Here's the reality of a solar complex out in Byron, New York, where topsoil has been stripped, bulldozed, and piled across the street from solar arrays that are sitting in standing water.
Drainage retention ponds have been dug to spoil the natural drainage of the fields. Looks like they're doing a really great job of keeping that water drained!
That's what happens when you remove a land's topsoil and compact the ground below it. It's also what happens when you remove natural grasses and native plants that have 6 to 15 foot long root systems. Everything floods.
It takes 600 to 1,000 years for 6 inches of topsoil to form. These commercial solar builders strip the land of that topsoil and dump it in a pile, pictured below. They don't "spread out the soil" or reuse it elsewhere. Anywhere you've read that is utopian propaganda that does not exist at a single ORES solar complex in Upstate New York.
This is what these industrial zones look like instead. All for pathetic amounts of power that are unreliable, intermittent, and inaccessible when we need it most during the winter.
Your electric bill hasn't gone down. In fact, it's going to keep going up. The state needs billions of dollars to court these foreign developers with subsidies, credits, contracts, and promises.
This is the biggest scam ever peddled on the American public.
This land will never be farmed again.