'Unstoppable force' of solar power propels world to 40% clean electricity

Okay, but put the panels on rooftops, not over that nice greenery.

The greenery may be perfectly fine with it. A lot of plants prefer shade, though of course that’s so they can still grow while shaded by trees.

You might say “put in a forest”, and I’d agree, but if that’s not going to happen then we might as well have the solar panels.

Putting solar on rooftops has at least one really unfortunate drawback, at least in Anglosphere nations with the fucked up common law system. Rooftop solar vests the owner with a claim to a right to the sun, and a way to stop people from building anything next to their house.

It's not "over" greenery. Land is entirely cleared of vegetation before panels are installed, including the occasional forest. Thousands of larger birds are killed by wind farms. Offshore wind farms are creating deserts for fish. Understandably, many prefer the good old days before the planet was being saved.

Why would they prefer the older methods that do more land damage and kill even more animals?

Putting solar panels over a grassland is a lot better for the environment than using the same area for agriculture. It's not like we have a lot of meadows just lying around unused that are used for solar projects. It's also a lot cheaper than installing panels on roofs.

However we should normalize panels over parking lots. Parking lots are just concrete wastelands, and while lifting the panels up over the cars requires a bit more material it is otherwise basically free real estate in areas with high electricity use (great to minimize grid losses)

Wait until you find out what fracking and oil drilling do.

DWs recent doc showed fish thriving around offshore farms and high success rates of preventing bird strikes by painting the blades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3395_T1N-fo

The greenery in question appears to be a tidal estuary (but I'm not 100% sure) and it also appears to be close to the downtown center of a city of 4 million people who all need some amount of electricity to live their daily lives. The ecosystem of the body of water on which these panels are installed is I would imagine relatively undisturbed by the solar PV - it's a question of aesthetics whether or not this habitat has been degraded.

My feeling is that these over-water panels generating a not-insignificant amount of power are an ideal compromise between the sprawl of the built environment of (Taizhou, China) and the natural ecosystem.

Can you cite the offshore wind farm induced fish desert? I’d be interested to understand the dynamics.

Have you seen what just mining coal does too a landscape? I don't think so.

The only reason for that is that coal isn't new and thus not reported on in the news.