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Colorado 'solar garden' is a farm under solar panels

355 points by akeck 5y ago

aquir 5y ago
Great! In England these lands are very often used as pastures for sheep. They're small enough to graze under it
Ericson2314 5y ago
The key part is: > But he soon discovered that the shade from the towering panels above the soil actually helped the plants thrive. That intermittent shade also meant a lot less evaporation of coveted irrigation water. And in turn the evaporation actually helped keep the sun-baked solar panels cooler, making them more efficient. Solar panels are still way over hyped in a stupid marginalist way, but polyculture has always been a good idea :).
- poulsbohemian 5y ago
  > Solar panels are still way over hyped in a stupid marginalist way Talk more about this, I’d be very interested to understand your thoughts
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    How's what I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219258 ? Conversely see what I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29212004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29212004 about more capital intensive power generation that if done at a good scale would drown current demand.
- cedilla 5y ago
  Solar is hardly over-hyped. It has always over-delivered since the first panels were built in the 19th century. No one predicted such a success and so incredibly low prices even 20 years ago. Could you explain what you mean by "hyped in a marginalist way"?
  - glogla 5y ago
    I've seen a lot of suggestions that solar can be used as the only energy source for humanity, that we don't need anything else, just build more solar! That's not realistic. Of course, the limitations that solar has are very much solvable, and having solar is better than not having it. Solar is important, and it is our future. But the solutions to solar's limitations seem to be in their infancy (new types of storage), hard to scale (battery storage), not really helpful (just build more coal and gas peakers!) or not considered at all. Which does not inspire confidence.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      You see this quite a lot. There does come a point where adding more solar … when a certain percentage of your production is already solar … there comes a point where more solar is a whole lot more expensive and less reasonable. But that’s really more of a “80% of our power is solar” problem and the US isn’t even at 3%. The percentage of usage which could be handled by solar is usually far underestimated. We don’t need to care about limitations of solar for a long long time.
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        I agree, however your point about 3% isn’t quite true. Look at the last 12 months rolling and estimated total solar and divide by total electricity and you get about 3.7%: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
      - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        Would 80% be ideal? I would imagine Solar would start getting iffy over 50%. Presumably you want a lot of hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear so you don't need a lot of batteries, and you have enough sources of power when the sun isn't shining. Maybe I'm being un-imaginative - but is anyone envisioning a global energy grid so we could have solar energy from Australia and Sahara shipped to North America during our night - and back to Asia and Europe from the Southwest during our day?? ^ This seems nonsense science fiction.
- yardie 5y ago
  > Solar panels are still way over hyped It literally turns abundantly free solar energy into electricity. Where is the hype?
  - bobsmooth 5y ago
    What do you do when it's cloudy?
    - buchanaf 5y ago
      Use other forms of electricity generation?
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      In addition to using other forms of energy, you can also over provision. Solar panels still work when it’s cloudy. They just don’t produce as much power. And with a grid you can average cloud cover over a large area.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      That's why we have an electricity grid, it's not cloudly all the time all across the world, so even if we went full solar I don't see how it'd be problematic.
    - themeiguoren 5y ago
      Thankfully when it’s cloudy, your peak loads from AC are a lot lower.
  - rozab 5y ago
    Current solar panels are almost 20% efficient. Even in the most outrageous sci-fi scenario, they could only hope to be 5x more efficient than they are currently, and in any case would require significant land use. Compared to nuclear or geothermal, the ceiling is so much lower. And then we get all the vaporware viral ops like solar freaking roadways and those water bottles that magically refill from the air with a tiny solar panel, ignoring the laws of thermodynamics but making hella kickstarter bux
- anonuser123456 5y ago
  >Solar panels are still way over hyped in a stupid marginalist way Solar panels are powered by fusion, of course they are hyped.
  - ruined 5y ago
    who the fuck is scraeming "AGRIVOLTAICS" at my house. show yourself, coward. fusion energy will never take off
- gremloni 5y ago
  I feel like you posted your whole comment just to inject that last line in.
- missinfo 5y ago
  The hype is going to die down the more we see landscapes and entire mountains being covered with non-recyclable, toxic panels: https://twitter.com/ScienceIsNew/status/1458512267150966786 https://twitter.com/ScienceIsNew/status/1458512267150966786 It strikes me as environmental vandalism. Solar panels make sense on roofs, not so much on landscapes. Maybe the desert, but you have transmission loss and still have to deal with the large amount of toxic landfill they generate. Nuclear makes much more sense for anything approaching base load.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Putting them in landfill implies is it harder to turn old PV into new PV than to build new PV literally out of rock. This does not seem plausible in long-term (short term, sometime has to actually build a factory to do it), and if it was true then we would’ve just substituted one polluting non-renewable (fossils) for another.
  - thinkcontext 5y ago
    I assume you wring your hands just as much for mountain removal for coal? Or the coal ash ponds so toxic they kill workers by the dozen when they need to be cleaned up? Or the millions of lives whose health is damaged by fossil fuel externalities? By all means we should have frank discussions of the externalities of various technologies.
    - missinfo 5y ago
      Correct, coal is worse. But notice I said nuclear is the way to go.
- adminscoffee 5y ago
  a lot of pressure to not go solar and the whole overhype movement i've seen was mainly endorsed by those with vested interest in other forms of energy. big oil, coal, nuclear etc. there's a lot of energy we are not harvesting due to battery technology. hell we can honestly pull energy out of the air during a storm, it would make the area safer because lightning itself could be used as a way to charge up batteries. but the batteries are just not there, there are very cheap ways of storing energy though, gravity being one of those primitive technologies. pumping water up a spout etc. but i don't think solar itself will be all we need, i agree with that part. but we have a lot of unused energy that we can take advantage of if people allow their mind to explore new sources of renewables
