Solarpunk technology

Okay, and I see a thousand places where I would consider solar panels well placed. Every house, every shed, parking place, road .... should have panels on top. Some mountain areas can have them. They can provide shade for useful crops in more arid places. All of these are small scale and combined uses though, and the companies currently promoting and building solar here in Southern Europe are buying up farm and pasture land instead and filling that with panels, in a way that makes no sense.

I think it has to do with the way subsidies and grants for projects are organized. It's very difficult and complex to submit a mixed project to ask for EU money for your project. You can't go and say "I want financing for this project, where I have these few fruit and olive trees, 50 500W panels, blueberry plants and garden under the panels, and fifty sheep on 15ha land." The guys in the subsidy office will give you that toothache face and go "errr" and what you end up with is projects with 1000 panels and nothing else, or 100000 trees of one kind and nothing else, or 1000 sheep and nothing else. Each business artificially kept alive on behest of enormous energy and work inputs - blueberry plants with elaborate shading structures. Tree rows kept clean with help of machinery and pesticide. Solar panel rows cleaned in the same way. Trees artificially fertilized. Everything separated becomes mega energy intensive, very wasteful, but bureaucracy likes it simple, and people can't or don't want to move without EU financing.