Ordinary solar can work fine in fields, because most plants don't use light beyond a few hours' worth, and endure the heat, after.
A practical arrangement is bifacial panels in vertical fencerows running north-south, to pick up morning and afternoon sun, spaced widely enough for equipment to run between. Blocking morning sun preserves dew, and blocking afternoon cuts heat stress.
Certain cereal crops get slightly lower yield from reduced light, but reduced water loss can make up the difference.
I wonder how often interspersing the panels with crops ends up being better than packing the panels onto the most marginal portion of the land parcel. There's often ridges or whatever to deal with on a field.
There is a hell of a lot of ag land, so you only need to site solar where conditions are ideal. E.g. in hill country, just on southern slopes. But any farm has marginal parts hard to harvest that could take dense paneling.
Much of the appeal of agrivoltaics is its continuous steady income supplementing harvest peaks, reducing debt load. England is just now panicking over farmers removing fields from farm production to pack in solar farms.
Many places will need legislative change to permit agrivoltaics, which can look to regulators like forbidden industrial conversion. England might need to undo panic-induced restrictions. Colorado recently adapted.
Solar will be added incrementally, e.g. first on existing fence lines and shed roofs, expanding opportunistically where it is most profitable to add. Farmers are used making to such choices.
Yes, the article does create the impression the amount of solar we can have is limited by the land it consumes.
100e18 joules = the amount of energy the USA consumes in a year. [0]
4,000 sq kilometres = area of solar panels to generate the energy. [1]
5,000,000 sq kilometres = USA land devoted to agriculture. [2]
Ergo whatever is the problem is with 100% solar, it isn't the availability of land. Even doing bizarre things like saying we will over provision by a factor of 10 doesn't stress the land supply. (Over provisioning by a factor of 10 gets rid of the cloudy day problem, because even on the cloudiest day you get 10% yield).
If you put solar on ag land, you will do it because the solar helps the ag, not because solar needs the land.
The cost of those solar panels might have something to do with it not happening. At $1.00/watt it's about USA$800B. It's less than the USA spent on the Iraq war. But it's significant nonetheless, and you need storage. So perhaps double it.
> If you put solar on ag land, you will do it because the solar helps the ag
Or helps the farmer's cash flow. They might put in solar where it is not technically ideal, but helps them personally.
Panels are under $0.50/W peak lately, and still falling. Of course mounting costs money, but most farmers have experience with putting up fences. Wiring, maybe less.
To the degree that electricity can displace fuel fed to heat engines, the need is reduced by the inefficiency of the heat engine. So solar replaces 2.5x coal-fired electricity, 5x automotive vs. gasoline, 3-5x domestic heating (when outside temp is high enough a heat pump works) vs NG, oil, or propane, depending on chimney losses. Electrolysing water for hydrogen for steel processsing is lossy, while burning coal for heat is less so, so maybe 0.5x there.
When aviation finally goes to LH2, it will be complicated. Flight deck will be higher, H2 turbines may be more a bit efficient than for kerosene, and lofting an LH2 fuel load takes much less energy than lofting a kerosene load; but again, electrolysing is lossy.
So assuming an average advantage of 2x, and cost-per at half cited, that's only $200B spread over decades. Iraq cost >$5T.
Ordinary solar can work fine in fields, because most plants don't use light beyond a few hours' worth, and endure the heat, after.
A practical arrangement is bifacial panels in vertical fencerows running north-south, to pick up morning and afternoon sun, spaced widely enough for equipment to run between. Blocking morning sun preserves dew, and blocking afternoon cuts heat stress.
Certain cereal crops get slightly lower yield from reduced light, but reduced water loss can make up the difference.