Specialty cut flower grower here. Backyard scale, but we're profitable and have received some grants so that means we have had a USDA relationship for a couple years. The rep I've talked to and am closest with is skeptical of agrivoltaics due to past dealings with solar companies (not sure what she means). There doesn't seem to be enough reliable public data to make it seem like the win-win-win we want it to be. In their mind, you're adding a non-ag industry to the land and that could have downstream consequences in a generation. Maybe you're scheming to get the land re-zoned for light industrial; I honestly have no idea what they're thinking, but they're averse toward it.
Most flowers in 7b don't want extreme sun. We use shade cloth frequently, so solar coverage would be fine and of course have the energy co-production. Cut flowers aren't harvested mechanically at our scale, so we wouldn't have to worry about tractor access.
Meanwhile, more and more food is produced under cover for a lot of good reasons. Polytunnels, glass houses. You might get some summer shade from solar but what about season extension at the beginning of spring/end of fall? Depending on your crop and location, that could mean 4-8 extra weeks a year. What if you do geothermal energy generation for the tunnel? Now you can grow through the winter and not need the same footprint as solar. That's more appealing to me.
Anyway, I'm forever mad at corn ethanol and we should at least replace all that with solar farms. That's probably the right place to start. But also, again, zoning...
HN is probably over-indexed on people living in high-density cities, which might explain why tech like this and also things like vertical farming are popular here. However there's almost no dimensional constraint for farmland in the United States. We have vast amounts of it and there's really nothing to be gained from "stacking"
Often these "solutions" introduce more problems than they solve. One example being a solar farm designed to be grazed by sheep where the panels are so low to the ground that farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.
The best solution is still to put solar panels and farmland in different places where each can be optimized without concern for the other.
Believe it or not cattle is a low margin business and farmers can't buy hay (from a non-PV field) and sell meat at a profit. Ranchers cut hay to get their pastured cattle through the winter. They can't have portions of their field unreachable by a tractor. Reasons like this are why this type of tech will always be popular on HN but they just can't figure out why farmers don't want it.
"The solar canopy also protects the grasses, keeping them green and dewy, even as nearby fields blanch and crisp in the sunlight. Shallanberger rotates the herd every few days, a key tenet of regenerative farming philosophy, so they munch on fresh grass while the rest of the field grows back. They move through all 15 paddocks in about 45 days; if the site relied on mechanical mowers, they’d trim every 45 days, too."
"Vegetation management is one of the most significant costs for solar plant maintenance in the Southeast, Shallenberger said. In the first six months, the cattle took care of about 75% of the mowing — he had to bring in conventional equipment for some woody weeds that the cattle don’t care for. Once the pasture is more established, the herd could handle up to 95% of the site’s mowing needs."
> Reasons like this are why this type of tech will always be popular on HN but they just can't figure out why farmers don't want it.
Farmers come in different sizes, shapes, locations.
The largest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_station is several times the size of the state of Rhode Island, and chances are there're some spots where a bit of shade is welcome. I can also assure you no one's mowing/haying that size a property.
Huge isolated fields of solar end up with the same problem as nuclear: they introduce multiple single-points of failure.
The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.
I think most people want highly distributed, reliable, affordable power. That's why off-grid tech is experiencing such a boom.
I live in a 36' skoolie, so I'm nomad-indexed, but I can confirm that over the past 10 years or so, most RV-lifers have transitioned their focus from recreation / comfort to off-grid experimentation. Essentially everywhere I go in the US, if I'm camped near others, they are going to have minimum viability for boondocking. That was not the case when I started.
Especially amidst the current political instability and apparent looming collapse of the US state, one of the simplest things that most of us can do is stabilize off-grid power in our neighborhoods, and that is quietly happening all over the place.
So, the role of vertically integrated solar (both literally and metaphorically) has more to do with the grid shape that serves our stability needs, and less to do with large-scale differences in efficiency.
