The Knowlton Farm, a Massachusetts agrisolar operation, has recently partnered with BlueWave Solar to expand agrisolar operations on the farm in Grafton, according to an article by The New York Times.
Owner Paul Knowlton stated that the farm typically produces a variety of vegetables, dairy products, and hay, but also produces solar energy. He said that solar was already part of the farming operations, providing electricity for both his barn and home, but through this partnership with BlueWave, the farm will include a parcel of land where solar panels will share space with crops, known as dual-use solar, according to the report.
The dual-use solar operation includes adjusting the heights of solar panels to allow farm operations, including workers, equipment, and grazing animals, to operate underneath them. Spacing and angles of the solar panels are adjusted to benefit crops growing below them—shielding them from the elements, including intense heat. Some of the panels will have cattle grazing beneath them while others will grow butternut squash and lettuce.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/sunny-farmscape.jpg8001200A. J. Pucketthttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngA. J. Puckett2022-06-29 12:11:412022-06-29 12:12:21Massachusetts Farm Partners with BlueWave in Dual-Use Solar
In this Teatime from April 21, 2022, Tom Murphy, the Director of Penn State’s Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research (MCOR), presents Leasing for Community and Grid Scale Solar – Key Consideration While Negotiating. Tom’s current work is as an educational consultant in transitioning to clean energy including utility and community scale solar. Teatimes are a series of educational agrivoltaic webinar presentations that are jointly run by The AgriSolar Clearinghouse and the American Solar Grazing Association.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/asga-asc.png6711430Carl Berntsenhttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngCarl Berntsen2022-05-13 08:09:192023-12-20 17:44:09Watch: Teatime – Leasing for Community and Grid Scale Solar: Key Considerations While Negotiating
By Lee Walston and Heidi Hartmann, Argonne National Laboratory
Pollinator habitat at a solar facility in Minnesota. Photo: Lee Walston, Argonne National Laboratory.
Many of us have witnessed regional land-use transformations towards renewable energy in the last decade. As the fastest growing electricity generating sector in the U.S., solar energy development has grown more than 20x in the past decade and is projected to be the dominant renewable source of electricity by 2040. The recent DOE Solar Futures Study predicts that over 1 terawatt (TW) of utility-scale solar electricity developments will be required to meet net-zero clean-energy objectives in the U.S. by 2050 (Figure 1). This represents a solar land-use footprint of over 10 million acres across the U.S. – roughly the combined area of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
Figure 1. Source: Solar Futures Study
A fundamental question we all face is how to balance solar energy development with other land uses such as agriculture. Given the current and projected land-use requirements, sustained development of solar energy will depend on finding renewable energy solutions that optimize the combined outputs of energy production, ecosystem services, and other land uses. Dual land-use approaches that co-locate solar energy with other forms of land uses, such as agriculture or habitat restoration, have emerged as promising strategies to improving the landscape compatibility of solar energy. The establishment of native pollinator-friendly vegetation at solar facilities (“solar-pollinator habitat”) is one strategy to improve the multifunctionality of these lands that not only provide renewable energy but also offer several ecosystem service benefits such as: (1) biodiversity conservation; (2) stormwater and erosion control; (3) carbon sequestration; and (4) benefits to nearby agricultural fields.
Understanding the true ecosystem service benefits of solar-pollinator habitat will require field studies in different geographic regions to examine the methods of solar-pollinator habitat establishment and link these processes with measured ecosystem service outputs. Given the time required to conduct these direct field studies, most discussions of solar-pollinator habitat thus far have centered on qualitative ecosystem outcomes. Fortunately, there are ways to quantitatively understand some of these potential outcomes. Native habitat restoration has been a focus of scientific research for many years, and we can use these studies to understand the regional methods for solar pollinator habitat establishment (e.g., types of seed mixes, vegetation management) and relate these habitat restoration activities with quantifiable ecosystem responses. For example, there are decades of research on the restoration of the prairie grassland systems in the Midwest and Great Plains – regions that have seen losses of over 90% of their native grasslands due to agricultural expansion.
Because many solar facilities in the Midwest are sited on former agricultural fields, research on ecological restoration of former agricultural fields could be very useful in understanding the establishment and performance of solar-pollinator habitat in the same region. We can look to these studies as surrogate study systems for solar-pollinator habitat and utilize the data from these studies to make inferences on the ecosystem outcomes of solar-pollinator habitat. Along with a team of research partners, we recently took this approach to quantify the potential ecosystem services of solar-pollinator habitat in the Midwest. Our goal was to understand how solar energy developments co-located with pollinator-friendly native vegetation may improve ecosystem services compared to other traditional land uses. We began by reviewing the literature to collect a range of data on vegetation associated with three different land uses: agriculture, solar-turfgrass, and solar-pollinator habitat. The data for each land use included information on vegetation types, root depths, carbon storage potential, and evapotranspiration, to name a few.
