12 ms·

In Colorado, a marriage of solar energy and farming

191 points by dr_dshiv 2y ago

ashoeafoot 2y ago
expected solar driven nitrogen reactor fixation mention cause thats the trinity.
- nelsonic 2y ago
  Please elaborate for the uninitiated.
  - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
    Make fertilizer from solar energy
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
      A solar process would have to compete with nitrogen fixing plants as well.
  - evilduck 2y ago
    The comment is referring to finding something to replace the Haber-Bosch Process, which is mostly fossil fuel driven, which makes most of our food itself dependent on fossil fuels.
    - roughly 2y ago
      Unrelated to the above, except in the mix of sustainability and agriculture - there are a bunch of companies working on bacteria to fix nitrogen for crops without requiring separate fertilizer similar to how legumes do it. I think Pivot Bio is the furthest along in the space - they’ve got a commercially available product - but it’s an active area of development in the industry right now.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        > Unrelated to the above, except in the mix of sustainability and agriculture - there are a bunch of companies working on bacteria to fix nitrogen for crops without requiring separate fertilizer similar to how legumes do it. Nitrogen fixation is energy-intensive, so something has to provide energy. Additionally, nitrogen fixation has to happen in anaerobic conditions, oxygen kills the enzymes responsible for nitrogen fixation. In legumes, the oxygen is carried away by hemoglobin (the same one used in "artificial meat"), but engineering these conditions for free-living bacteria is likely going to be problematic. I'm personally hoping for a catalyst that can work in mild conditions.
        roughly 2y ago
        There’s been some success here already - as mentioned, there’s some commercial products on the market already that do some amount of nitrogen fixation for at least corn and I believe wheat as well, so it’s not unsolvable.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- corysama 2y ago
  How about solar powered liquid fuel for tractors? https://youtu.be/NngCHTImH1g?si=XVLJAfkJi3MqZN1d https://youtu.be/NngCHTImH1g?si=XVLJAfkJi3MqZN1d https://youtu.be/ekEdq6PhC0Q?si=Wpr_DKcAvtX-Tsi- https://youtu.be/ekEdq6PhC0Q?si=Wpr_DKcAvtX-Tsi-
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Hey. I live literally 30 seconds from this place, and know Bryce. Cool dude! I do wonder why solar panels in fields aren't more common, as opposed to rooftop solar. It seems like such a burden doing all those one-off jobs aren't worth it compared to the ease of just putting more up in an easy to access location on the ground. Especially since most people aren't set up so they can go off grid with their panels in case the grid goes down.
- elihu 2y ago
  The big utility-scale solar plants tend to be on the ground in big fields. I think the preference for rooftop solar for individual houses comes mostly because it's convenient for suburban installations, as they don't usually want to give yard space and the panels would be in the shade anyways. Roofs aren't being used for anything useful, so that's where the panels go. In a rural setting there's less incentive to install on a roof, but you still might put them there anyways if that's where you get the best sun. I suppose people might also be afraid of theft or vandalism if the panels are accessible to random passers-by without a ladder.
  - Veserv 2y ago
    To add-on, utility scale solar generation is the majority of generation and has consistently outpaced small scale generation in growth. Starting at 11,233 small scale out of 26,482 in 2014, ~42.5%, versus 73,406 out of 236,090 in 2023, ~31% [1]. So, despite a ~6.5x increase in small scale generation over 10 years, ~19% compounded annual growth, utility scale generation increased by ~10.66x, ~24% compounded annual growth. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01_a.html https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01...
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Land is expensive in many places. Go somewhere it is very cheap, and you'll find fields of windmills and the occasional field full of solar panels. In fact, Texas had a 350 megawatt install taken out by a hail storm earlier this year. It made the rounds in the news and even here on HN if memory serves. That's still not even close to the big projects though. Vista Sands in Wisconsin has a 1.3 gigawatt install planned that will cover nearly ten thousand acres. The only reason residential rooftop solar became the industry it did was the massive subsidies handed out to consumers to make it financially viable. Without that, larger field installs and off-grid setups would be the bulk of what you hear about in most of the country.
robertclaus 2y ago
