The New Yorker:

Solar fields turn out to be ideal for pollinators, too.

By Bill McKibben

I had a long way to go with wasps and hornets,” Tawnya Kiernan told me, as her husband, Mike Kiernan, drove us north along Vermont’s iconic Route 100, past the ski town of Stowe; it was late August, and a few trees were showing just the faintest tinge of color. “They seemed so aggressive and mean,” she added. “They were not good ambassadors for pollination. But, the more you learn, the cooler they are.” What followed was a discourse on hyperparasitism, by which some wasps lay eggs in insects that themselves are parasitic on other insects, a process that sounds disheartening until you recollect that, for all that parasitism, these wasps—and flies, and bees, and butterflies—are also pollinating, which is to say finding ways to coöperate across species, indeed kingdoms, in a spectacular display of mutualism. “The pollinators move seeds around, in turn they get the energy to raise their young,” Mike said. They do two things at once.

We pulled off the two-lane highway and onto a short farm road, and then got out at an access gate along a wire fence that enclosed an eleven-acre field of solar panels. The reason we were there is that three years ago, when Encore Renewable Energy—a Burlington-based developer of solar arrays—set up the panels, it contracted with a nonprofit that the Kiernans started, called Bee the Change, to seed pollinator-attracting plants that are native to the area in the rows between them. The organization’s small crew tends more than twenty fields like this across the state, weeding and, at least once a year, mowing what they have planted so that it doesn’t grow so high it shades the panels. Most of the attention to “agrivoltaics”—use of one piece of land for both farming and for producing solar energy—has gone to more common agricultural practices, such as letting sheep graze between the panels. But at least fifteen states, including big players like Illinois, maintain solar-pollinator scorecards, which are used as accountability measures in the solar-development community. The theory is that we face two crises—climate change and the rapid loss of biodiversity—and that the same patch of land might be used to address them both.

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