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Growing crops under solar panels
81–90 of 154 posts
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#82I’ve long wondered why solar panels and wind turbines aren’t colocated, as the power transmission infrastructure can be shared. In Germany, power companies are installing turbines in farmers’s fields. Solar is harder (but you could mount it higher — harder to wash though). I’ve seen solar installations in India overgrown with vegetation.
In many countries it's hostile legislation to make it worse and increase soft costs. Australia was only recently allowed to include batteries on solar.
> Australia was only recently allowed to include batteries on solar.
Source? Tesla Powerwall was introduced into the Australian market in 2015. From what I understand, other residential systems existed before that, but they were uncommon. In 2019, they significantly tightened the safety standards, but the impact on people running approved off-the-shelf systems (such as Tesla's) is modest (tighter rules on installation locations may cause issues for some people, especially smaller properties–although those rules only apply to new installs, existing installs are grandfathered), most of the added burden is on those rare people who have bespoke systems.
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#83I’ve long wondered why solar panels and wind turbines aren’t colocated, as the power transmission infrastructure can be shared. In Germany, power companies are installing turbines in farmers’s fields. Solar is harder (but you could mount it higher — harder to wash though). I’ve seen solar installations in India overgrown with vegetation.
In many countries it's hostile legislation to make it worse and increase soft costs. Australia was only recently allowed to include batteries on solar.
I'm with @ skissane on asking for a source here.
FWiW myself and friends put a solar power system with recon'd Telstra batteries together for an off the grid house out the back of Bridgetown (W.Australia) in the mid 1980s.
Given it was private land and farming jack of all trades engineering maybe it was "illegal" - but I recall no mention of that at the time in any of the magazines we read and ears we pulled.
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#84I’ve long wondered why solar panels and wind turbines aren’t colocated, as the power transmission infrastructure can be shared. In Germany, power companies are installing turbines in farmers’s fields. Solar is harder (but you could mount it higher — harder to wash though). I’ve seen solar installations in India overgrown with vegetation.
> I’ve seen solar installations in India overgrown with vegetation. I wonder what the institutional setup behind that is. Whoever gets power from the solar installation has a clear incentive to keep them from being overgrown, so I assume there must be some horrible corrupt principle-agent conflict style stuff going on in the background. (Very typical of India, alas.)
I have always assumed that the situation is that someone (NGO a or government) pays for the installation but nobody pays for or trains on maintenance.
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#85Just plant that type of grass the herbivores really like and let the cows, sheep and goats roam. We can't only eat plants we need cheese too.
Just gotta keep the goats off the panels (a real problem!)
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#86There are interesting things in the article, but I think it was never about available land use, but just another knee jerk argument against solar panels. Example: Disneyland Europe will generate over 30 GWh per year from just covering a part of its parking lot. And if France makes it mandatory to cover all "substantial" parking lots it will generate as much electricity from just that as 10 nuclear power plants [1]. A…
As someone in Texas I'd really love is more parking lots had even partial covered parking with solar above. Please. It gets dang hot out here, I'd love the shade.
shoot, around my parts of Texas, when you stand in the shade of a tree, the tree looks at you and says, "trust me, it's not any cooler here"
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heck yes. It's absurd now but... imagine those crop-water-er things, with a central pivot (ed: "central-pivot-irrigation"). What if instead of just a line of watering, that rotated around, it was a vast overhead rotating circle? Like 80% by area solar panels overhanigng. But also, one radian with all the farm stuff: watering, tiller, planter, harvester? An polar-plotter of tools, with solar panels taking up most ever…
I’m actually experimenting with building one of those- the problem is the forces involved compared to the irrigator which is basically just suspending water pipes over the ground
maybe i'm misremembering, but I was under them impression that the water pressure drove the platform. was i totally wrong on this? i ask, as i would never have guessed adding the weight of solar panels to that would be viable without possibly using some of the generated power to drive a motor.
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#88I’m no farmer but wouldn’t putting a whole bunch of stuff in a field make it difficult to drive a tractor through it? Like have you seen the size of modern tractors? These panels will need to be 20ft in the air with support posts really far apart to accommodate seed drills and sprayers and other equipment that the tractor pulls behind it.
there's no reason to put solar panels on fertile land, there is plenty of land that can be used in other places.
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#89I really don't get why people keep coming up with all these elaborate plans to mix solar panels with other stuff that's in active use, instead of just putting fields of them out in non-endangered desert elevated enough off the ground that they won't actively interfere with local animals.
Why would we destroy pristine desert, which is rapidly disappearing, when we could cover land that has already been disturbed, like parking lots, building roofs, and farmland? Deserts are important ecosystems regardless of their immediate utility to industrial society
There will always be trade off no matter where we decide to put them. Either that or we return to living in villages and forget about modern civilization.
Re: Growing crops under solar panels
#90There are interesting things in the article, but I think it was never about available land use, but just another knee jerk argument against solar panels. Example: Disneyland Europe will generate over 30 GWh per year from just covering a part of its parking lot. And if France makes it mandatory to cover all "substantial" parking lots it will generate as much electricity from just that as 10 nuclear power plants [1]. A…
As someone in Texas I'd really love is more parking lots had even partial covered parking with solar above. Please. It gets dang hot out here, I'd love the shade.
I tried to sell this in Texas a decade or so ago and feedback from most tenants and commercial RE folks was they were concerned with lighting, visibility , safety (as in, increase opportunities for theft/assault), liability, etc of having panels on their property. All I wanted was the use of their land and I was going to fund everything else. Likely would have pursued selling them low rate electricity. The market wasn’t ready for it at that time.