By JOHN HAYWARD
A paper published in Science on Friday found that China’s rapid construction of solar panels has damaged the environment and reduced biodiversity, especially among birds, who have lost habitat space plus foraging and breeding grounds to the vast fields of photovoltaic cells.
The Science paper — produced by researchers from China, Vietnam, and the United States — began with the required genuflections towards the renewable energy industry but admitted that “clean energy also will have a large footprint on nature.”
Researchers studied over 2,000 counties in China and found those with the most solar panels experienced “reductions in bird diversity, primarily due to land conversion.”
“Land conversion” is the preferred euphemism for gigantic fields of solar panels gobbling up land that was formerly used for agriculture or environmental preserves. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has lately been promoting “agrivoltaics,” which means figuring out ways to continue growing crops, herding livestock, and building insect pollinator colonies in the shadow of massive solar panels.
The Science paper, on the other hand, rather bluntly concluded that solar farms ought to be built in deserts and other sparse terrain because they indisputably have a negative effect on vegetation, which in turn harms birds that rely on the vegetation for food and shelter.
China is building solar panels at a more rapid pace than other nations, so the negative effects on biodiversity became apparent quickly in the shadow of vast Chinese solar farms. China’s “solar footprint” now covers acreage “equivalent in size to the U.S. state of Rhode Island.”
One of the unexpected consequences of this development was a “paradox” called “inferior greening,” which means that solar panels tend to reduce diversity in the vegetation around them, producing “dense but ecologically homogenous vegetation.” This phenomenon is disastrous for birds, insects, and animals that cannot make good use of the newly homogenous plant life.
Researchers found solar panels also “fragment landscapes,” “create visual and thermal disturbances,” and wipe out bird habitats.
“Conversely, a growing body of work suggests potential co-benefits. The shaded, cooler, and more humid microclimates under photovoltaic panels can foster vegetation growth, potentially enriching food sources, and the physical structures can act as ‘habitat islands’ in degraded areas,” the paper added before admitting that none of these theoretical “benefits” seemed to have helped the birds getting shoved aside by China’s solar panel explosion.
