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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation

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ipdashc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> large equipment (combines, sprayer booms, center pivot irrigation systems[1], etc)

Something I've always absent-mindedly wondered about when agrivoltaics comes up is integrating a gantry/rail system of sorts for the farm equipment. It's definitely infeasible for many reasons, but it's fun to think about. Instead of equipment pulled by tractors, have the equipment ride above the field on rails, held up by the same poles the solar panels are on.

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Iolaum 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe today but with the rise of automation, who knows?

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kempbellt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	defrost 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Center pivot irrigation is hardly universal - its main use is in low / sparse rainfall areas in order to deplete the finite resource of the water table. There are already strong signs a number of significant basins are in terminal decline from agricultural use. There are no universal one setup suits all solutions here. One advantage of large scale agrisolar projects (trialled since at least 2020) is better moisture retention through shade of increased condensation drip. It's a balancing act - you appear to have a position hard up one end of a see saw.