93 in 2024 after the solar panels were added. Furthermore, the milkvetch growing at the Gemini solar farm grew wider and taller than the milkvetch growing on nearby land plots outside the solar farm.
Another recent study from Argonne National Laboratory found more grassland birds on ecovoltaic solar arrays than nearby farming fields across the U.S. Midwest.
A Cambridge/RSPB study from England also found more birds on solar farms than neighboring farmers’ fields.
In Germany, the Weesow-Willmersdorf solar farm has become a high-density breeding area for the Eurasian skylark.
And a solar farm in Colorado appears to have directly helped the wild grassland ecosystem beneath survive a drought by boosting soil moisture retention, increasing plant growth by about 20% or more compared to open fields with no solar panels.
The United States is currently in an entirely politician-driven electricity shortage as gigawatts of solar, wind, and transmission line projects are being intentionally blocked by the White House. And with an increasingly chaotic global climate, we need as much support for biodiversity as we can get. In addition to farming-plus-solar “agrivoltaics,” wildlands-plus-solar “ecovoltaics” is looking like a scalable win-win for a warming world.
By supporting the build-out of solar farms, U.S. state leaders can help provide abundant and affordable clean electricity while supporting healthy ecosystems! The clearest win-win in policy today is to prioritize and accelerate solar power progress with maximally supportive pro-buildout legal, regulatory, and permitting structures.
Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by Sam Matey-Coste for Climate Action Now.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.