Amber Waves Of--Solar Panels?

Government officials in California are not satisfied with destroying the food basket of the Central Valley by cutting off the water to save a fish. Now it's time to destroy agriculture in the north by replacing fertile farmland with solar panels. Yolo and Sacramento counties are not affected by the water shutoff since they are at the headwaters that formerly fed the farms to the south.

Those of us who attended UC Berkeley in the 60s used to refer to our little sister, UC Davis (Yolo County) semi-affectionately as the Cal Aggies. The university was devoted largely to agriculture although it did have full curricula in other fields. The school was instrumental in increasing farm fertility throughout the state, including many of the proposals for water projects that later increased agricultural productivity throughout the state. The City of Davis today is in the forefront of political correctness, largely as a result of the heavy population of UC Davis students who don't even faintly resemble their counterparts from the 60s.

Currently, the City of Davis is considering plans from politically-connected developers to turn hundreds of acres of Yolo County lush farmland into solar farms. Ironically, one of the reasons given for eliminating the farmland is that the solar panels would provide a considerable portion of the power needed to operate--you guessed it--the farms. Is it just me, or does that sound like the old medical gag where the doctor informs the family that they had to kill the patient to save him?

The plan that the Davis city council will soon vote on is proposed by developers Angelo K. Tsakopoulos and Phil Angelides. California political junkies should recognize the name Angelides. Angelides was a longtime far left member of the Democratic Party, starting with his antiwar activism in the mid-60s. After helping to secure the nominations of George Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer he went on to his own career as a politician, being elected State Treasurer in 1998 and again in 2002. In that position he was in charge of the California Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) nd the California State Teachers Retirement System, which are the major contributors to California's looming bankruptcy.

Best of all, Angelides was the leader of the "Green Wave Initiative" which convinced the legislature to invest $950,000,000.00 in environmental businesses and research. Are you seeing a connection here? Angelides has been out of office just long enough to be allowed by law to deal directly with governmental agencies outside of conflict of interest and incompatibility of office rules. California is sounding more like Chicago all the time.

The Yolo County Board of Supervisors and the Regional Planning Commission are not quite so far to the left as the City of Davis, so there's no guarantee that Tsakopoulos and Angelides will succeed. But these are not sane times, in California anyway. The best the Yolo supervisors can come up with so far is to require that the proposed Davis ordinance be modified somewhat. Instead of simply allowing the developers to plump down their solar panels anywhere they can bribe or coerce the farmers into giving up their highly-productive farms, the County wants the applicants to certify that there is no non-prime farmland in the affected area for the installation of the panels. Yeah, that will stop them.

Fortunately for agriculture, the farmers and farm workers in the county outnumber the money-grubbing eco-weenie politicians, developers, and radical UC Davis students. But there are also the state regulations working against the farmers. I've mentioned before that the state requires that private and public energy-providers must derive 33% of their power from renewable sources no later that 2020. That goal is ridiculous, but it gives the much-subsidized "green energy" people a strong argument for acting in haste.

The big push hasn't yet affected adjacent Sacramento County, since there were plenty of non-fertile areas to build on. But that land is disappearing fast, and the county will soon be in the same situation as Yolo County. The Tsakopoulos/Angelides initial project would create an 80 megawatt facility that would eat up 688 acres of present farmland. And that's only the initial project. They have many more up their sleeve. In nearby Placer County, they have proposed a 220 megawatt solar farm that they say would power 75,000 homes. At least there they are running into opposition from competing environmentalists who want to turn farmland into wildlife reserves.

These projects appear to have some Democratic opposition in the state legislature, but it's more apparent than real. State Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) says she is concerned, and intends to introduce legislation that would provide incentives for the developers to put their solar panels in non-fertile areas. In other words, make an already heavily-subsidized industry more heavily-subsidized.

Green advocates profess extremely strong "mitigation" standards to protect the environment. How about some extremely strong mitigation standards which protect the farms? California is already bleeding jobs, and this will only worsen the problem by eliminating farms in favor of green suburbs and wildlife reserves. Mitch Sears, Davis's "sustainability programs manager" says he is addressing the issue. He wants the farmers to consider mingling agriculture within the rows of solar panels. Oh, brother--is he kidding? Has he ever tried to plow a field without the impediment of rows of touchy solar panels? Believe me, that's hard enough.

Says Sears: "Solar is in Davis's DNA. It's the culture of the community. We're trying to work toward lower energy use and increased renewables. This is the scale that it is going to take to achieve that." That DNA pool doesn't extend back even forty years, when the only green the locals were concerned with was the lush green of the bumper crops being produced throughout the area. Concurrently, the UC Davis Aggies are producing far more lawyers than farmers. Pity.