I would assume spacing becomes quite sensitive for this to work well, but cool idea!
energy123 2y ago
> "A lot of the cost of the solar array is the people — installing the solar panels and all the wiring that goes into it. Inverters and the transformers and the switchgear. None of that changes" Reminded me of Charge Robotics' mission: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics
- xbmcuser 2y ago
  Yeah this came as a big shock to me as I was hearing acquaintances say their solar and battery install would payback in 3-4 years compared to 15-20 years timeline I read on hackernews etc. Turns out the cost of equipment is so cheap now that in countries with cheaper labour and other costs they can get a similar system with install at 1/3 the price.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    I'm currently getting 16% return on capital invested, just with domestic savings. Thats an annualized return over all capital spent, including panels, equipment and labor. Thats more or less what I expected. So yes, your locality matters. As does your current consumption, cost of electricity, and so on. Prices are also falling quite a bit as time passes.
    - energy123 2y ago
      The two things that get worse over time are labor costs and net metering arrangements. Labor costs either track or exceed inflation, and net metering arrangements get less lucrative as the grid becomes more solar heavy, like what happened in California last year. But relying on net metering for ROI is a pre-2024 thing. Batteries are getting so cheap.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Net metering changed when it become economically unsupportable as PV adoption scaled. The same thing will happen with grid-connected residential solar + batteries. Rates will be changed to be based on capacity rather than consumption. There might, for example, be a charge based on your maximum usage during a period rather than total usage.
edm0nd 2y ago
>Today, Kominek estimates that he earns $20,000 annually by selling energy to subscribers. so how much did he have to get a loan for to pay for 3.2k solar panels + install + make the land suitable for em? Seems like that will take a long time to recoup (if ever).
sci_prog 2y ago
This is a cool concept and I love the idea but the math on the money earned from the 3276 solar panel doesn't add up. The article says the farm owner makes about $20,000 a year from the solar farm. I'm assuming that each solar panel is 2 by 1 meter, which would mean that it produces about 400 watts (20% efficiency at 1000 watts per sq meter coming from the sun). You can use this calculator to estimate how power you can produce at the given location for a given system size in kilowatts: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php The system above is 1310400 watts or ~1,310 kW, which according to the calculator produces about 2 million kWh/year. If he makes $20,000 that would mean that he gets paid only $0.01 per kW of power. And even if my assumption above about the size of each individual panel is off by a factor of 2 and they are only 1 sq meter in size (which I think they are not because the article states that the solar farm can power about 300 average households, which require the annual power output to be more than what I estimated above) that would make $0.02 per kW of power. How is it possible that the amount earned per kW is so low when the utility companies in Colorado charge about $0.14 per kW (effective rate)? And who is actually the customer here and where is the money coming from? I'm just curious to learn more.
- boredatoms 2y ago
  I guess the transmission lines themselves is where the costs are
- gpm 2y ago
  I took $20k to be profit after costs (except maybe personal labor and land), not revenue.
- thephyber 2y ago
  Is there anything about farming that makes financial sense? Most farmers (even in developed countries) are cash poor and most farmers are deep in debt. The ones that aren’t can quickly become so given a little bad luck. Farms have to hedge against bad yields to protect against undesirable weather. Family farms only make financial sense if there is a lot of free labor (slavery, indentured servants, or unpaid labor of children).
aaron695 2y ago
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ledgerdev 2y ago
I used to think this was a wonderful idea, with the greatest of intentions, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out it's inevitable that a hail storm hits or mother nature somehow will break/cracks those panels, allowing heavy metals to leach into the soil and make it unusable for farming in perpetuity. This actually happened to a guy I spoke with during lunch one day. So seeing the actual reality over a longer timeframe of solar farms, and wind turbines (those huge blades made of not friendly chemicals last only 10 years, do you know how they are disposed of?), have greatly reduced any excitement I had for solar/wind as environmentally friendly longer term sustainable solutions. I guess it's sort of good to diversify but they most definitely aren't "earth friendly" as advertised. Fusion seem our only real hope.