mrfusion 5y ago
Solar with grazing land could make a ton of sense. Plus you wouldn’t have to pay for mowing. And if done right the panels could even be free shelter for the cows.
- justinph 5y ago
  Apparently sheep are the right thing to graze. Cows and horses are too big. Goats tend to bite at the cables. Sheep are small enough to fit in and around the solar panels and won't bite the wires. https://www.startribune.com/pollinator-friendly-landscape-takes-root-beneath-solar-panels-in-minnesota/600074815/ https://www.startribune.com/pollinator-friendly-landscape-ta...
oh_sigh 5y ago
Doesn't it make far more sense to just put solar panels in a field like this, instead of doing custom work putting them on top of individual homes which may have shade or directionality issues? Even disregarding the agriculture happening, why don't we do this more often?
- pengaru 5y ago
  Personally the addition of solar panels to my roof has the added appeal of reducing the wear and tear of my roof. The panels must be in the sun, so they'll always be getting that UV damage if they exist outside at all. May as well let them do double duty on my roof in that role. It'll also help keep the solar thermal gain out of the house, reducing cooling costs...
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Presumably because, the further you transport electrical energy, the more it is prone to be lost as heat.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    I'm not arguing for a giant solar array in the Sahara, just using marginal farmland that surrounds many cities to put solar panels instead of scattered about on roofs in the city. And with most solar installations it just dumps electricity back into the grid so I'd think losses would be similar.
  - handmodel 5y ago
    From what I understand even at 100 miles the loss of energy is about 5 percent. You may need to build more transmission lines at some point - but I would still wager there is no way that it is energy efficient to build a frame upwards + have people get on special tools to maintain things 10 feet above the ground. In places like Colorado there is very cheap land that is not very good for farming about an hour away from Denver and it certainly seems like it would be cost + energy efficient to build out there instead of up.
- WJW 5y ago
  At least in the Netherlands, you don't pay energy taxes on electricity generated "behind the meter", ie from solar panels on your own house. Electricity that comes from the grid, no matter how it is generated, comes with grid fees and energy tax. Seeing how the price for bulk electricity is currently ~0.09 EUR/KWh and the taxes+ grid charges come to ~0.15 EUR/KWh for a total price of 0.24 EUR/KWh, electricity from solar panels on your own house instantly becomes about 3x cheaper than if you put the same panels elsewhere in a field. Thus, many people opt to put the panels on their home since the installation cost is not that high and the financial benefits are substantial.
iambateman 5y ago
$2,000,000 / 300 homes / 20 years = $333/home/year for electricity. Assuming this is a low-maintenance setup, it seems like there’s lots of room for steady profit. At the same time, the article makes it sound like the farming output was improved too. Aside from regulatory concerns, what downsides are there to installing these on millions of acres?
- twalla 5y ago
  My assumption is they pivoted from hay to growing high margin stuff (most greens are higher margin, I think) they can sell to restaurants/farmers markets/co-ops. Being close to Boulder definitely helps in that regard. The solar panels just provide the shade that shadecloth used to provide with the upside of producing income. The biggest barrier to scalability is probably how labor intensive some of the farming is and the target audience for stuff like kale and collard greens outside of major metro areas.
  - sigstoat 5y ago
    > My assumption is they pivoted from hay to growing high margin stuff (most greens are higher margin, I think) they can sell to restaurants/farmers markets/co-ops. yes, this is exactly the case. as i understand it, they've got a single customer they're selling all the produce to, who is also involved in providing man power for the farming. > The biggest barrier to scalability is probably how labor intensive some of the farming is yes, they've got folks out there most days during the growing season, whereas when it was hay, it could be managed with a couple of man*days a month. (i am more familiar with the operations there than i'm going to admit, or provide evidence for. don't "sources?" me.)
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  Well, it depends - for a current investor of any scale in the utility and fossil fuel sectors, this is a disaster. 1) Installing solar panels on millions of acres would be done most likely by utilities for grid-scale power. This means an accelerated investment in infrastructure, and that means profits don't go to dividend payments but for solar panel purchases (from an international manufacturer, as domestic US solar manufacturing is basically a joke at present). 2) Then you have the follow-on losses - investors in utilities tend to have large holdings in fossil fuels, and one hand washes the other - power plants buy fracked gas, in other words, boosting the value of the fossil fuel investments. So when you switch to solar, and write off the natural gas and coal plants, there goes the majority of the profits that investor's portfolio generates. There's no way around it: renewable systems are far less profitable than fossil-fuel systems, because you don't get to <sell> set up a wind and sun cartel (*orbiting sunscreens maybe?). This is the source of both Wall Street and fossil fuel exporter disenchantment with renewables. Now, if you're a farmer and can generate your own power while continuing to enjoy good crop yields, it's all winning. Although your 401K retirement fund may decrease in value. But that's OK, as your net savings are greater than that loss.
mikysco 5y ago
I must read too many negative articles… this stands out as a feel-good, “real” win-win. The science & cost-benefit is clearly understood even for the non-technical and the implementation seems straightforward, at least at first glance. Would love to see solar farms wildly adopted
- rch 5y ago
  Agrivoltaics, agroforestry, aquaponics and regenerative organic methods combine really well for modest commercial farms. I'm curious to see how, or if, these approaches scale, together or individually. Automation could be a decisive factor.
- prawn 5y ago
  I imagine the height of the panels is important to allow cleaning, but they could perhaps try more to combine the solar infrastructure with any fixed elements that would help the plants - irrigation lines, grow/heating lights or pest deterrents, rails for picking carts, etc. I recently toured a very advanced tomato greenhouse system where a heliostatic field, solar tower and turbine generated the power to cool/heat the greenhouses and desalinate water for irrigation. The heating pipes doubled as rails for the scissor-lift carts used by inspectors, pickers, etc. They had navigational lines embedded in the concrete flooring so that they could fill a train of carts with tomatoes, and then program a destination for it to self-drive to.