> The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.
Who cares? One isolated field of solar represents a negligible amount of power at grid scale. Nobody is going to bother to go around attacking each individual field because the "ROI" of attacking a high-voltage transmission line (the kind that brings power from multiple thermal plants to a city) is so much higher.
Attacks scale in the drone age, infrastructure left where nobody’s looking at it is a vulnerability. Solar stacked on an active farm has the benefit of having eyes on it constantly - detection, repair and recovery cycles are dramatically shortened.
I bought my bus in 2015, so my personal picture is of the past 11 years.
The big changes seem to have been:
* Better / more varied solar panels
* Lithium batteries (which I don't use for a house bank, but still benefit from by dint of them having driven the price deep-cycle lead batteries down)
* USB-C everything
When I first started this lifestyle, almost everyone had lead-acid batteries powering an inverter, and a zillion wall warts converting power back to DC. Some people had solar for sure, but a solid majority only camped where they were able to plug in.
At festivals, powered sites sold out quickly and at a premium. Dispersed camping in national forests was the purview of tent campers, truck campers, and people who don't use much power (ie, not a ton of remote workers). New campgrounds always focused on power pedestals and seemed to regard that as the MVP.
Now, festivals are a sea of solar and/or off-grid-cooled beers. Campgrounds are often a de-facto swap meet of usb-c oddities (I have a USB-C coffee grinder - what a world!). Dispersed camping in national forests are often transient standing desk communities. Nary an inverter in sight - everything is direct-to-USB-C.
The difference between most people needing to plug in within a few hours in order to have their basic comforts vs. being able to live indefinitely without the grid has significantly changed what it feels like to be on the road.
In the theorical sense, sure. We could cover all of the world's needs with a solar panel in the Sahara that's 700 km on each side and handwave the transmission lines for that.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how the real world works.
In the theorical sense, sure. We could cover all of the world's needs with a solar panel in the Sahara that's 700 km on each side and handwave the transmission lines for that.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how things work.
little known fact: US currently grows a lot of corn for ethanol production. If we replaced that all with solar panels we'd have plenty of electricity. The solar vs farm debate is usually framed as a tradeoff with food production but that's not really true
if your initial reaction is we have tons of empty land why would we ever build solar panels over a farm?
this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation. just like a hospital may want to cover their parking lot to offset costs.
at giant scale do these solar location choices optimize the absolutely best use of land for cheapest possible electricity generation? no. but at small scale it can make sense for these individual owners
I believe that, while a cool technological innovation, the cost of installing and maintaining these panels will be significantly higher than doing the same on open land.
The article’s biggest claim is that devoting one percent of US farmland to agrivoltaics could cover 20 percent of the country’s electricity, pointing at the Texas to Nebraska to California corridor, which is exactly where big mechanized farms are most common.
They run large equipment (combines, sprayer booms, center pivot irrigation systems[1], etc). To keep that working under panels you need tall posts, wide spans, and a layout that matches the equipment paths, which would push structural cost significantly above a ground installation. All maintenance would require a boom truck, not just a ground crew. And center pivots in particular (very common) need an entire circle cleared for the system to pivot, meaning a multi-acre span with no posts for the pivot to hit, which is simply infeasible.
That’s before accounting for pesticide spray and dust on the PVs, or the logistical burden of running PV crews through a working farm.
It’s also worth noting that the study itself was broccoli, which is hand harvested and about the best case crop for this. Even so, the broccoli took 25 extra days to mature. On a farm running multiple rotations a season that lost time has a real cost, separate from the structural costs.
This innovation has a lot more promise on smaller plots. Co-ops, market gardens, specialty crops, and the like that don’t rely on large equipment. I’d be surprised to ever see it on a large farm.
Center pivots are mechanical automation. They replaced traditional hand-moved sprinkler lines and automatically sweep the entire field at a defined rate. The concept is over 100 years old and has stuck around because of how efficient it is.