- bcraven 2y ago
  I'm not sure wind turbines are quite as bad as you assert: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wind-turbine-blades-be-recycled https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...
  - ledgerdev 2y ago
    That seems like a pretty biased source, how about these actual cases at the top of google search? We are just getting started perhaps 10 years into this, now imagine this after another 100 years? And of course maybe they can technically be "recycled" now but it's not actually happening in a significant way yet. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-t... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... For now we have to be realistic, but hopeful that some better use than landfills can be found and be viable.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  not sure where you're getting 10 years for windd turbines from, but it's closer to 20. they also aren't nasty chemicals. it's fiberglass and epoxy and are disposed the same way pretty much everything is disposed of, putting them in a pit in the middle of nowhere.
asdefghyk 2y ago
I'm very skeptical about claimed benefits. Ive lived and worked on a farm and my parents were long term farmers for decades. To be convinced I would need to hear the benefits from many more (commercial ) farmers. The quoted farm is a hobby farm, small scale farm. What are the risks in such installations ?
- sandworm101 2y ago
  The risks are the investment in foundations and trenchwork necessary to install the panel support infrastructure. There are companies doing interesting things with low-mounted high-density installations that would be more efficient and require less infrastructure.
- adrianN 2y ago
  Where I live, the chief risk (aside from the usual risks of investments) are spending years and years fighting bureaucrats and NIMBYs to get the necessary permissions to put solar panels on land zoned for agriculture.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  The biggest risk is that you need to plant differently to take advantage of the solar panels. Planting for forage is much harder than growing a field for hay/soy/beet/other feed crop. obviously you can't use normal combines to harvest between the rows, so you need different, custom, equipment to harvest at scale.
akamaka 2y ago
For those interested in the economics of this project, the details are available in this publication: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/88816.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/88816.pdf Summary: This particular research project won’t quite break even purely on market-rate electricity sales, due to having 2x the installation cost of utility scale solar. If high value crops are successfully grown, there are scenarios where it could break even after including profits from crop sales.
- zbyforgotp 2y ago
  Yeah - that’s what I thought. The original article sounds like motivated reasoning - solar farms don’t look like “green technology” so there is that great need to make them more palatable and project like this cater to that need instead of economic calculation.
ggm 2y ago
If he did any energy consuming processes to aide farming such as drying wheat to harden it and increase market price, or had greenhouses which needed heating, or a dairy adjunct which needed cooling, then his rate of return as cost avoidance and improved profit for the Ag. side could be a lot bigger than the 1c/kW to sell power back. Basically, heat energy is time shifting be it coolth or warmth. And heat and cool cost money. Farmers in Oz are using droids to spray and weed, so battery charging could be another cost avoidance. Or cold store for produce to sell at advantageous prices in winter. Basic arbitrage gains to permit the farm yield to maximise against predictable price variance. Colorado has rich people. Grow microherbs out of season. Farms often have a lot of less viable land for primary production. They could deploy flow batteries which have size costs, but massive mwh return and scale very nicely and last a very long time. Even just water pumping shifts energy into storage. Farms are giant machines for converting sunlight and water into produce anyway, this is a good fit: it's the same energy source, shifted.
- maeil 2y ago
  > Even just water pumping shifts energy into storage Could potentially reuse elevated water tanks? Guess the cost of the pumps might make the savings on the structure very small, and no idea if the amount of energy would be significant to a farm.
  - ggm 2y ago
