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News
A dry lakebed in the Mojave is hard enough to land a jet on, and the 1.9 million solar panels spread beside it stand on the same flat ground where pilots first flew faster than sound
6+ hour, 4+ min ago (700+ words) There is a place in the California desert where the ground is almost perfectly flat. Not flat like a field. Flat like a table. Rain fills it in winter, wind smooths it, and the sun bakes it back into a…...
A camera watched solar panels for 17,000 hours, then researchers repeated the experiment across seven states and discovered we were wrong about birds crashing into them
17+ hour, 12+ min ago (533+ words) Across the Texas prairie, large stretches of open land have been transformed by solar development. Large areas of open land are often developed when solar projects move forward. But one solar development left nearly 1,000 acres completely untouched. The decision had…...
Owls and harriers “shrunk” a New York solar farm from 750 to 530 acres because they needed the land to nest and hunt on the ground
1+ day, 17+ hour ago (575+ words) Owls find their prey at lower levels over New York’s open grasslands. Northern Harriers also use these open spaces to locate their prey. Both need wide expanses of unbroken habitat, which became a problem due to a planned solar farm…...
A giant Caterpillar excavator weighs about 94 tons, more than twice the legal road limit, and the real marvel in the convoy is not the digger but the hydraulic trailer beneath it
1+ day, 11+ hour ago (739+ words) On a wide open highway, the traffic slows to a patient crawl. A flashing escort truck blocks the fast lane up ahead. Ahead of it, a flatbed rig inches along under a towering yellow machine. Drivers film the giant excavator,…...
Farmworkers pick crops on a Colorado farm under 3,276 solar panels, and four years of measurements show the shade beneath the panels takes up to 10 degrees off the heat they work in
1+ day, 20+ hour ago (794+ words) The row of spinach runs flat and dark green between two lines of steel posts. Above it, a panel the size of a door tilts slowly to follow the light. Someone kneels in the row and cuts leaves into a…...
Wisconsin’s largest solar plant was forced to surrender 750 acres to a rare bird that inflates bright orange pouches and needs room to dance for females
2+ day, 11+ hour ago (569+ words) The great prairie chicken has lived on the grasslands of Wisconsin for many years. Each spring, males will go out into the open fields, expand the large orange air sacs on their necks, and pound the ground with their feet....
Digging out the world's first solar road took a crew 2 weeks, 8 years after France laid two thirds of a mile of panels into a Normandy lane that never made half the power it promised
2+ day, 14+ hour ago (749+ words) A milling machine went down a rural lane in Normandy in late May and started chewing the road surface out. The council had voted in February to take the whole thing out, and the work took about two weeks. The…...
Tennessee cattle farmers keep hearing that solar takes land out of farming, so a 20 acre solar farm raised its panels, taught them to lie flat, and turned 10 cows and their calves loose underneath
2+ day, 21+ hour ago (763+ words) A gate opens on a solar field in middle Tennessee and there are cattle standing between the rows. Ten cows and their calves, grazing in the shade with the panels overhead lying almost flat. The flatness is not an accident,…...
A California solar plant is trying to coexist with tortoises, squirrels, owls, bumblebees, and Joshua trees, but the desert wildlife is not making it easy
4+ day, 13+ hour ago (490+ words) There’s a large-scale project being constructed in Kern County, California, with the aim of converting the state’s sunshine into power for 180,000 homes. Thousands of acres are meant to be transformed for this purpose, but developers have a delicate challenge to…...
Every spring California trucks in 1 million rented beehives, and a free army of wild bees hands those same farms up to 2.4 billion dollars more
4+ day, 20+ hour ago (739+ words) Every spring in California, long trucks pull up to the orchards loaded with boxes that hum. Inside are rented honeybees, hauled in by the colony to pollinate the coming crop. Farmers pay hard cash for that service, because the bill…...