cjlars 5y ago
One issue with solar is where we put it all. If it turns out that a meaningful portion of farmland has an excess of solar energy, that takes a big bite out of the problem. Powering the US entirely on solar might take a land mass equivalent to 2% of the country... Only a small portion of the 40% of US land area used as farmland.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  This is a non issue. Rooftops alone are enough to power the US with solar, versus prime land. With that said, there is enormous potential in the roofs yet to have solar installed, parking lots with solar canopies, marginal land, floating PV systems at reservoirs, etc. Land is not an issue. At this rate, we’re constrained by pv module costs, deal flow, permitting, and install labor (a combination of labor and soft costs, essentially, with a healthy dose of supply chain issues). https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/10/11/solar-deployed-on-rooftops-could-match-annual-u-s-electricity-generation/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/10/11/solar-deployed-on-roo...
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    Having PV above water is something we should do immediately. As this article points out it seems to help with evaporation and evaporation is a big deal [1] water out here and heading south just sits in concrete canals waiting to be flooded inefficiently onto crop land. but using way better irrigation is another topic. [1] https://www.circleofblue.org/2013/world/report-evaporation-from-california-irrigation-adds-enough-water-to-colorado-river-to-supply-3-million-people/ https://www.circleofblue.org/2013/world/report-evaporation-f...
    - prawn 5y ago
      There was a story on HN the other month about solar panels above irrigation canals in India. Something like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-solar-canals-revolutionising-indias-renewable-energy https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-solar-canals...
starwind 5y ago
> When Kominek approached Boulder County regulators about putting up solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland. That's Boulder for you, they're super progressive right up until progress forces something to change
- missinfo 5y ago
  Bill Maher had a segment on this recently about progressives that don't acknowledge progress and are afraid of it in practice. A kind of willful blindness. Steven Pinker calls it Progressophobia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB9KVYAdYwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB9KVYAdYwg
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    Also, Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How.--NYT Opinion[1] Has a focus on housing, but it's the same underlying issue. People love to signal their virtue, but their true values are revealed by what they do. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw&t=670s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw&t=670s
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - kilna 5y ago
    That's rich coming from Maher.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Yeah, Boulder considers it's green belt to be the fence of their little gated community. They're terrified of the idea of development around Boulder. The city even owns a bunch of land in surrounding counties so the perpetually undeveloped land is some one else's tax burden.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
foxhop 5y ago
Very cool, if you are into this sort of stuff I have a YouTube channel on growing food at home. https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw A blog post on my solar system I bought outright https://russell.ballestrini.net/fulfilling-childhood-dreams-solar/ https://russell.ballestrini.net/fulfilling-childhood-dreams-...
Cycl0ps 5y ago
On the talk of reduced evaporation, can we replicate this at a fraction of the cost by running some plastic sheeting across a field? The solar is an investment that may not pay off in all farms, but reducing water usage is a major concern and stringing along some barriers could be a big help with that.
- tsol 5y ago
  Good point. While it may make harvesting trickier, installing covers could be a cheap way to increase water use efficiency
- kragen 5y ago
  Maybe not plastic sheeting, but certainly other forms of shade.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
> Our farm has mainly been hay producing for fifty years For those who don't know, Boulder has a bunch of land outside the city that is designated openspace/'farm' land. Being from the midwest I always sort of laughed at these land parcels being called 'farms' since economically it really can't be farmed outside of selling niche products at affluent farmers markets. I am glad to see that Boulder is finally letting the land be used for something more productive. And this is a very cool idea. My family grew strawberries in eastern Colorado for a few years and one of the big problems was the extreme sun. In order to extend the growing season we used low tunnels to shield to plants from frost. However, the low tunnels during the peak summer months would act like a lens melting irrigation lines and even damaging produce.
- poulsbohemian 5y ago
  Did you experiment at all with swapping out different materials? IE: using a thicker material to shade from the sun and then something else in the fall to hold in warmth. I’m debating doing something similar in my garden. In my area we have a lot of orchards that are now completely under sun canopies due to our extreme heat / sun.
  - prawn 5y ago
    A major modern greenhouse operation I saw recently dealt with this by spraying the exterior with some sort of chalk solution (I think). Just made the glass panels look slightly opaque. Then they'd wash it off when they needed more light through. In this case, there was generally less rain when they wanted the solar protection, so they didn't have to worry about it washing off out of schedule too often.
- sneak 5y ago
  Is it just me or is not letting the rightful owners of the land use it for the most productive (and not damaging/harmful/polluting) thing possible seem insane? Why does Boulder get to decide whether these farmers are allowed to install solar on their own land? The fact that they had to fight a battle and take time out of their life to obtain permission to do this (on unprofitable farmland) seems tremendously unjust. My mind reels.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I saw a good video on YT about this idea. It made the excellent point that it has a fundamental problem: 1. It's excellent for everybody, except... 2. It's a sub-optimal use of land for the farmer, and ... 3. It's a sub-optimal use of land for solar PV Trying to get something adopted where the two primary parties both end up with a suboptimal solution, even though the overall solution is great from a broader perspective, tends to be difficult. And it does generally need both farmers and the solar PV folks to collaborate; the former have the land and systems for growing, the latter have the capital and process for solar PV. This doesn't mean it cannot work, but it does require some creative "marketing" to get people to take up the idea even though it may appear sub-optimal when viewed through a narrow lens.