    As i understand it mostly the best use of pumped water is gravity fed watering for stock, or crops. Pumped hydro is great at dam size scale but the losses exceed battery. What it's got is the sheer gwh scale - snowy 2.0 will run for days and days riding out a dunkelflaut with a lot of gw fed out. 2.2 gw and 150 gwh usable. (They claim more but it's disputed) I don't think a farm needs that. Better to pump the water to a headstock keeping cow troughs full, or for crop circles. Not a farmer or an engineer. Happy to be corrected.
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  It also fits well with some ideas from Denmark to find new catalysts to allow intermittent processes to make ammonia from solar power, with the idea that the ammonia when mixed with water can be used as fertiliser. Solar power + intermittent synthesis methods fits really well together for a less centralised economy.
cubefox 2y ago
In this headline, no verb
dr_dshiv 2y ago
> “Having shade on the ground is a climate adaptation. I hate to say it, but I've kind of given up on the thought that we're going to fix climate change whatsoever,” said Komenik. “Climate change is going to happen. It's going to be rapid. It's going to be terrible. So we need to figure out how to adapt to that changing climate.” Only because geoengineering is off the table. If you take climate change seriously and want to avoid it, solar radiation management is pretty much the last remaining option for prevention. Here’s a nice article for an overview: https://climate.benjames.io/someone-is-going-to-dim-the-sun/ https://climate.benjames.io/someone-is-going-to-dim-the-sun/
- epolanski 2y ago
  The simplest geo engineering is planting trees, but I see very little rush from government, privates and agencies into doing the simplest thing.
  - peterpost2 2y ago
    You can't capture even a percentage of what we've been emitting in Carbon over the last 100 years or so with trees. Planting trees is good thing to do but not even getting close to a solution.
    - badgersnake 2y ago
      Trees release chemicals to see clouds and make it rain. They also prevent soil erosion. It’s not just about carbon capture.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      I didn't say it's a solution, but it makes a huge difference for many things (erosion, carbon capturing, providing shade and cooling cities/suburbs). Yet, I don't see much of it being done, at least in my countries (Poland and Italy).
    - KaiserPro 2y ago
      > Planting trees is good thing to do but not even getting close to a solution. for carbon, no. For stopping heat being absorbed by the earth, yes. Some of the anti-desertification work being done in africa has yielded something like an average 8 degree c drop in temperature.
seanalltogether 2y ago
For farmers in regions with intense sun like colorado, I would imagine that some kind of solar netting would ultimately be the best solution for mixed agriculture. If you could hang a net like 10 feet off the ground that has tiny solar panels linked together to block out 50% of the sun, that would probably create an ideal environment for growing certain berries and vegetables.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Or even a kind of greenhouse structure?
kibwen 2y ago
> Although elevated panels may provide sufficient room for people and sheep, they complicate mechanized agriculture. I'd like to hear more about this. Do you need specialized tractors, harvesters, etc to fit under the panels?
bufordtwain 2y ago
I've been interested to see some small (1 acre-ish) solar panel installations popping up on local farmland near me in Northwest Indiana. I'm a bit surprised because although we get quite a few sunny days it's nowhere near Colorado levels of sun. So I guess the economics must be getting to the point where it's either profitable now or is expected to be profitable soon.
hsuduebc2 2y ago
I like it. I believe that this path of compromise is elegant way to implement these technologies which can take a lot of space to use. But more importantly, it can demonstrate to those who argue that solar farms are taking up fertile soil that there are alternative ways to implement solar energy without using valuable farmland.
- trenchgun 2y ago
  It's more expensive than industrial solar farms. Aesthetics over economics.
greekanalyst 2y ago
This is already happening in countries around the Mediterranean, such as Greece.
thelastgallon 2y ago
While a great idea, we don't necessarily need this. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total). From ChatGPT: <chatGPT> Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh) Real-World Context (I didn't ask ChatGPT this question, it provided without asking!): (1) The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. (2) The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over. </chatGPT> But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
- thelastgallon 2y ago
  This is not just in US, ethanol/biodiesel subsidies waste hundreds of millions of acres all over the world.
Gabrys1 2y ago
Make your mind! Is it Kominek or Komenik? Mistyping your main character name 13 or 19 times (out of 32 mentions total) doesn't seem nice...

