Hi,
I took some vacation days to attend a conference this March ’23 that I’d like to share with anyone interested.
The first North American Agrivoltaics Conference, Solar Farm Summit 2023, was an amazing display of what is happening and what is possible around the world.
There are two broad categories of Agrivoltaics; Solar First and Food First.
It was very cool to hear many of the federal and state agencies and advocacy groups discuss ongoing programs from NREL (National Renewable Energy Association) and the DOE (Department of Energy) as well as some of the individuals who worked on CEJA (Clean Energy Jobs Act) in Illinois.
I learned that all 131 gigawatts of the 55 community solar sites being built in Illinois have recently decided to follow guidelines to define themselves as agrivoltaics through choosing pollinator friendly seed mixes and some are trying to grow hay. Many vegetation management companies were present at the conference as well as other regional leaders in the space. These sites are producing environmental benefits to the surrounding farmland through the ecological health of biodiversity of plants, insects and improved water table health. They are also prepared to graze sheep through planting pollinators, ideal pasture forage for these livestock. Over the life of the project the health of the soil on site will improve greatly and the surrounding farmland will see the benefits of a healthier ecology. This approach is considered solar first because it prioritizes maximum solar production and employs no modifications to existing solar installation methods. Sites up to 1,300 acres are being managed by sheep across the country with no real limit on how large a site can be. Silicon Ranch is among the largest operations as well as Gray’s Lambscaping. Apparently there is also a high demand for sheep in the US that is being met by foreign imports of meat products. Solar grazing can meet that demand while being a source of local employment for new farmers shepherding sheep and provide local food security to rural areas that mostly grow inedible corn and soy. Sheep produce fiber and dairy as well.
Food first projects can offer better solutions to other agricultural needs than currently exist.
Active projects around the world are showing that solar can actually benefit crops growing below them. Many high value market garden crops like grapes, fruit trees, berries of all kinds, lettuce and more face heat stress without additional costs to protect them from the sun during the peak heat of the day. Single axis trackers run North-South and are well suited to allow enough light to reach these crops while benefiting them with cooler temperatures that promote healthier growth. This shade also helps to retain moisture and forms the basis of a symbiotic relationship that also benefits the solar production. The microclimate created by the plants and the solar panels is cooler due to the transpiration of water through the plants that then is retained by the solar modules above. The solar array also produces more energy in these cooler temperatures. Jack’s Solar Garden has received the most attention for their project in Boulder, Colorado with a community garden below their community solar site. Solar Farm Summit also featured several start ups who have developed agrivoltaic projects across the country using specialized racking structures that allow more light to pass through and are mounted higher than a typical ground mounted solar project.
One speaker presented their work with rural communities in India who face water shortages in their rice crops. Elevated solar installations improved their rice yields while using less water and producing more power from the same solar modules installed in more conventional systems over bare land.
The American Farmland Trust was there speaking to the benefits of Agrivoltaics for solar development in the US. Many farmers are actively fighting projects they see as encroaching on their rural character, seeing solar as an industrial development. With the perception (and reality) that solar improves farmland and can continue to be agriculturally productive farmers are more likely to embrace projects in their community rather than obstruct the new construction.
I received much encouragement for my carbon sequestration plans from people I met at the conference. Agrivoltaics can pair with regenerative agriculture practices that store carbon in the soil.
One main leader of Agrivoltaics is the American Solar Grazing Association. Rotational grazing of sheep qualifies as regenerative agriculture and adds carbon to the soil as well as other ecological benefits. There was consensus that carbon credits for this actively are not yet viable but the potential exists at some point in the future. People are being encouraged to establish a baseline of carbon soil content through soil sample testing and it may be possible to monetize the benefits of carbon capture after several years of ecological land management if future tests demonstrate an increase in carbon content. PFAS are chemicals that human industry has produced that remain in the environment for a very long time, also known as “forever chemicals”. Farmers have used sewage sludge to fertilize their fields and can be held liable for the PFAS they introduced to the land through this fertilization method. Agrivoltaics paired with regenerative agriculture has the potential to mitigate these PFAS and soil sample testing is needed to establish a baseline of before and after in order to both monitor and potentially monetize the benefit to the environment/society in order to create an incentive mechanism to clean up the pollution. Fungi are especially well suited to absorb toxins and heavy metals from the environment, concentrating them to be disposed of through further processing.
