Finland:

> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/sand-battery-polar...

That doesn't really make sense, you need the ability for significant overproduction before you start thinking about storage. The other way around is just wasting money. We are just starting to get there, but still have significant fossil fuels that we can replace even by just building out solar more and just having more over production.

> They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels.

I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.

It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.

> My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds

I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.

You need to read about agrivoltaics. This is being used to huge effect elsewhere in the world to improve farming & soil. Here's an example from China:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

The standard alternative to a solar farm is a monoculture corn farm producing ethanol. That monoculture corn farm regularly gets sprayed, plowed and harvested, each time decimating its animal population. Your solar farm is probably filled with a diverse selection of grass and weeds, supporting a far higher animal population than that corn farm.

Technology Connections did the math on this and found that if you ONLY replaced fields used for ethanol production with solar panels, the amount of space would be enough solar panels to power the entire power grid in the US.

I cry more when I think about the amount of farmland being used for bioethanol, something which is barely energy positive. If the US would switch the subsidies and regulations propping that up to propping up solar, it would easily free up a huge amount of land.

on that easy fix - the land under solar panels can still be used for farming or ranching

Sure but compare that to the amount of land used for oil and gas extraction. The difference is that mines and drills can only go where there's stuff to extract and solar panels can go anywhere. Including near residential areas. That's also due to the fact that they are so environmentally neutral.