- 7952 5y ago
  It might be optimal in terms of a reliable income to have different things you can sell.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Most farmers don't have the capital to invest in enough solar PV to generate anything you might call an income.
- sigstoat 5y ago
  > It's a sub-optimal use of land for solar PV the PV aspect doesn't really have to make any compromises for this sort of system. it is installed on taller posts than you might normally use, and there's some netting on the underside to keep the wiring a bit more protected from passerbys, but it's otherwise a standard install in a field.
pirate787 5y ago
Solar panels contain heavy metals like cadmium that leech into the soil and water as the panels age. This is not a safe approach. https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/solar-panel-waste-the-dark-side-of-clean-energy https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/solar-panel-was...
- yumraj 5y ago
  But that seems to only be an issue when they are literally dumped in a landfill. In the case above, where they are mounted, why would it be an issue? Or, are you saying that they leech, say, when it rains? But in that case, wouldn't roof mounted solar panels be equally bad as in leech heavy metals into home soil and I had not heard that to be an issue.
- VygmraMGVl 5y ago
  This link's reference for "solar panels leach [cadmium] into the soil and water as the panels age" is a paper that simulated *landfill conditions* on CdTe solar cells. In the study linked, the solar panels were ball-milled and then suspended in anaerobic sludge. This is not comparable to suggesting solar panels will leach cadmium and lead into the soil underneath them during their normal operation. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607867/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607867/
  - rcxdude 5y ago
    Also, most solar panels are not CdTe cells, the vast majority of the market are silicon cells (CdTe making <10% of the market).
- weaksauce 5y ago
  ...in a landfill environment. those aren't leeching into the ground during their normal lifespan. sure recycling should be done more in earnest but to say this is unsafe is silly.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Coal ash contains 100ppm Cd and the USA produces and dumps into the environment 130 million tons of that annually. PV panels are glass-encapsulated and only leach metals if you literally grind them into dust and then submerge the result.
nanomonkey 5y ago
I'm surprised they aren't using bifacial solar panels which allow light through and utilize light from both sides of the panel. Seems ideal for such a scenario.
cannaceo 5y ago
Reminds me of http://www.soliculture.com/ http://www.soliculture.com/
vvarren 5y ago
> But he soon discovered that the shade from the towering panels above the soil actually helped the plants thrive. That intermittent shade also meant a lot less evaporation of coveted irrigation water. And in turn the evaporation actually helped keep the sun-baked solar panels cooler, making them more efficient. Holy cow! Sounds like a win-win-win to me?
- lostdog 5y ago
  They should still compare solar+farm, to covering the farm with canvas shade and having the solar panels elsewhere.
  - FPGAhacker 5y ago
    What would that show?
    - lostdog 5y ago
      Similar to solar roadways, I would expect there are many reasons to separate the solar panels and the farm. For example, maybe the solar panels restrict the types of tractors you can use. Maybe the fields sometimes create too much condensation and harm the solar panels. Maybe pesticides damage the solar panels. Maybe the solar panels sometimes block too much sun from reaching the plants. And so on...
      - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        the solar roadways comparison would be if you put the solar panels under the pants.
      - pgeorgi 5y ago
        What's that, a gish gallop waiting to happen? They're not arguing to have found a global maximum and everybody everywhere should stop what they're doing and adopt this scheme, this is just reporting that there are unexpected positive effects to the scheme they've tried.
danielvf 5y ago
Is it just me, or do the photos show that only part of a single row between panels has actually been planted? Looking outside the plants in the foreground, it just looks like bare grass everywhere.
- bigtones 5y ago
  Yes I spotted that too. It looks to be a very small garden from the photos.
animal_spirits 5y ago
> The inverters here generate enough power for 300 homes to use in a year. Kominek hopes to soon grow enough food beneath the panels to maybe feed as many local families. This would be a super interesting village concept. Have 1 central agrovoltaic farm owned and operated by the surrounding farmers, and supply all of them with the electricity produced by the central solar farm. That way the land would be used both to grow produce to sell and sustainably power all the electrical needs of the surrounding farms.
- bleachedsleet 5y ago
  Sounds like a good idea for a DAO honestly
skbohra123 5y ago
In India government is encouraging this and have a scheme for farmers to setup solar plants and do farming together. The scheme is yet to pickup but good to see results like this.
tomohawk 5y ago
> generate enough power for 300 local homes This is a very misleading claim. Do they do this at night? How about on a rainy day? Unless energy storage is made part of it, it is an incomplete and unreliable solution.
branch_predict 5y ago
The solar garden is profiled in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_hRm-WFM1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_hRm-WFM1M
55555 5y ago
The obvious problem here is you can't run tractors/machinery over the crops?
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  I’m the article it states that the panels are spaced enough that he can drive his tractor through.
usrusr 5y ago
My favorite "why has no-one done this yet" for agricultural photovoltaics would tweak the compromise even further towards plants: space the panels not only north/South but also east/west and make them heliostats, like we used to do when panel price was still the limiting factor (heliostats need distance between them to not shade each other, these days it's cheaper to just pack panels tightly oriented for noon). If you put them high enough to run machines beneath you'd get zero permanently shaded area.
mjevans 5y ago
"... now in the grips of a 22 year megadrought." Climate change, caused by us humans.
- tim333 5y ago
  Perhaps. Climate was changeable before there were humans.
senectus1 5y ago
As someone who grew up in a farming rural environment. this seems like an oversimplification of what is possible. Farming land with solar panels on it means either not using vehicles or mounting the panels up very high and even then a lot of large scale farming vehicles will need to be heavily modified to fit underneath and inside the mounting poles. I['d say the usage scenarios for this concept are very very narrow.

