Originally posted by: Brent Kline
How many of these solar farms are foreign owened , and are they getting federal money to start them up ? I worry about taking food producing land out of production and the long term unintended consequences of using land, water and food to produce energy. It takes a lot of water and farmland to produce ethenol, and these solar farms are really just getting started. It will be interesting to see the pressure it puts on our food supply such as beef.
This isn't a time for xenophobia. We in fact have plenty of unfarmed land. What's the difference who owns it? No matter what, we can't force the owner to install a solar farm, but incentives can be applied to anyone.
As far as wind farms are concerned, they can be put on productive land with little or no negative effect.
We also need to consider that if the huge amount of power we buy from Canada is tariffed, we'll have to boost domestic power production to make up the shortfall.