a
nd then your food will cost more because so many farm fields were used for solar/wind energy generation!
Mike,
I used to think the same thing, that agricultural land is precious and that every housing development or any other such use was a crime, against our interest.
But having operated a good-sized agricultural operation for a number of years, I learned different. Every year that I grew 300-some acres of wheat (and other small grains to some degree) I went to the county office of the branch of the USDA that managed such stuff (alphabet-soup acronyms that I'd have to drag paper out of my files downstairs to remember). I got paid money NOT TO HARVEST so many acres of wheat because we are/were oversupplied. This system is still in place.
Virtually every major farm commodity in the US is managed this way. Cotton and peanuts were the big money-makers in my Oklahoma county back in the 1980s-90s. Solar energy is not competing in any real way with agricultural production. If anything, it's a good way to make marginal acreage pay.
I like seeing the acres and acres of photo-voltaic harvest everywhere I see that stuff. "Free" energy from the sun. I know all the arguments about how destructive the mining of minerals necessary for photo-voltaic cells can be. But anyone worried about that should spend more time observing the environmental costs of oil & gas. I lived in oil/gas country, have photos of the crew who drilled a well on our 160 acre home place, have a good friend who makes his living as a small-time producer, have had to go head-to-head with producers who damaged land that I operated on, have seen every kind of damage from oil and gas. Oh, and by the way, there were no earthquakes in Oklahoma back in the day. I joked once (1982?) with my friend in the business--I said, maybe all this oil we're pulling out of the earth has been lubricating the ground beneath us, maybe there's a cost to that. Said it as a joke. But apparently there was something to it.
Every form of energy comes at a cost. Nuclear, wind, solar, oil/gas--there's no free lunch.