This toolkit is intended for state and municipal lawmakers, farmers, and researchers hoping to improve or better understand their community’s farmland solar policies. It identifies key areas of state law affecting how much and what kind of solar development occurs on farmland, as well as farmers’ access to clean energy.
The avenues by which Michigan and the United States provide the electricity essential for the economy and quality of life are in urgent need of change to ensure reliability and affordability while reducing the environmental impacts of this generation and improving social equity. These energy transitions are among the greatest challenges facing countries worldwide today. Another salient global challenge is reversing the decline in pollinators, including numerous species of native bees, honey bees, butterflies and birds. Pollinators provide critical ecosystem services but are facing numerous threats. These two grand challenges intersect as stakeholders work to identify the appropriate landscapes and places to develop solar power in Michigan. Agricultural land is desirable for solar installations for reasons that will be explained in this report. The state of Michigan is allowing solar developers to locate, or “site,” solar panels on preserved farmland but only if they develop habitat on this land to support pollinators. Other states are developing or have already developed standards developers must meet before they can advertise solar power plants as pollinator friendly. This intertwines these two urgent challenges in ways that are laudable; however, numerous questions of feasibility and best practices for achieving quality habitat remain unanswered. Multiple types of expertise and experiences from stakeholders from both energy and agricultural domains are required to successfully address these two challenges. In order to effect change, these stakeholders should collaborate more closely to overcome challenges of interpretation, problem definition and costs. This report identifies and characterizes those issues to facilitate stakeholders’ development of more optimal solutions. Overall, we identified several different paradigms through which stakeholders in Michigan viewed the appropriateness of solar power development on farmland. Some stakeholders viewed solar siting as a decision that should be left to an individual landowner because they have private property rights. Moreover, solar leasing would help to diversify farmers’ incomes, reducing the risks from seasonal and price volatility. Some stakeholders even saw solar leasing as part of farmland preservation, as it could enable a struggling farming operation to stay in business and a farmer to continue to own the land leased for solar rather than selling it for housing development. Other stakeholders saw farmland as a public good and opposed using prime farmland for solar power generation. These stakeholders often assumed that solar power could be targeted specifically toward low-quality agricultural land, or urban rooftops and brownfields rather than agricultural lands. For these stakeholders, inclusion of pollinator habitat and other multi-land uses tended to improve their opinion of solar power.
This research explores conflicts and synergies between preserving farmland and scaling up solar development in Massachusetts.
This paper provides insight on the trade-offs of co-locating agriculture and solar photovoltaic infrastructure by analyzing microclimatic conditions, PV panel temperature, soil moisture and irrigation water use, plant ecophysiological function and plant biomass production within this agrivoltaics ecosystem and in traditional PV installations and agricultural settings.
This thesis presents a case study of plant-pollinator interactions at a solar energy generation site in southwestern Oregon, a water-limited, dryland ecosystem. Results show no difference in visitation rates of insects to flowers located inside versus outside the solar array. These findings could prove useful when developing AgriSolar operations that include pollinators.
The article investigates the effects of solar arrays on plant composition, bloom timing and foraging behavior of pollinators from June to September (after peak bloom) in full shade plots and partial shade plots under solar panels as well as in full sun plots (controls) outside of the solar panels.
This study describes the manufacture and evaluation of a beehive box that is safe for inspection, optimum syrup fed, easily identifies the different states of the bee colony, and maximizes the colony health while preventing colony losses. An AgriSolar development may benefit in utilizing the findings from this study in relation to beehive boxes.
This study evaluates the monetary benefits of pollination services from installing honeybee hives in solar parks and discusses how the findings could inform policy and practice. The study includes an overview of field crops, fruit crops, pollination ecosystem service benefits as well as costs of honey beehives. These discussions could be used when developing AgriSolar operations that include various crops and pollinators.
The Town of Mount Morris commissioned this research to answer questions about the nascent solar-agricultural industry, assess opportunities to attract farmers to the EDF Renewables Morris Ridge Solar Energy Center, and identify viable markets for solar-raised products. The report addresses the current interest of local farmers in grazing sheep and establishing apiaries at Morris Ridge; summarizes surveys employed to discover regional demand for lamb and honey; and analyzes market opportunities for solar-raised lamb, honey, and related products.
This article highlights ongoing efforts to couple solar energy production with pollinator conservation, noting recent legal definitions of these practices. The authors summarize key studies from the field of ecology, bee conservation, and experience working with members of the solar industry (e.g., contribution to legislation defining solar pollinator habitat). These results suggest the addition of native, perennial flowering vegetation will promote wild bee conservation and more sustainable honey beekeeping.