355 points by akeck 5y ago

Great! In England these lands are very often used as pastures for sheep. They're small enough to graze under it

The key part is: > But he soon discovered that the shade from the towering panels above the soil actually helped the plants thrive. That intermittent shade also meant a lot less evaporation of coveted irrigation water. And in turn the evaporation actually helped keep the sun-baked solar panels cooler, making them more efficient. Solar panels are still way over hyped in a stupid marginalist way, but polyculture has always been a good idea :).

poulsbohemian 5y ago
> Solar panels are still way over hyped in a stupid marginalist way Talk more about this, I’d be very interested to understand your thoughts
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  How's what I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219258 ? Conversely see what I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29212004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29212004 about more capital intensive power generation that if done at a good scale would drown current demand.
cedilla 5y ago
Solar is hardly over-hyped. It has always over-delivered since the first panels were built in the 19th century. No one predicted such a success and so incredibly low prices even 20 years ago. Could you explain what you mean by "hyped in a marginalist way"?
- glogla 5y ago
  I've seen a lot of suggestions that solar can be used as the only energy source for humanity, that we don't need anything else, just build more solar! That's not realistic. Of course, the limitations that solar has are very much solvable, and having solar is better than not having it. Solar is important, and it is our future. But the solutions to solar's limitations seem to be in their infancy (new types of storage), hard to scale (battery storage), not really helpful (just build more coal and gas peakers!) or not considered at all. Which does not inspire confidence.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    You see this quite a lot. There does come a point where adding more solar … when a certain percentage of your production is already solar … there comes a point where more solar is a whole lot more expensive and less reasonable. But that’s really more of a “80% of our power is solar” problem and the US isn’t even at 3%. The percentage of usage which could be handled by solar is usually far underestimated. We don’t need to care about limitations of solar for a long long time.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      I agree, however your point about 3% isn’t quite true. Look at the last 12 months rolling and estimated total solar and divide by total electricity and you get about 3.7%: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      Would 80% be ideal? I would imagine Solar would start getting iffy over 50%. Presumably you want a lot of hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear so you don't need a lot of batteries, and you have enough sources of power when the sun isn't shining. Maybe I'm being un-imaginative - but is anyone envisioning a global energy grid so we could have solar energy from Australia and Sahara shipped to North America during our night - and back to Asia and Europe from the Southwest during our day?? ^ This seems nonsense science fiction.
yardie 5y ago
> Solar panels are still way over hyped It literally turns abundantly free solar energy into electricity. Where is the hype?
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  What do you do when it's cloudy?
  - buchanaf 5y ago
    Use other forms of electricity generation?
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    In addition to using other forms of energy, you can also over provision. Solar panels still work when it’s cloudy. They just don’t produce as much power. And with a grid you can average cloud cover over a large area.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    That's why we have an electricity grid, it's not cloudly all the time all across the world, so even if we went full solar I don't see how it'd be problematic.
  - themeiguoren 5y ago
    Thankfully when it’s cloudy, your peak loads from AC are a lot lower.
- rozab 5y ago
  Current solar panels are almost 20% efficient. Even in the most outrageous sci-fi scenario, they could only hope to be 5x more efficient than they are currently, and in any case would require significant land use. Compared to nuclear or geothermal, the ceiling is so much lower. And then we get all the vaporware viral ops like solar freaking roadways and those water bottles that magically refill from the air with a tiny solar panel, ignoring the laws of thermodynamics but making hella kickstarter bux
anonuser123456 5y ago
>Solar panels are still way over hyped in a stupid marginalist way Solar panels are powered by fusion, of course they are hyped.
- ruined 5y ago
  who the fuck is scraeming "AGRIVOLTAICS" at my house. show yourself, coward. fusion energy will never take off
gremloni 5y ago
I feel like you posted your whole comment just to inject that last line in.
missinfo 5y ago
The hype is going to die down the more we see landscapes and entire mountains being covered with non-recyclable, toxic panels: https://twitter.com/ScienceIsNew/status/1458512267150966786 https://twitter.com/ScienceIsNew/status/1458512267150966786 It strikes me as environmental vandalism. Solar panels make sense on roofs, not so much on landscapes. Maybe the desert, but you have transmission loss and still have to deal with the large amount of toxic landfill they generate. Nuclear makes much more sense for anything approaching base load.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Putting them in landfill implies is it harder to turn old PV into new PV than to build new PV literally out of rock. This does not seem plausible in long-term (short term, sometime has to actually build a factory to do it), and if it was true then we would’ve just substituted one polluting non-renewable (fossils) for another.
- thinkcontext 5y ago
  I assume you wring your hands just as much for mountain removal for coal? Or the coal ash ponds so toxic they kill workers by the dozen when they need to be cleaned up? Or the millions of lives whose health is damaged by fossil fuel externalities? By all means we should have frank discussions of the externalities of various technologies.
  - missinfo 5y ago
    Correct, coal is worse. But notice I said nuclear is the way to go.
adminscoffee 5y ago
a lot of pressure to not go solar and the whole overhype movement i've seen was mainly endorsed by those with vested interest in other forms of energy. big oil, coal, nuclear etc. there's a lot of energy we are not harvesting due to battery technology. hell we can honestly pull energy out of the air during a storm, it would make the area safer because lightning itself could be used as a way to charge up batteries. but the batteries are just not there, there are very cheap ways of storing energy though, gravity being one of those primitive technologies. pumping water up a spout etc. but i don't think solar itself will be all we need, i agree with that part. but we have a lot of unused energy that we can take advantage of if people allow their mind to explore new sources of renewables

mrfusion 5y ago

Solar with grazing land could make a ton of sense. Plus you wouldn’t have to pay for mowing. And if done right the panels could even be free shelter for the cows.

