It’s called “Conserv-voltaics”, and I’m seeing more examples every week.
Ecologists walked matching 200-meter transects across solar farms planted for wildlife in England’s East Anglian Fens and counted 35 birds on each solar pass against 12 on the cropland beside it, corn buntings and yellowhammers among the birds now working the rows between the panels
Solar farms designed for wildlife are harboring nearly three times more birds than the conventional crops they replaced, challenging long-held assumptions about renewable energy and nature.
Journal of Arid Environments – Desert kit foxes use solar energy facilities in southern California:
Our results show that the desert kit foxes we tracked ranged into solar facilities and used habitats there extensively, even daily, both during and post-construction. Thus, solar energy development may be compatible with conservation for this subspecies. Active management of solar facilities that increases their accessibility to wildlife may produce further conservation benefits for desert kit foxes.
In addition to supplying clean energy, solar panels have a surprisingly positive impact on degraded land and local wildlife. The panels block the sun, allowing the soil to retain more moisture to the point where China’s largest solar farm is changing the desert around it, turning a once dry landscape green with plant life. Animals can also benefit from solar farms, including the San Joaquin kit fox, an endangered species that lives in central California, whose population faces many threats, including habitat loss and predators.
Some San Joaquin foxes have found a safe haven within the Topaz Solar Farm and California Valley Solar Ranch, both of which were built on their natural habitat. Researchers examined how the facilities impacted local foxes in two separate studies carried out from 2014–2017, with results published in a 2019 report (link will download a PDF to your device). They found that solar farms’ fences kept out common predators like bobcats and coyotes, animals too large to fit underneath. Additionally, the solar panels provided shielding from birds of prey like the golden eagle. It seems to be effective, too.
Passive ultrasonic recorders were set over the panels and over paired farm fields nearby, logging each echolocation pass without anyone present in the dark. The comparison was about as direct as field work gets: the same landscape, the same nights, one microphone under panels and one under open sky.
Average weekly overall bat activity was roughly 50 percent higher within the ecovoltaic sites than the reference sites in the first half of the monitoring season. Not one freak week, but a sustained pattern through May and June, the months that cover the peak active and pup rearing season for bats.
There were no weeks in which activity was statistically greater on the reference sites, suggesting that bats in the Midwestern US do not avoid ecovoltaic solar sites at all.