Unless we intentionally replace them with less efficient automation, it’s a hard sell.
It’s really more of a physics problem than an automation problem.
You can farm and do industrial scale solar on the same land. It works extremely well for lamb herds, shade tolerant crops like strawberries, and greenhouses. I'm extremely interested in this area and actually starting some personal projects where I live, around agri-solar that is actually farming.
any recommended reading resources or documentation of your projects? building a resource database on this field and don't personally know anyone with experience, especially being in the NE
> this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation.
Also: Many plants don't want/need full sun. In fact, they adapt by varying production of a chemical called zeaxanthin throughout the day to manage the amount of energy they take in.
Partially shading crops with bifacial panels (which are semi-translucent) can be beneficial to the crops as well as producing energy.
Initial reaction is how do you harvest? Is the farm well connected to the grid? Is the cost of making this practical just much higher than land. Land is cheap in the scheme of things here.
Optimization for land area in agriculture is already a catch-22 type affair: We subsidize the planting of corn to produce ethanol -- one of the most inefficient forms of solar energy 'harvesting' possible. So going directly to electrical harvesting while retaining the ability to grow high-value crops is certainly still advantageous...
To put some numbers: ~40% of the corn grown in the US (approx. 5.4 billion bushels out of roughly 14.9 billion bushels total production) goes toward ethanol production
Don't know about the US, but where I live farmland is restrictively zoned to preserve its agricultural use. You can't just turn prime cropland into a (normal) solar power plant, but perhaps you can get away with this dual use trick.
I wonder how little farming you’d have to do if this did count. Does letting a few sheep walk around a solar farm count? Growing a few strawberry plants? If the economics from elsewhere in thread are accurate, the farming feels like it would add 0 value other than the regulatory dodge, and would therefore be minimized.
Freedom-loving, R-voting America is full of restrictive zoning. I don't think it's necessarily the contradiction you make it out to be. Especially if, like here, the government doesn't tell you what or how to farm, only that farmland is for farming.
One thing the article doesn't mention is that some plants prefer a little shade.
So while broccoli yields may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere where it might normally be too sunny. So leafy vegetables like spinach might be doing equivalently fine under the magenta shades in New Jersey, but might actually be even better in Texas.
> Broccoli cultivated under them grew more slowly, requiring an additional 25 days for harvest, but produced roughly the same yield. Meanwhile, these magenta sunscreens improved the microclimate below, reducing the “vapor pressure deficit”—a measure of when plants need to halt photosynthesis to avoid excessive water loss. This may have improved the plants’ efficiency in converting sunlight into plant biomass, which increased by 2.8- to 4.5-fold compared to unshaded plants.
> The shaded plants’ levels of macronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus were either higher than or similar to unshaded plants, while levels of some micronutrients such as iron, copper, and zinc were slightly lower.
I think you're missing the point made above: the paper compares apples to apples (broccoli with and without shade) for good reason, but the ability to cool the microclimate may enable crop substitution that has better output/value in areas where it is normally too hot for that crop.
I find the physics of wavelength-dependent materials properties oddly satisfying. You can do clever things like this, extracting energy from different parts of the spectrum by combining materials and conversion processes. You can beam waste heat back to space through the atmosphere’s “infrared window”. You can explain global warming from first principles. Fascinating stuff!
One thing I’m curious about this from the plant perspective - we’re pretty sure we’re passing everything relevant down to the plant, but nature doesn’t normally leave signal or energy lying around without leveraging it somewhere, so what don’t we know about how the broccoli use the parts we’ve been assuming they don’t?
I'm current taking composite construction certification courses because modern manufacturing provides for customizing the material for very specific uses. Low volume production with very specific mechanical and physical properties.
Reflect back shortwave IR sunlight below the bandgap of the solar panels.
Make the solar panels "black" at longer IR wavelengths corresponding to the temperature of the panels and to IR windows in the atmosphere, to maximize emission of heat back into space.