There were also very interesting discussions of the difficulty of interconnecting large projects to the grid and building new transmission lines needed for all the new renewables being built. One potential discussed was pairing large projects with large loads to avoid transmitting the power long distances and potentially building microgrids that reduce or eliminate interconnection requirements. Energy storage and flexible loads paired with agrivoltaic projects can empower the new manufacturing centers being developed due to the IRA and infrastructure bills recently passed. Industrial parks can operate as microgrids with flexible interconnection requirements that can connect to the larger grid at a later date to function as a grid balancing tool. Being able to build projects without waiting for the interconnection equipment and costs to the utility (sometimes multi year wait times and millions of dollars), empowers projects to be built at an accelerated rate with competitive costs due to falling energy storage and smart load controller costs. It’s possible to utilize used electric car batteries to act as stationary energy storage to avoid supply chain constraints on new energy storage products. The Sol Ark Inverter is perfect for these microgrid applications able to be paired with a flexible range of different battery chemistries and also able to pair with a range of other solar products AC coupled or with generator backup integrated. It’s possible to use biogas or syngas to run generators and operate these backup generator systems as carbon negative if paired with other carbon removal systems with the carbon neutral gasification or anaerobic digester inputs. Microgrids are a powerful tool to empower a new generation of industrial and agricultural centers around the world or even powering off world colonies with circular economies harnessing the elemental molecular economy of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen as water, air, soil, food, and fuel.
I met a couple guys launching a crypto mining DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) that is developing a solar farm paired with Bitcoin mining. Their project is called Solar Farm Access. Using batteries this set up can help balance the grid as a flexible load and generate incredible wealth. Check out Energy Web Chain and the Crypto Climate Accords too. They are both spin offs from the Rocky Mountain Institute who I became a big fan of from their excellent reporting and studies in DER (distributed Energy resources).
Industrial feedstocks can be sourced from biomass grown using agrivoltaics methods and employ BECCS (biomass to energy with carbon capture sequestration). Ethanol plants are receiving a lot of attention for carbon capture potential but gasification and anerobic digestors have more potential as we phase out gasoline through electrification of transportation. Literally all products made using petrochemicals can be synthetized using natural sources with enough clean energy. Ammonia production in particular pairs well with agrivoltaics considering it is the most consumed fertilizer chemical in the world. Syngas, biogas, methanol, methane, ammonia and hydrogen can all pair with large wind/solar installations and using electrochemical processes produce carbon negative products by using biomass as a source of carbon for the chemical engineering process. The carbon capture topic is vast and complex so I’ll have to write up something else on my research and plans for that sometime.
SolarEdge was a main sponsor of the event and featured SolarGik, a racking manufacturer SolarEdge acquired several years ago who has developed agrivoltaic projects in Israel. Their approach is similar to ATI and NexTracker who are the current industry leaders, but they have made some improvements to their design that benefits both agrivoltaics and conventional large scale utility solar. Their system is lighter and able to be mounted higher with less steel than the others. Also, rather than very long rows that do not conform to the contour of the land, they focus on shorter tables that are better able to follow uneven slopes. They demonstrated the ability to install utility scale projects on topographies that other systems wouldn’t be able to. They have also installed their trackers integrated into greenhouse structures and the roofs of commercial/agricultural buildings.
SolarEdge also presented a software solution they called SOMA to integrate a wide range of sensors and real time grid monitoring for smart responsive management of energy assets. The tracking algorithm can optimize an agrivoltaic system for food production by tilting the panels away from the sun during clipping events, when there is more DC being produced than the inverter can convert to AC. This improves the life of the solar panel by reducing heat stress and can be programmed to accommodate the needs of different crops. There is also huge potential for this type of software to predict the needs of the grid and utilize energy storage and flexible loads to stabilize the grid with a much higher ratio of intermittent sources like wind and solar using far fewer batteries and improve the power quality of the grid to be much more efficient while constantly maximizing the production of value. They are also working on a combiner box level optimizer for whole string MPPT optimization rather than a 1:1 or 2:1 optimizer.
I really liked a rainwater collection system integrated into an Agrivoltaic racking designed by another Israeli company Trigo. Check them out on YouTube.
The conference discussed water scarcity a lot and how agrivoltaics can literally transform arid/ semi arid environments into lush productive grasslands or farmlands. We can reverse desertification through implementing ecological systems within solar arrays and improve food and energy security around the world as climate change continues to impact our environment.
I imagine farms in the future will be stewards of ecology while producing food, energy, and harnessing the infinitely recyclable elements of the air and soil to make all the same products we currently consume in our society.
There was so much to see at the solar farm summit that I can’t share it all here so shoot me a message or grab me on lunch sometime if you want to hear more.
-Dan Schmidt
daniel.schmidt1089@gmail.com
P.S. If you are interested in Carbon Capture, check out Airminers Boot up. It’s a free online course with discussion groups and abundant resources about the current state of the carbon capture industry. I took the course over a year ago and will be going through it again soon so ask me about that too if you’re interested.
Something many people don’t realize is that even if we were 100% clean energy immediately today, global warming would continue for the rest of our lives and the ice caps would potentially still totally melt with over 200 feet of sea level rise displacing over 1 billion people from their homes. The only way to reverse global warming at this point is to actively remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. It’s technically possible but requires a total shift in every aspect of human industry for which most solutions already exist. This all requires vast amounts of energy. The Earth receives millions of times the energy it consumes in a year every day from the sun so don’t worry, it’s very doable.
Isthmus Evolving 