191 points by dr_dshiv 2y ago

ashoeafoot 2y ago

expected solar driven nitrogen reactor fixation mention cause thats the trinity.

nelsonic 2y ago
Please elaborate for the uninitiated.
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  Make fertilizer from solar energy
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    A solar process would have to compete with nitrogen fixing plants as well.
- evilduck 2y ago
  The comment is referring to finding something to replace the Haber-Bosch Process, which is mostly fossil fuel driven, which makes most of our food itself dependent on fossil fuels.
  - roughly 2y ago
    Unrelated to the above, except in the mix of sustainability and agriculture - there are a bunch of companies working on bacteria to fix nitrogen for crops without requiring separate fertilizer similar to how legumes do it. I think Pivot Bio is the furthest along in the space - they’ve got a commercially available product - but it’s an active area of development in the industry right now.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > Unrelated to the above, except in the mix of sustainability and agriculture - there are a bunch of companies working on bacteria to fix nitrogen for crops without requiring separate fertilizer similar to how legumes do it. Nitrogen fixation is energy-intensive, so something has to provide energy. Additionally, nitrogen fixation has to happen in anaerobic conditions, oxygen kills the enzymes responsible for nitrogen fixation. In legumes, the oxygen is carried away by hemoglobin (the same one used in "artificial meat"), but engineering these conditions for free-living bacteria is likely going to be problematic. I'm personally hoping for a catalyst that can work in mild conditions.
      - roughly 2y ago
        There’s been some success here already - as mentioned, there’s some commercial products on the market already that do some amount of nitrogen fixation for at least corn and I believe wheat as well, so it’s not unsolvable.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
corysama 2y ago
How about solar powered liquid fuel for tractors? https://youtu.be/NngCHTImH1g?si=XVLJAfkJi3MqZN1d https://youtu.be/NngCHTImH1g?si=XVLJAfkJi3MqZN1d https://youtu.be/ekEdq6PhC0Q?si=Wpr_DKcAvtX-Tsi- https://youtu.be/ekEdq6PhC0Q?si=Wpr_DKcAvtX-Tsi-

IncreasePosts 2y ago

Hey. I live literally 30 seconds from this place, and know Bryce. Cool dude! I do wonder why solar panels in fields aren't more common, as opposed to rooftop solar. It seems like such a burden doing all those one-off jobs aren't worth it compared to the ease of just putting more up in an easy to access location on the ground. Especially since most people aren't set up so they can go off grid with their panels in case the grid goes down.

elihu 2y ago
The big utility-scale solar plants tend to be on the ground in big fields. I think the preference for rooftop solar for individual houses comes mostly because it's convenient for suburban installations, as they don't usually want to give yard space and the panels would be in the shade anyways. Roofs aren't being used for anything useful, so that's where the panels go. In a rural setting there's less incentive to install on a roof, but you still might put them there anyways if that's where you get the best sun. I suppose people might also be afraid of theft or vandalism if the panels are accessible to random passers-by without a ladder.
- Veserv 2y ago
  To add-on, utility scale solar generation is the majority of generation and has consistently outpaced small scale generation in growth. Starting at 11,233 small scale out of 26,482 in 2014, ~42.5%, versus 73,406 out of 236,090 in 2023, ~31% [1]. So, despite a ~6.5x increase in small scale generation over 10 years, ~19% compounded annual growth, utility scale generation increased by ~10.66x, ~24% compounded annual growth. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01_a.html https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01...
zdragnar 2y ago
Land is expensive in many places. Go somewhere it is very cheap, and you'll find fields of windmills and the occasional field full of solar panels. In fact, Texas had a 350 megawatt install taken out by a hail storm earlier this year. It made the rounds in the news and even here on HN if memory serves. That's still not even close to the big projects though. Vista Sands in Wisconsin has a 1.3 gigawatt install planned that will cover nearly ten thousand acres. The only reason residential rooftop solar became the industry it did was the massive subsidies handed out to consumers to make it financially viable. Without that, larger field installs and off-grid setups would be the bulk of what you hear about in most of the country.