I feel the same way about how fiber optics can create bandwidth by just slicing up the spectrum for different channels of data (my rudimentary understanding anyway). I like how even after all this time we find new and clever ways to work with light.
QAM can absolutely be used in fiber optics communication. Encoding and decoding systems are complicated (I won’t pretend to understand it), but it exists.
Wavelength-division multiplexing[1]... it's what they use with fiber-to-the-home to get bidirectional signals with a single strand of fiber. Or the big-boy version is DWDM which ISPs use to stuff dozens of customers on a single strand.
Are there realistic ways of harvesting vegetables at scale that are underneath mounted solar panels, with all their supports?
Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
I'm just imagining that you are going to need a lot of vertical clearance for tractors, and support posts will have to be widely spaced enough that the horizontal beams supporting the panels will have to be quite strong, and that at some point this is less solar panels in a field, and more like constructing a building with solar panels on its roof.
> Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.
Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.
Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.
I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.
The good news is that as someone else pointed out, we mostly grow corn for energy, so in a way, this is more about getting the ground we use for corn back than it is getting more energy.
We are right at the point where fully automated harvesting machines start to gain ground. And removing the operator (or moving the operator outside the machine) allows for designs that are less tall. The benefit of wider and wider machines also shrinks with full automation, even if it doesn't fully go away
You can see there are already huge examples of this in Australia with sheep grazing under panels and it's just barely starting in New York state with a cornell pilot. In my opinion it's the future of electricity in agricultural areas.
CdTe panels are limited by availability of tellurium. Maybe we'll mine that in space one day; much of the Earth's Te was lost as volatile H2Te. The abundance of Te in carbonaceous chondrites is about 1000x that in the Earth's crust.
Given that it's about as abundant as platinum (which trades at ~$50000/kg), tellurium is pretty cheap right now (~120$/kg, about 10 times the price of copper).
Since it's an almost free byproduct of copper electrorefining (>1% concentration in copper anode slime, but low annual production of ~800 tons, limiting CdTe panel production to ~100GW/year short term [1]), I don't think that mining it in space is ever gonna pay off for terrestrial panel production, because if it was priced somewhat comparably to platinum group metals you could never ever justify any demand for it (panels would be much too expensive compared to alternatives, tellurium is already a relevant cost factor for them despite being cheap-ish) => and you'd obviously use all interplanetary mining/transport capability on platinum and its ilk instead.
Kinetic orbital bombardment is utterly worthless from a military perspective.
People tend to have a completely inaccurate view on this because of bad popsci, out-of-context feasibility studies from the 1950s and fiction that just leans toward the "fantasy" on that.
The reasons for this is are very simple:
1) There is no "high ground". Being in orbit does not enable you to throw things "down" for free, thats simply not how orbital dynamics work. All the impact energy you have to pay for up front, and delta-v on some orbital object is almost inevitably more expensive than the equivalent amount of explosives on the ground.
2) Anything launched from beyond earth orbit would be unusably delayed. And telegraphed.
3) The concept does not have a single selling point from a military perspective; not really faster than an ICBM, penetration is limited by newtonian physics regardless of speed and more expensive than just delivering the equivalent amount of explosives (or nuclear payload) via missile.
edit: Yes an interplanetary transport system could be weaponized. But so could the explosives currently used in mining (~tens of millions of tons per year), no one cares.
If North Korea or Iran could hold the world hostage with a threat of a mass-extinction-level event, they absolutely would. Similar for many terrorists of various stripes. Are you sure the control systems of whatever company ends up trying to bring back mass from space will be sufficiently resilient to hacking? I'm not. So, I worry.
And we're not even talking about "orbital" bombardment. We're talking about a continuous stream of material at well above escape velocity, whose delta-V is already paid for. Simply redirecting a few pieces of this stream would not be more telegraphed than any other attack. By the way, are you sure the control systems of the mine owners are resilient to coercion of their executives by "legitimate" terrestrial governments? I'm not. None of your reasons are effective.
