For construction, a company comes in installs a bunch of panels, a battery backup, equipment for interconnection with the grid. It can be done relatively quickly. Thanks to “economies of scale” all of the hardware is less expensive as well.
Maintenance can be provided by a small team, rather than traveling around to individual homes. Here’s part of the team that maintains “my” solar panels. I’d hate to see them climbing up on roofs all day long…
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=solar+grazing&iar=videos
Some people are concerned about changing a farmer’s fields into a “solar farm.” I’d be much more concerned about growing crops for “biofuels.” And, as it turns out growing crops and producing electricity are not mutually exclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=agrvoltaics&iar=videos
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01195-3
EDITORIAL
15 April 2026
What China’s Great Green Wall can teach the world
Efforts to boost tree cover and restore degraded land globally need stable funding and time to learn from failure.
In Nature this week, researchers describe an initiative that is greening some of the world’s drylands — including deserts, shrublands and other water-scarce regions. The Great Green Wall of China, officially called the Three-North Shelterbelt programme, is one of the largest and longest-running projects of its kind. Outside China, the initiative is less well known than other programmes, such as Africa’s Great Green Wall. But, as Lilin Zheng, a researcher in geographical information systems at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Design in China and colleagues write,
the project is succeeding whereas other green-wall initiatives are struggling. The programme’s strategies need to be studied — not only for land-restoration initiatives elsewhere in China, but also for those in other parts of the world, such as Africa.
…
For around a decade now, China’s desert regions have been home to large solar-power and wind farms. Green-wall planners are now planting vegetation around these renewable-energy facilities. The solar panels also provide shade, trap moisture, lower ground temperatures and help to reduce evaporation (
Z. Xia et al. J. Environ. Manag. 324, 116338; 2022).
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