Largest Farm to Grow Crops Under Solar Panels Proves To Be A Bumper Crop For Agrivoltaic Land Use

Start putting solar canopies over all these goddamn mostly empty parking lots we have everywhere. Completely wasted space otherwise and it’d provide some cover from the rain for people coming and going from their cars.

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Plus you'd lower the temperature of the vehicles, reducing air conditioning and decreasing fuel/battery use, which would further decrease emissions

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- No one ever brings this up, but the heat island effect might be diminished? Not sure how the math works out there.
  
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Or abandon the min parking reqs so developers can build something else there. But also solar panels where we actually need parking space

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- Yeah, build something other than a parking lot, and put a solar panel on top of that! 🧠
  
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- Most of those minimum parking requirements are based on bullshit anyways.
  
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This is one that seriously gets me as to why we don't do this more, it would make so much sense. Obvious benefits are power generation, but also when you consider, it would significantly reduce how scorching hot large carparks get in the sun, depending on the style of the solar canopy being built it could also massively reduce the amount of water flow onto the ground reducing some wear on the tarmac in addition to some hazards.

Also for places like the UK where we typically don't have huge amounts/extended periods of snow, as long as the canopy is sufficiently designed for the additional weight, you could ameliorate the need to salt the car parks, once again increasing the life of the tarmac.

It would also keep people's cars much cooler, in the sun, and make things generally a lot cooler below the canopy.

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- "Its too hard to maintain."
  
  "What if someone hits the pole holding up the panels?"
  
  "It costs more than clear cutting a forest to put the panels in." (True story)
  
  Lots of bullshit reason.
  
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- I work in municipal development.
  
  If it costs a quarter-penny more to build a better product, a developer will do anything they can to avoid it.
  
  I've had them flip out and demand to the City Manager that I be fired because they had to paint parking stripes. More than once.
  
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This seems to largely be a "retelling" of an original story from NPR from 2021. The original has significantly more information from actually interviewing the owner of the project.

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This is harder than it looks.

See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don't mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that's working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there's big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can't be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that's not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it'll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.

What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It's huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.

As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it'll keep the cars cooler in summer.

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There are plenty of crops that have to be tended and harvested by hand: Most green leafy vegetables for example.

This opens those fields to dual use alongside power generation, which might reduce agricultural use of fossil fuels, and provide shade for field workers which is especially dangerous with climate change raising heat levels.

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What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots.

Most of those parking lots shouldn't exist in the first place. They should be turned into actually-useful space by putting dense, walkable buildings on them, then the solar panels should go on top of that.

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- Often times, the only option for smaller communities that are car dependent is just a multi-level garage that has a smaller footprint. But many don't have the demand for downtown commercial real estate that would help it make financial sense.
  
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So we need levitating solar panels. Got it.

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Solar Power World reports that Namaste selected sophisticated trackers to follow the sun across the sky, and mounted them according to strategically-measured heights and spacing to allow enough sun to reach the crops below. For each row mounted 8-feet off the ground, providing enough room to drive a tractor under, two were mounted at 6-feet.

Now finished, the electricity Kominek’s farm generates is enough to power 300 private homes, 50 of which are now his energy clients—including the city, and the county. Underneath there are tomatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beets, lettuce, kale, chard, and peppers.

Others have built them over pasture.

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Might be a crazy idea but maybe they can just use smaller tractors. I'm not sure if we have the technology to build Smaller tractors. But since they are needed maybe there could be a Lot of R&D to make a tractor that fits under the space available in these installations.

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- Small tractors are easy. The issue is efficiency. The big tractor is big because the tool it pulls behind it covers ~10 rows per pass. You can easily build a small tractor that does 1-2 rows per pass, but that means you need a lot more passes, which means doing anything takes a lot longer.
  
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In the future, it would be cool to see the steel frames facilitate rails that equipment could ride on and work the field beneath. Perhaps it could even be moved by water pressure, since similar equipment in the shape of large scale sprinklers already exists.

This might never come to pass, because indoor farming can produce the same amount of some crops and grains as the equivalent of 40x as much land.

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- That, or design panels that can be rotated over the combine as it passes, and back into place. I'm thinking driverless combine that wouldn't look anything like the ones we have now. I also have no idea what this would entail.
  
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- Yeah I think indoor farming / vertical farming is going to be the ultimate answer. Much more efficient in every way, including resource use, water, pesticide, etc.
  
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Agro-solar is a win win. Solar is the fastest and the most economic energy to deploy.

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- Yields with solar are crop dependent. Some crops like berries yield more with solar panel cover.
  