robertclaus 2y ago

I would assume spacing becomes quite sensitive for this to work well, but cool idea!

energy123 2y ago

> "A lot of the cost of the solar array is the people — installing the solar panels and all the wiring that goes into it. Inverters and the transformers and the switchgear. None of that changes" Reminded me of Charge Robotics' mission: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics

xbmcuser 2y ago
Yeah this came as a big shock to me as I was hearing acquaintances say their solar and battery install would payback in 3-4 years compared to 15-20 years timeline I read on hackernews etc. Turns out the cost of equipment is so cheap now that in countries with cheaper labour and other costs they can get a similar system with install at 1/3 the price.
- bruce511 2y ago
  I'm currently getting 16% return on capital invested, just with domestic savings. Thats an annualized return over all capital spent, including panels, equipment and labor. Thats more or less what I expected. So yes, your locality matters. As does your current consumption, cost of electricity, and so on. Prices are also falling quite a bit as time passes.
  - energy123 2y ago
    The two things that get worse over time are labor costs and net metering arrangements. Labor costs either track or exceed inflation, and net metering arrangements get less lucrative as the grid becomes more solar heavy, like what happened in California last year. But relying on net metering for ROI is a pre-2024 thing. Batteries are getting so cheap.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      Net metering changed when it become economically unsupportable as PV adoption scaled. The same thing will happen with grid-connected residential solar + batteries. Rates will be changed to be based on capacity rather than consumption. There might, for example, be a charge based on your maximum usage during a period rather than total usage.

edm0nd 2y ago

>Today, Kominek estimates that he earns $20,000 annually by selling energy to subscribers. so how much did he have to get a loan for to pay for 3.2k solar panels + install + make the land suitable for em? Seems like that will take a long time to recoup (if ever).

sci_prog 2y ago

This is a cool concept and I love the idea but the math on the money earned from the 3276 solar panel doesn't add up. The article says the farm owner makes about $20,000 a year from the solar farm. I'm assuming that each solar panel is 2 by 1 meter, which would mean that it produces about 400 watts (20% efficiency at 1000 watts per sq meter coming from the sun). You can use this calculator to estimate how power you can produce at the given location for a given system size in kilowatts: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php The system above is 1310400 watts or ~1,310 kW, which according to the calculator produces about 2 million kWh/year. If he makes $20,000 that would mean that he gets paid only $0.01 per kW of power. And even if my assumption above about the size of each individual panel is off by a factor of 2 and they are only 1 sq meter in size (which I think they are not because the article states that the solar farm can power about 300 average households, which require the annual power output to be more than what I estimated above) that would make $0.02 per kW of power. How is it possible that the amount earned per kW is so low when the utility companies in Colorado charge about $0.14 per kW (effective rate)? And who is actually the customer here and where is the money coming from? I'm just curious to learn more.

boredatoms 2y ago
I guess the transmission lines themselves is where the costs are
gpm 2y ago
I took $20k to be profit after costs (except maybe personal labor and land), not revenue.
thephyber 2y ago
Is there anything about farming that makes financial sense? Most farmers (even in developed countries) are cash poor and most farmers are deep in debt. The ones that aren’t can quickly become so given a little bad luck. Farms have to hedge against bad yields to protect against undesirable weather. Family farms only make financial sense if there is a lot of free labor (slavery, indentured servants, or unpaid labor of children).

aaron695 2y ago

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ledgerdev 2y ago

I used to think this was a wonderful idea, with the greatest of intentions, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out it's inevitable that a hail storm hits or mother nature somehow will break/cracks those panels, allowing heavy metals to leach into the soil and make it unusable for farming in perpetuity. This actually happened to a guy I spoke with during lunch one day. So seeing the actual reality over a longer timeframe of solar farms, and wind turbines (those huge blades made of not friendly chemicals last only 10 years, do you know how they are disposed of?), have greatly reduced any excitement I had for solar/wind as environmentally friendly longer term sustainable solutions. I guess it's sort of good to diversify but they most definitely aren't "earth friendly" as advertised. Fusion seem our only real hope.

