Cultivated fields the size of Gangnam converted to pv farms during Moon faa

A nice solar farm (Yonhap)

President Moon Jae-in‘s aggressive push for electricity has incentivized increasingly more maqui berry farmers to repurpose their state as solar farms, contest concerns over South Korea’s food security.

According to Ministry on Trade, Industry and An energy source data obtained by Agent. Yoon Young-seok of the middle opposition People Power Spacial occasion, farmland amounting to the scale Gangnam — the third leading district in Seoul , has been transformed into solar farming over the past five years.

In 2016, solar farms worth 206MW replaced farmland. After Silent celestial body took office, however , this was accelerated, the understand spiking from 285MW inside 2017, 541MW in 2018, 903MW in 2019 to 1, 008MW in 2020. Merely put, a total of 2, 945MW using solar farms took my foyer of farmland over the five-year period.

Anchored in calculations by the Korea Electric Agency, a 1, 000MW descendencia farm requires 13. merely two square kilometers of stretch of land. This means that 2, 945MW would want approximately 39 square mls of land, which is like the size of Gangnam.

“In 2019, To the south Korea‘s food self-sufficiency selling price was 45. 8 p . c. It’s questionable whether ruling farmland with solar power certainly is the right situation, ” Yoon said.

Industry sources suggest number of government policies gave natal to the crisis. In 2018, the government strengthened regulations for the installing solar panels on mountainsides to prevent deforestation.

This triggered solar power companies to shift their care about farmland in rural locations, which is more expensive than land on the mountains, but still cheap because of the generous solar subsidies given by the government.

By Kim Byung-wook ( kbw@heraldcorp. com )

Cultivated fields the size of Gangnam converted to pv farms during Moon faa
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