The energies are substantially more than mining explosives, with wildly different properties as far as threat detection and mitigation. To put it charitably, that's a quite silly comparison.
There are countless square miles of vacant land in the USA that are unsuitable for farming and ideal for solar. This might be useful in areas where vacant land is actually scarce.
The US is huge. The problem is efficiency of transmission. But maybe we just install 2x the solar to overcome that? When energy is so low cost we can afford to be a bit less efficient.
A huge amount of corn goes into producing ethanol to burn as fuel in cars. We can safely take a small portion of agricultural land out of "food" production and replace it with photovoltaics and electrical production instead of using it to produce ethanol and produce productive stable returns for farmers instead of subsiding corn and fuel.
That vacant land tends to be far away from electricity users. Not always - lots of desert around Las Vegas - but people historically like settling around arable land. Producing electricity close to where you need it is great, both because of transmission losses and because building more long-distance transmission lines is neither easy, cheap nor fast
It really does seem like a no brainer. They should already be close to other infrastructure and they provide shade for parked cars which reduces the energy spent cooling the cars when people drive away. Even if you make very safe assumptions about the total area of parking lots in the US and their sun exposure, the amount of energy they could generate from solar panels on average rivals the current solar output.
I'd love this for a home greenhouse... I live in an area where during the summer insolation is high enough that some combination of large amounts shading and airflow (wasting humidity) is needed... wavelength-selective shading seems like an interesting idea to start with, and energy recovery from it is a nice add-on.
For a larger greenhouse a mix of clear non solar and solar pv pannels optimised for different plants could be the way to go.
The polycarbonate clear pannels are actualy cheap and likely strong enough that I am considering mounting solar pv directly to them. So: scratch building a greenhouse frame, that will support all the loads, and attaching the panels, and run the wires right through the polycarb, standard solar pannels, install@40" width and that works out to 3 per 12', 12 pannels for 40', for a neat eve to eve install.
Wild, I did a science fair experiment on plant growth vs light color as a young kid! i had each plant in a different shade of upside down tumbler cup and compared the growth. N=1 for each cup, but I remember being surprised that the plants really didn’t seem to care when you filtered out certain shades.
I like the idea of hybridizing the solar infrastructure to work with advanced AG systems. I watched a recent tour of a modern strawberry farm, and I was surprised that they were using wheeled robots instead of overhead tracks.
This is WAY more interesting than SpaceX launch number yada yada or whatever.
Datacenters in space are for Elon & his stock price, nothing more. Meanwhile we are not prioritizing things like this nearly enough. Solar on earth is what needs to be rolled out in a massive way, for our current energy needs and for datacenters.
Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels. You still need lights with magenta panels to hit 18+hrs of light a day. Once the lights are already installed, specialized panels would be hard to justify a mark-up.
> Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels.
Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants.
I was thinking this further through. What you write was indeed the next thought… and the reason we don’t grow in multistory factories is… cost! So sunlight is the OG for greenhouse growing. Cost of m2 free ground or glass do not matter when compared to building space, lights and energy.
This does lead me back to the idea that to cover greenhouses with translucent panels, you would need translucent panels to have undergone a price drop comparable only with regular panels. Which is unlikely. And then you have risks like hail risks that multiply when covering greenhouses with panels. Although that might be an upside, since greenhouses in NL are actively going towards break free glass which is pretty expensive. So perhaps there is a break free translucent solar panel upgrade route that could work out. (I am sceptical, but it is a nice idea indeed. Light is a spectrum and not all light is equal in photosyntesis.)
I think the question is, are these panels less expensive than taking normal panels, maybe with LEDs to help growth at night, and adding solar tracking to optimize solar generation, plant shading, and plant growth?