justinph 5y ago
Apparently sheep are the right thing to graze. Cows and horses are too big. Goats tend to bite at the cables. Sheep are small enough to fit in and around the solar panels and won't bite the wires. https://www.startribune.com/pollinator-friendly-landscape-takes-root-beneath-solar-panels-in-minnesota/600074815/ https://www.startribune.com/pollinator-friendly-landscape-ta...

oh_sigh 5y ago

Doesn't it make far more sense to just put solar panels in a field like this, instead of doing custom work putting them on top of individual homes which may have shade or directionality issues? Even disregarding the agriculture happening, why don't we do this more often?

pengaru 5y ago
Personally the addition of solar panels to my roof has the added appeal of reducing the wear and tear of my roof. The panels must be in the sun, so they'll always be getting that UV damage if they exist outside at all. May as well let them do double duty on my roof in that role. It'll also help keep the solar thermal gain out of the house, reducing cooling costs...
ravenstine 5y ago
Presumably because, the further you transport electrical energy, the more it is prone to be lost as heat.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  I'm not arguing for a giant solar array in the Sahara, just using marginal farmland that surrounds many cities to put solar panels instead of scattered about on roofs in the city. And with most solar installations it just dumps electricity back into the grid so I'd think losses would be similar.
- handmodel 5y ago
  From what I understand even at 100 miles the loss of energy is about 5 percent. You may need to build more transmission lines at some point - but I would still wager there is no way that it is energy efficient to build a frame upwards + have people get on special tools to maintain things 10 feet above the ground. In places like Colorado there is very cheap land that is not very good for farming about an hour away from Denver and it certainly seems like it would be cost + energy efficient to build out there instead of up.
WJW 5y ago
At least in the Netherlands, you don't pay energy taxes on electricity generated "behind the meter", ie from solar panels on your own house. Electricity that comes from the grid, no matter how it is generated, comes with grid fees and energy tax. Seeing how the price for bulk electricity is currently ~0.09 EUR/KWh and the taxes+ grid charges come to ~0.15 EUR/KWh for a total price of 0.24 EUR/KWh, electricity from solar panels on your own house instantly becomes about 3x cheaper than if you put the same panels elsewhere in a field. Thus, many people opt to put the panels on their home since the installation cost is not that high and the financial benefits are substantial.

iambateman 5y ago

$2,000,000 / 300 homes / 20 years = $333/home/year for electricity. Assuming this is a low-maintenance setup, it seems like there’s lots of room for steady profit. At the same time, the article makes it sound like the farming output was improved too. Aside from regulatory concerns, what downsides are there to installing these on millions of acres?

twalla 5y ago
My assumption is they pivoted from hay to growing high margin stuff (most greens are higher margin, I think) they can sell to restaurants/farmers markets/co-ops. Being close to Boulder definitely helps in that regard. The solar panels just provide the shade that shadecloth used to provide with the upside of producing income. The biggest barrier to scalability is probably how labor intensive some of the farming is and the target audience for stuff like kale and collard greens outside of major metro areas.
- sigstoat 5y ago
  > My assumption is they pivoted from hay to growing high margin stuff (most greens are higher margin, I think) they can sell to restaurants/farmers markets/co-ops. yes, this is exactly the case. as i understand it, they've got a single customer they're selling all the produce to, who is also involved in providing man power for the farming. > The biggest barrier to scalability is probably how labor intensive some of the farming is yes, they've got folks out there most days during the growing season, whereas when it was hay, it could be managed with a couple of man*days a month. (i am more familiar with the operations there than i'm going to admit, or provide evidence for. don't "sources?" me.)
photochemsyn 5y ago
Well, it depends - for a current investor of any scale in the utility and fossil fuel sectors, this is a disaster. 1) Installing solar panels on millions of acres would be done most likely by utilities for grid-scale power. This means an accelerated investment in infrastructure, and that means profits don't go to dividend payments but for solar panel purchases (from an international manufacturer, as domestic US solar manufacturing is basically a joke at present). 2) Then you have the follow-on losses - investors in utilities tend to have large holdings in fossil fuels, and one hand washes the other - power plants buy fracked gas, in other words, boosting the value of the fossil fuel investments. So when you switch to solar, and write off the natural gas and coal plants, there goes the majority of the profits that investor's portfolio generates. There's no way around it: renewable systems are far less profitable than fossil-fuel systems, because you don't get to <sell> set up a wind and sun cartel (*orbiting sunscreens maybe?). This is the source of both Wall Street and fossil fuel exporter disenchantment with renewables. Now, if you're a farmer and can generate your own power while continuing to enjoy good crop yields, it's all winning. Although your 401K retirement fund may decrease in value. But that's OK, as your net savings are greater than that loss.

mikysco 5y ago

I must read too many negative articles… this stands out as a feel-good, “real” win-win. The science & cost-benefit is clearly understood even for the non-technical and the implementation seems straightforward, at least at first glance. Would love to see solar farms wildly adopted

rch 5y ago
Agrivoltaics, agroforestry, aquaponics and regenerative organic methods combine really well for modest commercial farms. I'm curious to see how, or if, these approaches scale, together or individually. Automation could be a decisive factor.
prawn 5y ago
I imagine the height of the panels is important to allow cleaning, but they could perhaps try more to combine the solar infrastructure with any fixed elements that would help the plants - irrigation lines, grow/heating lights or pest deterrents, rails for picking carts, etc. I recently toured a very advanced tomato greenhouse system where a heliostatic field, solar tower and turbine generated the power to cool/heat the greenhouses and desalinate water for irrigation. The heating pipes doubled as rails for the scissor-lift carts used by inspectors, pickers, etc. They had navigational lines embedded in the concrete flooring so that they could fill a train of carts with tomatoes, and then program a destination for it to self-drive to.