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- The combination has significantly higher yield than the respective reductions though. A farmer applying it will make less money on farming, but much more money in total. But given teh increase in temperatures and droughts due to climate change, the combination can secure yields, as it keeps plants from getting sunburnt and drying out as fast.
  
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Agrivoltaics is the combined use of solar panels and agriculture under the panels that together use less energy and produce more crops. It can also provide shade for livestock.

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I guess it would depend on the crops, but wouldn't it somewhat limit the use of farming equipment. I assume you're not going to fit a tractor in the field with those panels and supports.

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It depends on the type of supporting structure for the panels. In Germany a company built it tall enough to use their normal farm equipment: Image

I've seen pictures of massive tractors pulling several ploughs side by side in the US, that would most likely not work with this, but there are plenty of solutions for anything on a slightly smaller scale.

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The original story from NPR says that they're able to drive their tractor between the panels. It's interesting that the project could essentially be described as an end run around a historic designation though. They put 1.2 MW of solar up, and from reading between the lines it seems that's how they're making money, the farming seems to be much more of a side thing that they're required to do for historic reasons.

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It's usually permanent pasture grazing that's mixed with solar panels. Take low value land that doesn't support the use of large equipment, add value with panels and get free shade for livestock.

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There's lots of startups making smaller agile AI powered electric robotics for agriculture. Would pair well with a farm like this.

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As this is not mentioned, is it possible to extend the system by collecting rainwater falling on solar panels ?

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The rainwater would fall off the slanted panels and fall onto the plants.

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- What is you installed a gutter? And made the down pipe go into a bucket
  
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This is so cool!

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Possibly a stupid question, but is there anything toxic in the solar panels or their infrastructure that could contaminate the plants or soil below? Particularly if the panels were damaged in, say, extreme weather, but also as a result of general wear and tear. I'm thinking heavy metal dust, carcinogenic liquid components, that sort of thing. As per the article this seems like it could be a good land use pairing, but not if it renders the soil unfit for agriculture due to a buildup of contamination.

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Not an expert, but my gut reaction is not really. The panels themselves are largely glass, aluminum and silicon, with fairly small amounts of doping agents. There are electronics but since they're outside they're largely encased in something, wiring which would be plastic and copper or possibly aluminum, and then the structure itself which is going to be steel and concrete.

Solar panels are significantly more sturdy than one would think given they are essentially a giant piece of glass. They're usually rated to 12mm hail or more, which would normally absolutely devastate a crop. They don't really go bad either they just become less efficient over time. There's no moving parts to wear, no liquids, and in some designs very little in the way of electronics to go bad.

Essentially, I wouldn't be surprised if there would be more harmful contamination from a diesel tractor driving around in the field or from a nearby coal power plant than from any kind of solar array as long as it didn't have like, lead legs or something.

That being said, these kind of projects have been shown a lot but they're unlikely to be used in most large scale farming - they usually interfere with any machines used to plant or harvest, and are only really well suited to a few crops. Parking lots are a much easier target for this type of solar project.

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- Parking lots or at least literally any public space that still refuses to become a third space or plant enough native plants/trees.
  
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most electronics have lead, i think thatd be the main thing .

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- Not really. Not for the last 20 years.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive
  
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I've heard of the panels burning down making fhe field unsafe for use in the future

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- That's not a thing.
  
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- Do you have any more information on this? A quick search largely just shows results about how firefighters need to be careful since the panels can look bad but still be producing voltage and are a shock hazard.
  
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Ooh so it’s mainly a way to dodge regulations so you can use land designated for farming to make money by generating electricity.

That makes sense, because a much more practical way to install solar is above open air car parking…

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It works really well, so how is it a dodge? Is watering crops also a dodge?

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- It's a dodge since the farm mentioned is historic farmland. They aren't allowed to stop farming and just put up solar.
  
  When Kominek approached Boulder County regulators about putting up solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland.
  
  In Kominek's case, he literally bet the farm in order to finance the roughly $2 million solar arrays.
  
  "We had to put up our farm as collateral as well as the solar array as collateral to the bank," he says. "If this doesn't work, we lose the farm."
  
  From: Original NPR story
  
  If anything it seems like a clever way around zoning. Reading between the lines it seems they view the crops as kind of a bonus, not half the point like the original article makes it seem.
  
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The plants provide a cooling effect, which makes solar more efficient. At the same time, plants are protected from hail and heavy rains. Water loss is reduced, as well. The shade isn't necessarily a downside, as some plants prefer it.

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- Transparent panels are a thing now too, if you can optimise your panels for the wavelengths your plants don't need that's even better.
  
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You mean the parking we should get rid of because cars ruin cities? Nah.

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