Most flowers in 7b don't want extreme sun. We use shade cloth frequently, so solar coverage would be fine and of course have the energy co-production. Cut flowers aren't harvested mechanically at our scale, so we wouldn't have to worry about tractor access.
Meanwhile, more and more food is produced under cover for a lot of good reasons. Polytunnels, glass houses. You might get some summer shade from solar but what about season extension at the beginning of spring/end of fall? Depending on your crop and location, that could mean 4-8 extra weeks a year. What if you do geothermal energy generation for the tunnel? Now you can grow through the winter and not need the same footprint as solar. That's more appealing to me.
Anyway, I'm forever mad at corn ethanol and we should at least replace all that with solar farms. That's probably the right place to start. But also, again, zoning...
Often these "solutions" introduce more problems than they solve. One example being a solar farm designed to be grazed by sheep where the panels are so low to the ground that farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.
The best solution is still to put solar panels and farmland in different places where each can be optimized without concern for the other.
There's significant evidence "add solar panels" is an optimization to at least some kinds of farmland.
> farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season
That season is typically "winter", and you wind up without much hay to cut at that point.
No one's banning hay fields. You can do both.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/wheres-t...
"The solar canopy also protects the grasses, keeping them green and dewy, even as nearby fields blanch and crisp in the sunlight. Shallanberger rotates the herd every few days, a key tenet of regenerative farming philosophy, so they munch on fresh grass while the rest of the field grows back. They move through all 15 paddocks in about 45 days; if the site relied on mechanical mowers, they’d trim every 45 days, too."
"Vegetation management is one of the most significant costs for solar plant maintenance in the Southeast, Shallenberger said. In the first six months, the cattle took care of about 75% of the mowing — he had to bring in conventional equipment for some woody weeds that the cattle don’t care for. Once the pasture is more established, the herd could handle up to 95% of the site’s mowing needs."
> Reasons like this are why this type of tech will always be popular on HN but they just can't figure out why farmers don't want it.
Farmers come in different sizes, shapes, locations.
The largest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_station is several times the size of the state of Rhode Island, and chances are there're some spots where a bit of shade is welcome. I can also assure you no one's mowing/haying that size a property.
The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.
I think most people want highly distributed, reliable, affordable power. That's why off-grid tech is experiencing such a boom.
I live in a 36' skoolie, so I'm nomad-indexed, but I can confirm that over the past 10 years or so, most RV-lifers have transitioned their focus from recreation / comfort to off-grid experimentation. Essentially everywhere I go in the US, if I'm camped near others, they are going to have minimum viability for boondocking. That was not the case when I started.
Especially amidst the current political instability and apparent looming collapse of the US state, one of the simplest things that most of us can do is stabilize off-grid power in our neighborhoods, and that is quietly happening all over the place.
So, the role of vertically integrated solar (both literally and metaphorically) has more to do with the grid shape that serves our stability needs, and less to do with large-scale differences in efficiency.
Who cares? One isolated field of solar represents a negligible amount of power at grid scale. Nobody is going to bother to go around attacking each individual field because the "ROI" of attacking a high-voltage transmission line (the kind that brings power from multiple thermal plants to a city) is so much higher.
Just take a look at the multiple fridge freezer attacks in the EU this year.
Can you elaborate, please? What exactly has changed, and over what time period?
The big changes seem to have been:
* Better / more varied solar panels
* Lithium batteries (which I don't use for a house bank, but still benefit from by dint of them having driven the price deep-cycle lead batteries down)
* USB-C everything
When I first started this lifestyle, almost everyone had lead-acid batteries powering an inverter, and a zillion wall warts converting power back to DC. Some people had solar for sure, but a solid majority only camped where they were able to plug in.
At festivals, powered sites sold out quickly and at a premium. Dispersed camping in national forests was the purview of tent campers, truck campers, and people who don't use much power (ie, not a ton of remote workers). New campgrounds always focused on power pedestals and seemed to regard that as the MVP.