bcraven 2y ago
I'm not sure wind turbines are quite as bad as you assert: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wind-turbine-blades-be-recycled https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...
- ledgerdev 2y ago
  That seems like a pretty biased source, how about these actual cases at the top of google search? We are just getting started perhaps 10 years into this, now imagine this after another 100 years? And of course maybe they can technically be "recycled" now but it's not actually happening in a significant way yet. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-t... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... For now we have to be realistic, but hopeful that some better use than landfills can be found and be viable.
adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
not sure where you're getting 10 years for windd turbines from, but it's closer to 20. they also aren't nasty chemicals. it's fiberglass and epoxy and are disposed the same way pretty much everything is disposed of, putting them in a pit in the middle of nowhere.

asdefghyk 2y ago

I'm very skeptical about claimed benefits. Ive lived and worked on a farm and my parents were long term farmers for decades. To be convinced I would need to hear the benefits from many more (commercial ) farmers. The quoted farm is a hobby farm, small scale farm. What are the risks in such installations ?

sandworm101 2y ago
The risks are the investment in foundations and trenchwork necessary to install the panel support infrastructure. There are companies doing interesting things with low-mounted high-density installations that would be more efficient and require less infrastructure.
adrianN 2y ago
Where I live, the chief risk (aside from the usual risks of investments) are spending years and years fighting bureaucrats and NIMBYs to get the necessary permissions to put solar panels on land zoned for agriculture.
KaiserPro 2y ago
The biggest risk is that you need to plant differently to take advantage of the solar panels. Planting for forage is much harder than growing a field for hay/soy/beet/other feed crop. obviously you can't use normal combines to harvest between the rows, so you need different, custom, equipment to harvest at scale.

akamaka 2y ago

For those interested in the economics of this project, the details are available in this publication: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/88816.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/88816.pdf Summary: This particular research project won’t quite break even purely on market-rate electricity sales, due to having 2x the installation cost of utility scale solar. If high value crops are successfully grown, there are scenarios where it could break even after including profits from crop sales.

zbyforgotp 2y ago
Yeah - that’s what I thought. The original article sounds like motivated reasoning - solar farms don’t look like “green technology” so there is that great need to make them more palatable and project like this cater to that need instead of economic calculation.

ggm 2y ago

If he did any energy consuming processes to aide farming such as drying wheat to harden it and increase market price, or had greenhouses which needed heating, or a dairy adjunct which needed cooling, then his rate of return as cost avoidance and improved profit for the Ag. side could be a lot bigger than the 1c/kW to sell power back. Basically, heat energy is time shifting be it coolth or warmth. And heat and cool cost money. Farmers in Oz are using droids to spray and weed, so battery charging could be another cost avoidance. Or cold store for produce to sell at advantageous prices in winter. Basic arbitrage gains to permit the farm yield to maximise against predictable price variance. Colorado has rich people. Grow microherbs out of season. Farms often have a lot of less viable land for primary production. They could deploy flow batteries which have size costs, but massive mwh return and scale very nicely and last a very long time. Even just water pumping shifts energy into storage. Farms are giant machines for converting sunlight and water into produce anyway, this is a good fit: it's the same energy source, shifted.

maeil 2y ago
> Even just water pumping shifts energy into storage Could potentially reuse elevated water tanks? Guess the cost of the pumps might make the savings on the structure very small, and no idea if the amount of energy would be significant to a farm.
- ggm 2y ago
  As i understand it mostly the best use of pumped water is gravity fed watering for stock, or crops. Pumped hydro is great at dam size scale but the losses exceed battery. What it's got is the sheer gwh scale - snowy 2.0 will run for days and days riding out a dunkelflaut with a lot of gw fed out. 2.2 gw and 150 gwh usable. (They claim more but it's disputed) I don't think a farm needs that. Better to pump the water to a headstock keeping cow troughs full, or for crop circles. Not a farmer or an engineer. Happy to be corrected.
impossiblefork 2y ago
It also fits well with some ideas from Denmark to find new catalysts to allow intermittent processes to make ammonia from solar power, with the idea that the ammonia when mixed with water can be used as fertiliser. Solar power + intermittent synthesis methods fits really well together for a less centralised economy.

