Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all the original, high-quality content we publish week after week despite the challenges of AI deleting content, anti-social media, inflation and other obstacles.
US President Donald Trump is doing everything he can in a supposed attempt to save farmers from high fuel costs, but he is shooting at the wrong target. Instead of cajoling a few shiploads of diesel from Russia, it should work to help farmers take advantage of new cash crop opportunities in the agrivoltaic movement. Agrivoltaics is where farmers get solar panels and whoops! We lost it in the solar panels. Oh well…maybe Trump doesn’t like farmers after all…
Solar energy, speed of power generation and agrivoltaics
Technical Cleaning has been following the agrivoltaic movement since 2017, when researchers began gathering evidence that solar panel arrays can be designed to make room for grazing animals and crops, allowing farmers to continue using the land for agriculture. Expansion has been slow, but signs of a breakthrough began to emerge in 2022, when Doral Renewables broke ground on the 1.3-gigawatt Mammoth solar power plant on land leased to more than 65 families in Starke and Pulaski counties in northwest Indiana (see more agrivoltaic background here).
The project was built in phases. Given that the last 900 megawatts were built in just 18 months, Mammoth checks the gearbox to power demands of today’s growing thirst for more electricity.
“In today’s world of economic development, every project seeks speed for electrons. With demand for electricity skyrocketing, we need every electron we can get on the grid,” enthused Indiana Secretary of Energy Suzanne Jaworowski in a press release marking the start of commercial operations for the 900-megawatt phase on Oct. 7.
While solar panels take some space away from agriculture, other opportunities arise. When the first 400 megawatts came online, Mammoth was home to 2,000 head of grazing livestock, including sheep, donkeys, alpacas and small pigs called kunekunes. Grazers serve as natural managers of vegetation, preventing plants from overgrowing the solar panels while reducing the use of diesel equipment needed for mowing.
What’s all this about solar panels on farms?
Jaworowski was also among those who emphasized that solar energy preserves the earth. Unlike other forms of real estate development, solar power plants require minimal surface disturbance. Once the solar panels are removed, the land can be recultivated if desired. “We want to create an energy infrastructure that attracts economic development and do it in a way that preserves our way of life and our agricultural environment. This project is a great example of that,” Jaworowski emphasized.
Maybe Jaworowski could talk about that with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins, who somehow got the idea into her head that solar power plants are destroying farmland.
On the other hand, it doesn’t matter. In addition to preserving land in northwest Indiana from destructive forms of real estate development, the Mammoth project has also made a significant contribution to the state’s manufacturing sector. Solar panels require racking systems and other hardware, and the Indiana steel industry produced 20,000 tons of steel for these elements of the project.
More solar panels and more water conservation on farms
Doral has stated that it will continue to explore agrivoltaic opportunities at the Mammoth project. “Among others, the company is exploring specialty crops, sheep and cattle grazing,” the firm notes.
Doral also has another subset of the agrivoltaic field, in which solar energy plants also function as native plant restoration and habitat conservation projects. The company’s 1.3-gigawatt Vista Sands solar power plant in Wisconsin, for example, received support from conservation groups, including the Audubon Society, for partnering on a connected grassland conservation project on private lands.
Conservation groups have also noted that the Vista Sands project will close more than 50 wells, conserving water in a stressed area and dramatically reducing chemicals leached from fertilizers and insecticides. Doral further cited an engineering report indicating that Vista Sands would contribute $630 million in public health and ecosystem benefits in its first year of operation alone.
An agrivoltaic love letter from Indiana to the US
Work on Vista Sands will reportedly begin now, if it hasn’t already. Meanwhile, back in Indiana, Doral has joined an agrivoltaic partnership led by Purdue University aimed at further improving the case for solar panels on farmland.
Under the umbrella of the newly formed Midwest Agrivoltaics for Resilient Communities, the partners are focusing on the energy security angle. “MARC is focused on the transformative potential of agrivoltaics (harvesting food and energy on the same land) to improve the economic resilience and energy security of rural communities in the Midwest in the face of severe climate,” summarizes Purdue.
“Producing food and energy locally can help diversify and stabilize landowners’ incomes, reduce power outages, and ultimately create a more prosperous rural Midwest,” the school adds.
“When hail ruins a crop, heat exhausts livestock, or wind storms knock out electricity, farmers and their communities are severely affected. Our goal is to understand how agrivoltaics can make our nation’s rural communities more resilient and prosperous,” explains Purdue’s Dr. Dan Chavas, who serves as principal investigator on the project.
For its contribution to MARC, Mammoth has marked a demonstration zone for the exclusive use of research activities, including testing of robotics and advanced monitoring systems, as well as crop testing. Solar tracker company Nextpower (formerly Nextracker) and utility company NiSource are also involved in the project.
Why can’t we have nice things?
Somehow, the MARC project escaped the Trump helicopter, having received funding from the National Science Foundation at its launch. However, other federal supports for agricultural solar virtually disappeared when Secretary Rollins wrote new rules that virtually excluded farmers from the low-cost loans and grants that used to support rural solar projects under the old REAP (Rural Energy for America) program.
Or not, as the case may be. Last month, two environmental organizations, the Environmental Law & Policy Center and Earthjustice, sued Rollins and the Department of Agriculture over the new rules. In addition to shutting down the future solar pipeline, the new rules also retroactively deny payment to recipients of existing loans and grants.
“The USDA has imposed illegal anti-solar eligibility criteria on REAP and at the same time abruptly changed the program’s rules, so that farmers and rural small businesses across the country have been individually hit by tens of thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses,” the two organizations charged.
Will Rollins back down? Stay tuned…
Photo: The agrivoltaic movement combines solar panels with agriculture, giving farmers new opportunities to improve their financial situation at a time when fuel costs are skyrocketing (cropped, courtesy of Doral Renewables).
Sign up for CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack to get in-depth analysis and high-level recaps from Zach and Scott, subscribe to our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News.
Do you have any tips for CleanTechnica? Do you want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Subscribe to our daily newsletter to receive 10-15 new cleantech stories per day. Or sign up to receive our weekly newsletter on the week’s top stories if the daily grind is too much.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica Comment Policy
