(From Wired Magazine, Oct. 14)
IN JACK'S SOLAR Garden in Boulder County, Colorado, owner Byron Kominek has covered 4 of his 24 acres with solar panels. The farm is growing a huge array of crops underneath them—carrots, kale, tomatoes, garlic, beets, radishes, lettuce, and more. It’s also been generating enough electricity to power 300 homes. “We decided to go about this in terms of needing to figure out how to make more money for land that we thought should be doing more,” Kominek says.
Rooftops are so 2020. If humanity’s going to stave off the worst of climate change, people will need to get creative about where they put solar panels. Now scientists are thinking about how to cover canals with them, reducing evaporation while generating power. Airports are filling up their open space with sun-eaters. And space doesn’t get much more open than on a farm: Why not stick a solar array in a field and plant crops underneath? It’s a new scientific (and literal) field known as agrivoltaics—agriculture plus photovoltaics—and it’s not as counterintuitive as it might seem....
Heavy precipitation that can damage crops is also on the rise, since a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. “In times when there is extreme heat or extreme precipitation, by protecting plants in this manner, it can actually benefit them,” says Madhu Khanna, an economist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who also won funding from the USDA’s new agrivoltaics grant. “So that's another factor that we want to look at.”
Photo by the National Renewable Energy Lab, some rights reserved.