Hops for beer flourish under solar panels. They’re not the only crop thriving in the shade.::A farm in Bavaria is covering its hops with solar panels, providing electricity to 250 households and shading the plants from the increasingly scorching summer heat in the process.
Sounds good to me. My only real complaint about solar panels is the space they occupy. That complaint goes away if that space can also be used for crops. It’s a win/win
Solar panels are about 70x as efficient in getting energy when compared to corn ethanol. If all corn ethanol land (which is heavily irrigated, fertilized, and subsidized) were converted to solar, it would generate 3x the yearly electricity needs of the US.
30.2 million acres * 400 MWh/acre/year = 12,080 TWh/year. US energy use is about 4,000 TWh/year.
We are already taking cropland away for energy production, might as well make it way more efficient.
Do we use corn ethanol for any mass power production?
I think a lot goes into gasoline. Like a large percentage of our corn crops
Well people also complain on expansion of agriculture land so I don’t think consideration on land usage will disappear.
Real problem is that many people want the energy source which is clean, cheap, invisible, safe, doesn’t consume any land or resources and of course has a easy to understand functioning. What could possibly go wrong ?
Driving through rural corn country, you see yard signs at every second residence saying to keep solar out of farming land, so there is land usage consideration, but by the farmers themselves
I’ll bet that tune would change if we stopped subsidizing corn. I find it hilarious when “farmers” (read just land owners) talk about land usage being wasted like that without even thinking for a second about the amount of subsidies corn gets or the random AG pay to not grow. Which is the most wasteful of land usage.
There is that idea to ring the equator in floating solar panels. Not actually sure how viable that is but sounds awesome. Like something you do in that game Dyson Sphere Project. That would certainly alleviate any worries about land usage.
The problem with plans like that is efficiently getting the electricity produced to the places where it is needed.
Well people also complain on expansion of agriculture land
They do?
Where I live most people complain that agricultural land is being lost to urban sprawl.
Reducing the amount of land available to produce food is not a good thing.
Best use of space was argued for by…ME. Back in 2002 I argued at length with colleagues that California should build solar panel covers for their aqueducts. This would provide electricity as well as significantly decrease algae growth and evaporation from the aqueducts.
Then car parks at airports.
There’s a ton of places they can go.
theres other ways. For instance in France its now law (I believe) that car parks (parking lots in US) over a certain size have to be covered in solar panels
takes up no space, covers the cars from the elements and provides power
The French Senate has approved a bill requiring all large parking lots across France to be topped with solar canopies in the next six years, which are predicted to generate as much energy as 10 nuclear reactors.
The legislation mandates that all new and existing car parks with 80 or more parking spaces must be blanketed in photovoltaics covering at least half of their surface area. [link]
Hell yeah. Bring on the Solarbeerpunk future!
Hops isn’t only for beer. You can dry them and make it into a tea to help you go to sleep.
Fun fact, hops are in the same plant family as cannabis (Cannabaceae)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
AU in der HALLERTAU, Germany (AP) — Bright green vines snake upwards 20 feet (six meters) toward an umbrella of solar panels at Josef Wimmer’s farm in Bavaria.
He grows hops, used to make beer, and in recent years has also been generating electricity, with solar panels sprawled across 1.3 hectares (32 acres) of his land in the small hop-making town of Au in der Hallertau, an hour north of Munich in southern Germany.
Researchers look into making the best use of agricultural land, and farmers seek ways to shield their crops from blistering heat, keep in moisture and potentially increase yields.
In addition to shielding plants from solar stress, the shade could mean “water from precipitation lasts longer, leaving more in the soil” and that “the hops stay healthier and are less susceptible to diseases,” Gruber said.
In the U.K., where weather is also getting hotter and more variable, a team of researchers is looking at how to retrofit solar panels onto greenhouses or polytunnels — frames covered in plastic where crops grow underneath — with semi-transparent or transparent installations.
In East Africa, which has suffered from a long and punishing drought that scientists said was worsened by human-caused climate change, solar panels can also help keep moisture in plants and soil and reduce the amount of water needed, said Richard Randle-Boggis, a research associate at the University of Sheffield who’s developing two agrivoltaic systems in Kenya and Tanzania.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Not necessarily a great way to do it. Hops grow super tall, so to have solar over them, you need a tall structure. To have a tall structure that can withstand wind loads, you need pretty substantial materials. You are probably better off just using wind permeable shade cloth that you can deploy during the heat of the summer and take down during the cooler months.
As a farmer and a solar offgridder, I agree. I build my own mounts and would not want to try to build a 20’ high mount that would take 100 km/h winds, which we have seen around here. Not only are the mounts going to go down, now they’re 20’ in the air when they start picking up speed to the ground.
I have bifacials and while I don’t have them out over crop, the grass and trees underneath them in the shade have to be dealt with all summer. I’m pretty sure crop would grow fine but then you’d have to figure out how to harvest it with panels and mounts in the way. Which would be doable, but hardly worth the trouble for the insignificant amount of crop I would gain.
I’ve seen people use sheep to keep the plants around panels down. There’s even people who rent herds to big solar farms. That seems like as much of a win-win as I can think of.
I’ve thought about that. Sheep can be pretty destructive on any shrubs or trees you’re wanting to keep alive though, you’d have to protect each one. Not as bad as goats, though.
Have you seen the pictures? The solar panels are fairly small, mounted on top of the poles.
This is in the Hallertau, one of the more famous hop regions. It’s not some random farmer, hop is how he makes his living.
Yeah, there’s actually some better pictures from presumably the same company linked in the article about apples.. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy people are trying out different stuff like this, but it doesn’t seem like the juice is worth the squeeze in this instance. Some quick numbers I found showed that average household energy consumption in Germany is about 4 MWh, and 200 MWh/acre is what you would expect from a traditional solar installation. Should be able to power 50 homes per acre. He’s getting ~8.
That’s the problem with solar over parking lots, farmland, even roofs. It doesn’t make financial sense.
Now if you’re trying to maximize land use and productivity and don’t care about having to lay in piledriven supports or lose some parking spaces to safety radius or do suboptimal scale installations then you’re getting something.
