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Largest Farm to Grow Crops Under Solar Panels Proves To Be A Bumper Crop For Agrivoltaic Land Use
(site.extension.uga.edu)
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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This is harder than it looks.
See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don't mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that's working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there's big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can't be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that's not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it'll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.
What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It's huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.
As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it'll keep the cars cooler in summer.
There are plenty of crops that have to be tended and harvested by hand: Most green leafy vegetables for example.
This opens those fields to dual use alongside power generation, which might reduce agricultural use of fossil fuels, and provide shade for field workers which is especially dangerous with climate change raising heat levels.
Most of those parking lots shouldn't exist in the first place. They should be turned into actually-useful space by putting dense, walkable buildings on them, then the solar panels should go on top of that.
Often times, the only option for smaller communities that are car dependent is just a multi-level garage that has a smaller footprint. But many don't have the demand for downtown commercial real estate that would help it make financial sense.
The real only option is reforming the zoning code so that the community can be restructured to end the car dependency.
I mean, zoning is kind of the smallest hurdle for a rural town. Developing public transit and construction to make streets bike friendly are significantly larger investments. You've still then got the issue that your small town serves as the hub for miles of mountain and farmland and you can never fully end the car dependency. And for colonial era towns, construction is often not an option because of the likelihood that something has historical significance.
Yeah, that's why it's essential to do first.
Car traffic is the only thing making streets bike unfriendly in the first place. Fix that, and you don't need bike lanes and whatnot.
Besides, this argument gets its order of operations backwards. You've got to quit massively subsidizing driving first in order to get people out of their cars and justify the investment in transit.
Colonial era towns are often the least problematic to begin with. It's the towns that have been demolished to accommodate cars that suck. In fact, I'd wager that any parking lots that do exist in colonial era towns are very likely to occupy space that would've been historically significant if it weren't already lost.
So we need levitating solar panels. Got it.
Others have built them over pasture.
Might be a crazy idea but maybe they can just use smaller tractors. I'm not sure if we have the technology to build Smaller tractors. But since they are needed maybe there could be a Lot of R&D to make a tractor that fits under the space available in these installations.
Small tractors are easy. The issue is efficiency. The big tractor is big because the tool it pulls behind it covers ~10 rows per pass. You can easily build a small tractor that does 1-2 rows per pass, but that means you need a lot more passes, which means doing anything takes a lot longer.
In the future, it would be cool to see the steel frames facilitate rails that equipment could ride on and work the field beneath. Perhaps it could even be moved by water pressure, since similar equipment in the shape of large scale sprinklers already exists.
This might never come to pass, because indoor farming can produce the same amount of some crops and grains as the equivalent of 40x as much land.
That, or design panels that can be rotated over the combine as it passes, and back into place. I'm thinking driverless combine that wouldn't look anything like the ones we have now. I also have no idea what this would entail.
I think it would be less efficient to move the panels than just build a structure where they aren't in the way.
For sure, not too mention the maintenance headache, but moving them is like way cooler
Yeah I think indoor farming / vertical farming is going to be the ultimate answer. Much more efficient in every way, including resource use, water, pesticide, etc.
Not more efficient use of Gravel. Unless the person's government requires water-barriers/floodwalls on fields for some reason. But yeah, indoor is great, I've personally been experimenting with bulbs in rock wool. They don't seem as likely to bloom on the first cycle, but otherwise they've been thriving.