If you’ve never heard of the term agrivoltaics, don’t worry, you’re not the only one. This 2011 term was coined by German physicist Adolf Goetzberger and Armin Zastrow, a team that conceived of this technique back in 1981. This refers to a technique where the harvesting of agriculture is combined with solar energy, increasing the performance of both these things.
With planted crops growing beneath solar panels, plants grow at a superior rate and in an improved matter, requiring less watering at that. Plus the solar panels also produce more electricity at the same time, leaving farmers, solar businesses, and researchers incredibly excited for the future.
Within the United States, one particular farm that is running using agrivoltaics is called Jack’s Solar Garden located in Boulder, Colorado. On the farm, you’ll find farmers on tractors traveling underneath the rows of solar panels, with others sowing, tending, or harvesting the surrounding gardens. While some of these areas are used for research, others are used for commercial purposes.
One of the men behind Jack’s is named Byron Kominek. Originally having a career with the Peace Corps, and with USAID, he is now considered one of the most innovative farmers within the United Sates. His 24-acre farm, which has been a family business for the past 50 years, which has been growing and harvesting alfalfa and hay since his grandfather, Jack, had bought it all those years ago. This is how the thriving ‘solar garden’ got its name.
When Kominek took over his family business, he found out that it was losing money and worse yet, the country wasn’t interested in his solar-powered idea for the farm.
He explained to NPR, “They said, ‘land’s for farming, so go farm it. I said, well, we weren’t making any money, you all want to be 100% renewable at some point so how about we work together and sort this out.”
Allowed to Transform the Farm
Alongside Boulder city and county, Kominek was able to get permission to build the agrivoltaic solar farm on his grandfather’s land.
Knowing he needed to work with the best, he chose Namaste Solar, one of the expert solar-panel firms to help him plan out and develop the 3,200 panels over one of his main paddocks. Although Namaste had built a variety of different types of arrays before, this would be the first time for them to construct one so high above row crops.
According to Solar Power World, they explain that Namaste used advanced trackers to follow the sun across the sky, making sure to mount them strategically, according to measured heights and spacing to make sure that the crops below get enough sun. For every row that’s mounted 8-feet off the ground, it provides enough space underneath it to drive a tractor. Meanwhile, two others were mounted at 6-feet.
Now that the project has been completed, the farm manages to generate enough electricity to power 300 private homes, 50 of which happen to be his very own energy clients with some from the city and the county. A variety of crops are grown such as turnips, squash, kale, beets, tomatoes, chard, lettuce, peppers and carrots.
Despite the project being a complete leap of faith, its success has been major and now they are reaping the incredible rewards, hopefully enough pay back their loan on the farm.
Kominek shared, “We had to put up our farm as collateral as well as the solar array as collateral to the bank. If this doesn’t work, we lose the farm.”
The Difference Between Agrivoltaics and Sun-Flowering
Making things a bit more difficult for Kominek is that while he was “betting the farm,” there was research being done within the country that was looking into the effectivity of agrivoltaics.
It was reported that some solar farms that use the same tactics were being used to grow native pollinators and pasture for grazing animals. Meanwhile in India, solar panels are also being built above canals where ‘they lose water through surface evaporation, cool the panels, and increase their efficiency.’
A study done in 2019 by the University of Arizona and the University of Maryland found that there were major benefits that came from combining solar panels and crops. When placed up above, these panels could be kept 16°F cooler by the evaporation from the crops below, which was enough to increase their energy generation by 2%.
Beneath the crops that were tested, there were 100% to 300% more productive – depending on the species – while the shade given by the solar panels lessened irrigation-water use by 15%, which resulted in a reduction of water consumption by at least 157 percent.
Moreover, the crops were also protected from major rain or hail by the panels placed overhead.
Within the last 8 years, agrivoltaic farms have grown in strength and size from just 5MW to 2.9GW. In fact, research done by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that if ‘just 1 million acres of farmland was covered in solar panels, the nation would meet its renewable energy goals.’ And hopefully this won’t be left as just research, but it will one day come to fruition.
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