cubefox 2y ago

In this headline, no verb

dr_dshiv 2y ago

> “Having shade on the ground is a climate adaptation. I hate to say it, but I've kind of given up on the thought that we're going to fix climate change whatsoever,” said Komenik. “Climate change is going to happen. It's going to be rapid. It's going to be terrible. So we need to figure out how to adapt to that changing climate.” Only because geoengineering is off the table. If you take climate change seriously and want to avoid it, solar radiation management is pretty much the last remaining option for prevention. Here’s a nice article for an overview: https://climate.benjames.io/someone-is-going-to-dim-the-sun/ https://climate.benjames.io/someone-is-going-to-dim-the-sun/

epolanski 2y ago
The simplest geo engineering is planting trees, but I see very little rush from government, privates and agencies into doing the simplest thing.
- peterpost2 2y ago
  You can't capture even a percentage of what we've been emitting in Carbon over the last 100 years or so with trees. Planting trees is good thing to do but not even getting close to a solution.
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    Trees release chemicals to see clouds and make it rain. They also prevent soil erosion. It’s not just about carbon capture.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    I didn't say it's a solution, but it makes a huge difference for many things (erosion, carbon capturing, providing shade and cooling cities/suburbs). Yet, I don't see much of it being done, at least in my countries (Poland and Italy).
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    > Planting trees is good thing to do but not even getting close to a solution. for carbon, no. For stopping heat being absorbed by the earth, yes. Some of the anti-desertification work being done in africa has yielded something like an average 8 degree c drop in temperature.

seanalltogether 2y ago

For farmers in regions with intense sun like colorado, I would imagine that some kind of solar netting would ultimately be the best solution for mixed agriculture. If you could hang a net like 10 feet off the ground that has tiny solar panels linked together to block out 50% of the sun, that would probably create an ideal environment for growing certain berries and vegetables.

HPsquared 2y ago
Or even a kind of greenhouse structure?

kibwen 2y ago

> Although elevated panels may provide sufficient room for people and sheep, they complicate mechanized agriculture. I'd like to hear more about this. Do you need specialized tractors, harvesters, etc to fit under the panels?

bufordtwain 2y ago

I've been interested to see some small (1 acre-ish) solar panel installations popping up on local farmland near me in Northwest Indiana. I'm a bit surprised because although we get quite a few sunny days it's nowhere near Colorado levels of sun. So I guess the economics must be getting to the point where it's either profitable now or is expected to be profitable soon.

hsuduebc2 2y ago

I like it. I believe that this path of compromise is elegant way to implement these technologies which can take a lot of space to use. But more importantly, it can demonstrate to those who argue that solar farms are taking up fertile soil that there are alternative ways to implement solar energy without using valuable farmland.

trenchgun 2y ago
It's more expensive than industrial solar farms. Aesthetics over economics.

greekanalyst 2y ago

This is already happening in countries around the Mediterranean, such as Greece.

thelastgallon 2y ago

While a great idea, we don't necessarily need this. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total). From ChatGPT: <chatGPT> Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh) Real-World Context (I didn't ask ChatGPT this question, it provided without asking!): (1) The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. (2) The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over. </chatGPT> But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).

thelastgallon 2y ago
This is not just in US, ethanol/biodiesel subsidies waste hundreds of millions of acres all over the world.

Gabrys1 2y ago

Make your mind! Is it Kominek or Komenik? Mistyping your main character name 13 or 19 times (out of 32 mentions total) doesn't seem nice...