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MandieD 2 days ago

Oooooh, you're one of today's 10,000, and I get to be the person who tells you about Agrivoltaics - combining farming/ranching and solar panels.

You don't completely cover the land in solar panels - you work with the idea that the sun (and resulting shadows from the panels) moves throughout the day, so space them out a bit, and mount them high enough to stay out of the way of the agricultural activity.

I first saw this going on in southern Germany. The cattle were all in the shaded areas, eating the grass that was growing better than in neighboring uncovered fields - this year was really dry here until a few weeks ago.

defrost 2 days ago | parent [-]

To lift that up from anecdata and to provide a link for the GP that you might enjoy:

Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels (2022) https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...

Confirmed multiple times since in several parts of rural Australia.

MandieD 2 days ago | parent [-]

How did you know that I'm a spinner?! This is definitely something I enjoyed.