cjlars 5y ago

One issue with solar is where we put it all. If it turns out that a meaningful portion of farmland has an excess of solar energy, that takes a big bite out of the problem. Powering the US entirely on solar might take a land mass equivalent to 2% of the country... Only a small portion of the 40% of US land area used as farmland.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
This is a non issue. Rooftops alone are enough to power the US with solar, versus prime land. With that said, there is enormous potential in the roofs yet to have solar installed, parking lots with solar canopies, marginal land, floating PV systems at reservoirs, etc. Land is not an issue. At this rate, we’re constrained by pv module costs, deal flow, permitting, and install labor (a combination of labor and soft costs, essentially, with a healthy dose of supply chain issues). https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/10/11/solar-deployed-on-rooftops-could-match-annual-u-s-electricity-generation/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/10/11/solar-deployed-on-roo...
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Having PV above water is something we should do immediately. As this article points out it seems to help with evaporation and evaporation is a big deal [1] water out here and heading south just sits in concrete canals waiting to be flooded inefficiently onto crop land. but using way better irrigation is another topic. [1] https://www.circleofblue.org/2013/world/report-evaporation-from-california-irrigation-adds-enough-water-to-colorado-river-to-supply-3-million-people/ https://www.circleofblue.org/2013/world/report-evaporation-f...
  - prawn 5y ago
    There was a story on HN the other month about solar panels above irrigation canals in India. Something like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-solar-canals-revolutionising-indias-renewable-energy https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-solar-canals...

starwind 5y ago

> When Kominek approached Boulder County regulators about putting up solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland. That's Boulder for you, they're super progressive right up until progress forces something to change

missinfo 5y ago
Bill Maher had a segment on this recently about progressives that don't acknowledge progress and are afraid of it in practice. A kind of willful blindness. Steven Pinker calls it Progressophobia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB9KVYAdYwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB9KVYAdYwg
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Also, Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How.--NYT Opinion[1] Has a focus on housing, but it's the same underlying issue. People love to signal their virtue, but their true values are revealed by what they do. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw&t=670s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw&t=670s
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- kilna 5y ago
  That's rich coming from Maher.
monocasa 5y ago
Yeah, Boulder considers it's green belt to be the fence of their little gated community. They're terrified of the idea of development around Boulder. The city even owns a bunch of land in surrounding counties so the perpetually undeveloped land is some one else's tax burden.
- bpodgursky 5y ago

foxhop 5y ago

Very cool, if you are into this sort of stuff I have a YouTube channel on growing food at home. https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw A blog post on my solar system I bought outright https://russell.ballestrini.net/fulfilling-childhood-dreams-solar/ https://russell.ballestrini.net/fulfilling-childhood-dreams-...

Cycl0ps 5y ago

On the talk of reduced evaporation, can we replicate this at a fraction of the cost by running some plastic sheeting across a field? The solar is an investment that may not pay off in all farms, but reducing water usage is a major concern and stringing along some barriers could be a big help with that.

tsol 5y ago
Good point. While it may make harvesting trickier, installing covers could be a cheap way to increase water use efficiency
kragen 5y ago
Maybe not plastic sheeting, but certainly other forms of shade.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

> Our farm has mainly been hay producing for fifty years For those who don't know, Boulder has a bunch of land outside the city that is designated openspace/'farm' land. Being from the midwest I always sort of laughed at these land parcels being called 'farms' since economically it really can't be farmed outside of selling niche products at affluent farmers markets. I am glad to see that Boulder is finally letting the land be used for something more productive. And this is a very cool idea. My family grew strawberries in eastern Colorado for a few years and one of the big problems was the extreme sun. In order to extend the growing season we used low tunnels to shield to plants from frost. However, the low tunnels during the peak summer months would act like a lens melting irrigation lines and even damaging produce.

poulsbohemian 5y ago
Did you experiment at all with swapping out different materials? IE: using a thicker material to shade from the sun and then something else in the fall to hold in warmth. I’m debating doing something similar in my garden. In my area we have a lot of orchards that are now completely under sun canopies due to our extreme heat / sun.
- prawn 5y ago
  A major modern greenhouse operation I saw recently dealt with this by spraying the exterior with some sort of chalk solution (I think). Just made the glass panels look slightly opaque. Then they'd wash it off when they needed more light through. In this case, there was generally less rain when they wanted the solar protection, so they didn't have to worry about it washing off out of schedule too often.
sneak 5y ago
Is it just me or is not letting the rightful owners of the land use it for the most productive (and not damaging/harmful/polluting) thing possible seem insane? Why does Boulder get to decide whether these farmers are allowed to install solar on their own land? The fact that they had to fight a battle and take time out of their life to obtain permission to do this (on unprofitable farmland) seems tremendously unjust. My mind reels.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

I saw a good video on YT about this idea. It made the excellent point that it has a fundamental problem: 1. It's excellent for everybody, except... 2. It's a sub-optimal use of land for the farmer, and ... 3. It's a sub-optimal use of land for solar PV Trying to get something adopted where the two primary parties both end up with a suboptimal solution, even though the overall solution is great from a broader perspective, tends to be difficult. And it does generally need both farmers and the solar PV folks to collaborate; the former have the land and systems for growing, the latter have the capital and process for solar PV. This doesn't mean it cannot work, but it does require some creative "marketing" to get people to take up the idea even though it may appear sub-optimal when viewed through a narrow lens.

