Get ready to lose your farms to big solar. The big solar farms are causing soil erosion in the heartland, i.e. the Midwest, which has some of the world's best farmland.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/solar-capacity-grows-americas-most-101203545.htmlThe greens are utterly nuts and I can't stand them anymore. Indiana, which is mentioned at length in this story, has seen very sharp declines in coal production in the last few months due to the troubles at Sunrise Coal, whose Oaktown Fuels Mines 1 and 2 are Indiana's biggest coal producer.
Indiana coal is in the Illinois Coal Basin, which has maybe four West Virginias worth of coal, all of it thermal quality bituminous and most of it in relatively thick seams for underground mines: five to eight feet thick are common in that area. That's not super high coal for underground, but it's farm from being "low coal," which is commonly defined as less than four feet thick in the U.S., meaning miners crawl around all shift. The Illinois coal seams are about par for the course for thickness, and since the Illinois Basin has bituminous coals, they are quite energy dense -- also in about the moderate range for bituminous coal energy density.
In my view, the Illinois Coal Basin is one of the most perfect in its own way: vast, high quality, strictly thermal, unless high tech were used to make its coal suitable for coking. This basin could fuel the whole USA for probably a century or more, but instead the land above these coal beds is being used to build giant solar farms that tear up the topsoil.
When will this green madness end in the West? There is so much money now invested in it that I don't think the momentum can be stopped in my lifetime.
