This year, the garden produced more than 8,000 pounds of agricultural products, and the panels above provide enough electricity for 300 local households. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption
This year, the garden produced more than 8,000 pounds of agricultural products, and the panels above provide enough electricity for 300 local households.
When Byron Cominek returned home after the Peace Corps ended and later worked as a diplomat in Africa, his family’s 24-acre farm near Boulder, Colorado was working hard to turn a profit.
“Our farm has mainly produced hay for 50 years,” Kominek said. On a recent cold morning, the sun illuminated the snow on the foothills west of him. “This is a major change for one of our three ranches.”
This huge change is undoubtedly an eye-opener: 3,200 solar panels are installed on pillars eight feet high on this rolling farmland at the door of the Rocky Mountains.
In this regard, even in progressive counties like him that want to expand renewable energy, it is not easy to sell 1.2 MW of community solar gardens to the local grid. When Kominek contacted Boulder County regulators about installing solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland.
“They said that the land is used for farming, so go and farm,” Kominic said. “I said, well, we are not making money. You all want to be 100% renewable at some point, so how about we work together to solve this problem.”
They finally did it with the help of researchers from nearby Colorado State University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which has been studying how to turn all unused land under solar panels into places for growing food.
In the newly passed infrastructure bill, nearly $2 billion is spent on renewable energy, and the solar industry is expected to win. But for a long time, there have been tensions between renewable energy developers and some farmers. According to NREL, more than 2 million acres of American farmland may be converted to solar energy in the next ten years.
But what if it does not have to be an either-or proposition? What if solar panels and agriculture can truly coexist without even helping each other?
This is where Kominek is interested, especially in a world of corporate mergers where so many family farms are almost impossible to survive, and so many elderly farmers are about to retire.
For about 50 years, Byron Kominek’s family has grown alfalfa and raised some dairy cows on a farm near Boulder, Colorado. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption
Last year, Boulder County updated its land use code. Soon after, Kominek installed solar panels on one of the pastures. The distance between them is far enough so that he can drive his tractor between them.
But he soon discovered that the shadows of the towering panels above the soil actually helped the plants thrive. This intermittent shadow also means that the evaporation of the coveted irrigation water has been reduced a lot. In turn, evaporation actually helps keep the solar panels in the sun cool, thereby increasing efficiency.
He walked among the intricately arranged rows of vegetables under the panel, smiling and pointing out that peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, pumpkins, lettuce, beets, radishes, and carrots were all recently harvested. Even in November, the farm still produces sugar beets and kale.
Kominek’s farm was renamed Jack’s Solar Garden (Jack is his grandfather’s name), which is part of an emerging agricultural photovoltaic industry. This is a relatively new field of research, and Kominek’s farm is one of only a dozen farms in the United States known to be experimenting with it.
But agricultural photovoltaics have aroused special interest in the West, and they are now in the midst of a 22-year drought.
“In the western United States, water is the cause of war,” said Greg Barron-Gafford, a professor at the University of Arizona, who is considered one of the most important experts in the field.
“Water is the reason we must have a really heated debate about where to get food in the future,” he said.
Barron-Gafford’s research in the Arizona desert has shown that some crops grown under solar panels require 50% less water. He and other scientists are paying attention to the Infrastructure Act and are pushing to use part of the estimated $300 million in new solar projects for agricultural photovoltaics.
Barron-Gafford said: “If you really want to build infrastructure in a way that does not compete with food, and can really effectively use our dwindling water resources, this is something worthy of attention.”.
Researchers say that if solar gardens like Byron Kominic really take off and become mainstream, they need economic incentives for family farmers to add solar energy to their portfolios.
In Kominek’s case, he really bet on the farm in order to fund approximately $2 million in solar arrays.
“We have to use our farm as collateral and the solar array as collateral for the bank,” he said. “If this doesn’t work, we will lose the farm.”
But he said that agriculture is about taking risks and debts. In any case, in the early days, his bet seems to be rewarded.
“The buzzing [you hear] is the inverter that makes us money,” he said, pointing to an electrical converter installed near a row of kale. A series of wires transports electricity to county roads and the local Xcel Energy grid.
The inverter here generates enough electricity for 300 households a year. Kominek hopes to plant enough food under the panels as soon as possible to feed as many local families as possible.
Post time: Dec-16-2021