7952 5y ago
It might be optimal in terms of a reliable income to have different things you can sell.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Most farmers don't have the capital to invest in enough solar PV to generate anything you might call an income.
sigstoat 5y ago
> It's a sub-optimal use of land for solar PV the PV aspect doesn't really have to make any compromises for this sort of system. it is installed on taller posts than you might normally use, and there's some netting on the underside to keep the wiring a bit more protected from passerbys, but it's otherwise a standard install in a field.

pirate787 5y ago

Solar panels contain heavy metals like cadmium that leech into the soil and water as the panels age. This is not a safe approach. https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/solar-panel-waste-the-dark-side-of-clean-energy https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/solar-panel-was...

yumraj 5y ago
But that seems to only be an issue when they are literally dumped in a landfill. In the case above, where they are mounted, why would it be an issue? Or, are you saying that they leech, say, when it rains? But in that case, wouldn't roof mounted solar panels be equally bad as in leech heavy metals into home soil and I had not heard that to be an issue.
VygmraMGVl 5y ago
This link's reference for "solar panels leach [cadmium] into the soil and water as the panels age" is a paper that simulated *landfill conditions* on CdTe solar cells. In the study linked, the solar panels were ball-milled and then suspended in anaerobic sludge. This is not comparable to suggesting solar panels will leach cadmium and lead into the soil underneath them during their normal operation. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607867/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607867/
- rcxdude 5y ago
  Also, most solar panels are not CdTe cells, the vast majority of the market are silicon cells (CdTe making <10% of the market).
weaksauce 5y ago
...in a landfill environment. those aren't leeching into the ground during their normal lifespan. sure recycling should be done more in earnest but to say this is unsafe is silly.
jeffbee 5y ago
Coal ash contains 100ppm Cd and the USA produces and dumps into the environment 130 million tons of that annually. PV panels are glass-encapsulated and only leach metals if you literally grind them into dust and then submerge the result.

nanomonkey 5y ago

I'm surprised they aren't using bifacial solar panels which allow light through and utilize light from both sides of the panel. Seems ideal for such a scenario.

cannaceo 5y ago

Reminds me of http://www.soliculture.com/ http://www.soliculture.com/

vvarren 5y ago

> But he soon discovered that the shade from the towering panels above the soil actually helped the plants thrive. That intermittent shade also meant a lot less evaporation of coveted irrigation water. And in turn the evaporation actually helped keep the sun-baked solar panels cooler, making them more efficient. Holy cow! Sounds like a win-win-win to me?

lostdog 5y ago
They should still compare solar+farm, to covering the farm with canvas shade and having the solar panels elsewhere.
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  What would that show?
  - lostdog 5y ago
    Similar to solar roadways, I would expect there are many reasons to separate the solar panels and the farm. For example, maybe the solar panels restrict the types of tractors you can use. Maybe the fields sometimes create too much condensation and harm the solar panels. Maybe pesticides damage the solar panels. Maybe the solar panels sometimes block too much sun from reaching the plants. And so on...
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      the solar roadways comparison would be if you put the solar panels under the pants.
    - pgeorgi 5y ago
      What's that, a gish gallop waiting to happen? They're not arguing to have found a global maximum and everybody everywhere should stop what they're doing and adopt this scheme, this is just reporting that there are unexpected positive effects to the scheme they've tried.

danielvf 5y ago

Is it just me, or do the photos show that only part of a single row between panels has actually been planted? Looking outside the plants in the foreground, it just looks like bare grass everywhere.

bigtones 5y ago
Yes I spotted that too. It looks to be a very small garden from the photos.

animal_spirits 5y ago

> The inverters here generate enough power for 300 homes to use in a year. Kominek hopes to soon grow enough food beneath the panels to maybe feed as many local families. This would be a super interesting village concept. Have 1 central agrovoltaic farm owned and operated by the surrounding farmers, and supply all of them with the electricity produced by the central solar farm. That way the land would be used both to grow produce to sell and sustainably power all the electrical needs of the surrounding farms.

bleachedsleet 5y ago
Sounds like a good idea for a DAO honestly

skbohra123 5y ago

In India government is encouraging this and have a scheme for farmers to setup solar plants and do farming together. The scheme is yet to pickup but good to see results like this.

tomohawk 5y ago

> generate enough power for 300 local homes This is a very misleading claim. Do they do this at night? How about on a rainy day? Unless energy storage is made part of it, it is an incomplete and unreliable solution.

branch_predict 5y ago

The solar garden is profiled in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_hRm-WFM1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_hRm-WFM1M

55555 5y ago

The obvious problem here is you can't run tractors/machinery over the crops?

FPGAhacker 5y ago
I’m the article it states that the panels are spaced enough that he can drive his tractor through.

usrusr 5y ago

My favorite "why has no-one done this yet" for agricultural photovoltaics would tweak the compromise even further towards plants: space the panels not only north/South but also east/west and make them heliostats, like we used to do when panel price was still the limiting factor (heliostats need distance between them to not shade each other, these days it's cheaper to just pack panels tightly oriented for noon). If you put them high enough to run machines beneath you'd get zero permanently shaded area.

mjevans 5y ago

"... now in the grips of a 22 year megadrought." Climate change, caused by us humans.

tim333 5y ago
Perhaps. Climate was changeable before there were humans.

senectus1 5y ago

As someone who grew up in a farming rural environment. this seems like an oversimplification of what is possible. Farming land with solar panels on it means either not using vehicles or mounting the panels up very high and even then a lot of large scale farming vehicles will need to be heavily modified to fit underneath and inside the mounting poles. I['d say the usage scenarios for this concept are very very narrow.