The local indian reservation has a pretty good sized array. Also outside of Vegas there are some huge facilities, multi square miles.

There's an attempt for a chinese company to put a large array on the hill across the valley from us - hence my increasing urgency to get our house sold before that eyesore destroys property values.

My farm lives off of wind and solar energy. The company that installed my wind turbine with a website and business guarantee that they had been doing it for 18 years and they serviced their wind turbines, did not service their/my wind turbine when it went down because all they were now was massive solar arrays that received huge government grants and tax abatements.

in my area, with the government tax perks, the farmers covered their barn roofs with solar panels. Industry with land filled their empty parcels with panels. Farms rimmed the edges of their fields. ALL of those type instances were to reduce their own consumption.

Homeowners who fell for it had two reasons - lower their personal costs and sell the excess back to the utilities. First part worked. Second part, not so much.

Ken,

I’ve always wondered...on a solar farm, how deep do you plant the solars? :)

Brad, plant it below the frost line. Otherwise they heave and twist like ones planted near me. That makes ugly even uglier.

Ken, in my area they are usually put on farmland that has easy access to power lines. The rent they pay is offset to the owners bill, and the excess that is sold might be enough to pay for the taxes. But the local government has to approve the site, usually requires plantings, screenings, access roads to meet specs etc. They are also requiring a decommission plan and bond.

Our city just contemplated leasing some land to a solar farm but decided against it, based on the uncertainty of what would happen when the lease (and the panels) expired. If the subsidies dry up or the panels don't turn out to be profitable, the company could go out of business. I can't even imagine how you'd dispose of large quantities of obsolescent solar panels.

Solar panels last a long while. Mine are going on 14 years and still do well. Power companies here limit the size of solar array you can have, you can run meter backwards and bank energy for 90 days, but then you lose it. If they do buy back it's 10 cents on the dollar. Finally, the system has to go offline in a power failure as they don't want any power flow while working on lines. So you cannot have power in case of power failure. All are negatives to me.