Now, festivals are a sea of solar and/or off-grid-cooled beers. Campgrounds are often a de-facto swap meet of usb-c oddities (I have a USB-C coffee grinder - what a world!). Dispersed camping in national forests are often transient standing desk communities. Nary an inverter in sight - everything is direct-to-USB-C.
The difference between most people needing to plug in within a few hours in order to have their basic comforts vs. being able to live indefinitely without the grid has significantly changed what it feels like to be on the road.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how the real world works.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how things work.
is it?
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2025/04/new-study-compa...
> The department has raised its corn production forecast by 234 million bushels to 16 billion bushels.
https://bioenergytimes.com/usda-raises-2026-27-us-corn-use-f...
About a third! Way more than I thought. I wonder how much of that would have to be covered in panels to get the same energy.
this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation. just like a hospital may want to cover their parking lot to offset costs.
at giant scale do these solar location choices optimize the absolutely best use of land for cheapest possible electricity generation? no. but at small scale it can make sense for these individual owners
https://electrek.co/2026/10/05/six-flags-has-installed-one-o...
The article’s biggest claim is that devoting one percent of US farmland to agrivoltaics could cover 20 percent of the country’s electricity, pointing at the Texas to Nebraska to California corridor, which is exactly where big mechanized farms are most common.
They run large equipment (combines, sprayer booms, center pivot irrigation systems[1], etc). To keep that working under panels you need tall posts, wide spans, and a layout that matches the equipment paths, which would push structural cost significantly above a ground installation. All maintenance would require a boom truck, not just a ground crew. And center pivots in particular (very common) need an entire circle cleared for the system to pivot, meaning a multi-acre span with no posts for the pivot to hit, which is simply infeasible.
That’s before accounting for pesticide spray and dust on the PVs, or the logistical burden of running PV crews through a working farm.
It’s also worth noting that the study itself was broccoli, which is hand harvested and about the best case crop for this. Even so, the broccoli took 25 extra days to mature. On a farm running multiple rotations a season that lost time has a real cost, separate from the structural costs.
This innovation has a lot more promise on smaller plots. Co-ops, market gardens, specialty crops, and the like that don’t rely on large equipment. I’d be surprised to ever see it on a large farm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation
Unless we intentionally replace them with less efficient automation, it’s a hard sell.
It’s really more of a physics problem than an automation problem.
Also: Many plants don't want/need full sun. In fact, they adapt by varying production of a chemical called zeaxanthin throughout the day to manage the amount of energy they take in.
Partially shading crops with bifacial panels (which are semi-translucent) can be beneficial to the crops as well as producing energy.
https://www.science.org/content/article/too-much-good-thing
https://farmbuy.com/1595-florina-road-katherine-nt-0850-4368...
1% of panel cost according to Gemini.
To put some numbers: ~40% of the corn grown in the US (approx. 5.4 billion bushels out of roughly 14.9 billion bushels total production) goes toward ethanol production
A 100 acre solar plant in Ohio would make well about $1m-$1.5m in revenue
Why would you increase the cost and complexity to try to increase your revenue from $1-1.5m to a massive $1-1.5m?
Or you could just lease the land to a solar operator for about $100k a year, with no expenses
It's a solution looking for a problem.
So central land use planning? Rural America won't be that Commumist -- not even by law, just look at the way it votes.
Freedom means a farmer can do whatever they want with their land
So while broccoli yields may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere where it might normally be too sunny. So leafy vegetables like spinach might be doing equivalently fine under the magenta shades in New Jersey, but might actually be even better in Texas.
> Broccoli cultivated under them grew more slowly, requiring an additional 25 days for harvest, but produced roughly the same yield. Meanwhile, these magenta sunscreens improved the microclimate below, reducing the “vapor pressure deficit”—a measure of when plants need to halt photosynthesis to avoid excessive water loss. This may have improved the plants’ efficiency in converting sunlight into plant biomass, which increased by 2.8- to 4.5-fold compared to unshaded plants.
