The ground on this hillside is not soil.<\/p>\n
It is crushed rock and spoil<\/strong>, graded flat by machines and packed hard enough to drive a truck across.<\/p>\n Trees will not take root in it.<\/p>\n A farmer would not touch it, a builder would have to dig it all out first, and it has sat like this since the last coal train<\/strong> left.<\/p>\n Which turns out to be the whole point<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A solar farm asks very little of the ground beneath it. No fertility, no drainage, no topsoil worth the name. It wants flat, open and sunlit<\/strong>, and legally simple, and a graded strip mine is all four.<\/p>\n Good farmland fails the last one. Every acre has a competing use and somebody who wants it, so a project there lands as an argument about food and property values first.<\/p>\n A spoil bench carries none of that. The trees came down decades ago, so nothing has to be cleared. The grading is already done<\/strong>, and the coal roads are still there and still wide enough.<\/p>\n Then there is the wire. A mine that shipped coal had heavy power run to it, and often the plant that burned it sat on the same network, so the connection a solar farm cannot do without is already in the ground<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The clearest case sits in the mountains of southwest Virginia, across two counties, on a surface mine called Red Onion that stopped producing long ago.<\/p>\n A power company and a conservation group agreed to put roughly 50 megawatts<\/strong> across about 1,200 acres<\/strong> of graded rock there, enough at full output for about 12,500 homes.<\/p>\n The land belongs to the conservation group, which is the unusual part.<\/p>\n It bought a very large block of former coal country outright, and being the landowner rather than a voice at a hearing changed what it could do with the ground.<\/p>\n It picked the developer, picked the sites, and kept the forest it wanted forested. The conservationist behind it was careful about the claim, saying “It’s a small step”<\/strong> and that the value of these projects is the concept.<\/p>\n The global figure behind all of this landed in a research journal last year, and it runs orders of magnitude past anything happening in Virginia.<\/p>\n Researchers went through public satellite and mine location data and counted every open pit patch on Earth larger than about 107,600 square feet<\/strong>, the smallest piece worth a real solar farm. They found 61,822, and regrowth marked nearly 40,000<\/strong> as already abandoned.<\/p>\n Together those patches cover about 18,500 square miles<\/strong>, which is Vermont and New Hampshire put together.<\/p>\n Cover all of it and the arithmetic comes to 4,764 terawatt hours<\/strong> a year. That is not a contribution toward the electricity the world is projected to want in 2050. It is the whole of it.<\/p>\n A number that large is a ceiling, not a plan. It assumes every patch is reachable, permitted, sound underfoot and near a line with room to spare<\/strong>, and many are none of those.<\/p>\n Spoil is awkward to build on, too. It settles unevenly under load, cut slopes erode, and old pits hold water that has to be managed first, much as a capped landfill<\/a> does before it carries panels.<\/p>\n The Virginia project shows the slower problem. It was announced five years ago with construction penciled in for two years back, and there has been no public word<\/strong> since about a shovel.<\/p>\n That is neither unusual nor a scandal. It is what a regulated utility project looks like from outside, and the underlying study<\/a> says plainly that site conditions vary more than any global total<\/strong> can show.<\/p>\n There is a second argument for this ground, and it is quieter than the megawatts. A graded bench left alone turns into rough grassland<\/strong>, which is the one habitat the eastern states have lost the most of, and the reason any of this is worth watching once the panels are up.<\/p>\n Reclaimed surface mines already carry some of that load. Ground nesting birds long gone from farm country turn up on old benches in the coalfields, and federal biologists have spent years studying how they use them<\/a>.<\/p>\n Solar does not deliver that by itself. A site mown to bare gravel helps nothing, which is why the state runs a voluntary scorecard on seed mixes, because the default is gravel and turf grass<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So the honest version is narrower than the headline number. The land is there and the sun reaches it every morning, but what lives under the panels is a separate decision<\/a>, made by whoever writes the planting plan.<\/p>\n Which is the part still open. The coal off that hillside was sunlight the forests caught 300 million years ago<\/strong>, and putting today’s sun back on the same slope is the easy half<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The ground on this hillside is not soil. It is crushed rock and spoil, graded flat by machines and packed hard enough to drive a truck across. Trees will not take root in it. A farmer would not touch it, a builder would have to dig it all out first, and it has sat like this … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":33082,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"coal scarred land","rank_math_title":"Solar farm plans keep landing on 1,200 acre strip mines instead of good farmland, and counting every scar like that worldwide turned up enough ruined ground to cover the whole planet's electricity by mid century","rank_math_description":"A 1,200-acre strip mine in Virginia's Wise County is becoming a 50 MW solar farm, and birds, monarchs and bumblebees are already colonizing the grassland","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why the worst land makes the best solar site<\/h2>\n
What 1,200 acres of it looks like<\/h2>\n
Where the number comes from<\/h2>\n
What the arithmetic leaves out<\/h2>\n
What grows back under the panels<\/h2>\n