> The shaded plants’ levels of macronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus were either higher than or similar to unshaded plants, while levels of some micronutrients such as iron, copper, and zinc were slightly lower.
Re-greening at a profit?
Reflect back shortwave IR sunlight below the bandgap of the solar panels.
Make the solar panels "black" at longer IR wavelengths corresponding to the temperature of the panels and to IR windows in the atmosphere, to maximize emission of heat back into space.
Example of a research paper using it: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290224766_Investiga...
You might also be interested in https://phys.org/news/2026-11-air-holes-silicon-wafers-flat....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexi...
Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
I'm just imagining that you are going to need a lot of vertical clearance for tractors, and support posts will have to be widely spaced enough that the horizontal beams supporting the panels will have to be quite strong, and that at some point this is less solar panels in a field, and more like constructing a building with solar panels on its roof.
It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.
Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.
Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.
I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.
Since it's an almost free byproduct of copper electrorefining (>1% concentration in copper anode slime, but low annual production of ~800 tons, limiting CdTe panel production to ~100GW/year short term [1]), I don't think that mining it in space is ever gonna pay off for terrestrial panel production, because if it was priced somewhat comparably to platinum group metals you could never ever justify any demand for it (panels would be much too expensive compared to alternatives, tellurium is already a relevant cost factor for them despite being cheap-ish) => and you'd obviously use all interplanetary mining/transport capability on platinum and its ilk instead.
[1]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/10/global-cadmium-tellur...
People tend to have a completely inaccurate view on this because of bad popsci, out-of-context feasibility studies from the 1950s and fiction that just leans toward the "fantasy" on that.
The reasons for this is are very simple:
1) There is no "high ground". Being in orbit does not enable you to throw things "down" for free, thats simply not how orbital dynamics work. All the impact energy you have to pay for up front, and delta-v on some orbital object is almost inevitably more expensive than the equivalent amount of explosives on the ground.
2) Anything launched from beyond earth orbit would be unusably delayed. And telegraphed.
3) The concept does not have a single selling point from a military perspective; not really faster than an ICBM, penetration is limited by newtonian physics regardless of speed and more expensive than just delivering the equivalent amount of explosives (or nuclear payload) via missile.
edit: Yes an interplanetary transport system could be weaponized. But so could the explosives currently used in mining (~tens of millions of tons per year), no one cares.
And we're not even talking about "orbital" bombardment. We're talking about a continuous stream of material at well above escape velocity, whose delta-V is already paid for. Simply redirecting a few pieces of this stream would not be more telegraphed than any other attack. By the way, are you sure the control systems of the mine owners are resilient to coercion of their executives by "legitimate" terrestrial governments? I'm not. None of your reasons are effective.
The energies are substantially more than mining explosives, with wildly different properties as far as threat detection and mitigation. To put it charitably, that's a quite silly comparison.
Let the people build.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TumxO2glmPQ
Datacenters in space are for Elon & his stock price, nothing more. Meanwhile we are not prioritizing things like this nearly enough. Solar on earth is what needs to be rolled out in a massive way, for our current energy needs and for datacenters.
Remember spacex is a public company and you can short the company at any time if you believe what you're saying. Why not profit off it?
Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants.
This is the classic out of depth HN take
This does lead me back to the idea that to cover greenhouses with translucent panels, you would need translucent panels to have undergone a price drop comparable only with regular panels. Which is unlikely. And then you have risks like hail risks that multiply when covering greenhouses with panels. Although that might be an upside, since greenhouses in NL are actively going towards break free glass which is pretty expensive. So perhaps there is a break free translucent solar panel upgrade route that could work out. (I am sceptical, but it is a nice idea indeed. Light is a spectrum and not all light is equal in photosyntesis.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428018
Image: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.xcrp.2026.103555/asset/c8...
Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...