We then developed ecosystem service models for each land use scenario. The land uses corresponded to the following scenarios (Figure 2):
1. Agriculture scenario (baseline “pre-solar” land use);
2. Solar-turfgrass (“business as usual” solar-turfgrass land use) and
3. Solar-pollinator habitat (grassland restoration at solar sites).
We mapped and delineated 30 solar sites in the Midwest and used the InVEST modeling tool to model the following four ecosystem services across all sites and land-use scenarios:
Figure 2. Illustration of land use scenarios at each solar site. Source: Walston et al., 2021.
Our results, published in the journal Ecosystem Services, found that, compared to traditional agricultural land uses, solar facilities with sitewide co‑located, pollinator‑friendly vegetation produced a three-fold increase in pollinator habitat quality and a 65% increase in carbon storage potential. The models also showed that solar-pollinator habitat increased the site’s potential to control sedimentation and runoff by more than 95% and 19%, respectively (Figure 3). This study suggests that in regions where native grasslands have been lost to farming and other activities native grassland restoration at solar energy facilities could represent a win‑win for energy and the environment.
What do these results mean? We hope these results can help industry, communities, regulators, and policymakers better understand the potential ecosystem benefits of solar-pollinator habitat. These findings may be used to build cooperative relationships between the solar industry and surrounding communities to better integrate solar energy into agricultural landscapes. While our study provides a quantitative basis for understanding these potential ecosystem benefits, additional work is needed to validate model results and collect the primary data that would support economic evaluations to inform solar-native grassland business decisions for the solar industry and quantify the economic benefits of services provided to nearby farmers, landowners, and other stakeholders.
Figure 3. Average ecosystem service values for the thirty Midwest solar facilities modeled with InVEST: (A) pollinator supply; (B) carbon storage; (C) sediment export; and (D) water retention. Source: Walston et al. 2021.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Argonne-Solar-photo.jpg8051430Danielle Miskahttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngDanielle Miska2022-05-04 12:59:162022-05-12 08:26:19Ecosystem Services of Solar-Pollinator Habitat
This report discusses the effects of solar radiation and total system head on techno-economics of a PV groundwater pumping irrigation system designed for sustainable agricultural production. The materials and methods of the study include crop water requirements, estimated pumping rates, estimations of PV-array ratings and solar charge controllers, and economic estimations of PV-pumping system(s). The results of the study also include an environmental impact analysis.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AgriSolar-Library-.png400600Carl Berntsenhttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngCarl Berntsen2022-04-13 15:44:342022-06-27 11:37:46Effects of total system head and solar radiation on the techno-economics of PV groundwater pumping irrigation system for sustainable agricultural production
The study shows that installing a Photovoltaic Water Pumping System (PVWP) system represents the best technical and economic solution to drive a water pump that provides water for sprinkler irrigation. This application could be applied in AgriSolar operations that include sprinklers and agricultural land.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AgriSolar-Library-.png400600Carl Berntsenhttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngCarl Berntsen2022-04-13 13:18:122022-06-27 11:45:21Identifying Photovoltaic Water Pumping (PVWP) Systems Opportunities in Albanian’s Agriculture Context
The purpose of this guide is to help Michigan communities meet the challenge of becoming solar ready by addressing SES within their planning policies and zoning regulations. This document illustrates how various scales and configurations of photovoltaic SES fit into landscape patterns ranging between rural, suburban, and urban.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AgriSolar-Library-.png400600Victorian Tilleyhttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngVictorian Tilley2022-04-08 12:41:542024-03-07 11:33:10Planning and Zoning for Solar Energy Systems
This research presents a highly transparent concentrator photovoltaic system with solar spectral splitting for dual land use applications. The system includes a freeform lens array and a planar waveguide. Sunlight is first concentrated by the lens array and then reaches a flat waveguide. The dichroic mirror with coated prisms is located at each focused area at the bottom of a planar waveguide to split the sunlight spectrum into two spectral bands. The red and blue light, in which photosynthesis occurs at its maximum, passes through the dichroic mirror and is used for agriculture. The remaining spectrums are reflected at the dichroic mirror with coated prisms and collected by the long solar cell attached at one end of the planar waveguide by total internal reflection. Meanwhile, most of the diffused sunlight is transmitted through the system to the ground for agriculture. The system was designed using the commercial optic simulation software LightTools™ (Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA). The results show that the proposed system with 200× concentration can achieve optical efficiency above 82.1% for the transmission of blue and red light, 94.5% for diffused sunlight, which is used for agricultural, and 81.5% optical efficiency for planar waveguides used for power generation. This system is suitable for both high Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) and low DNI areas to provide light for agriculture and electricity generation at the same time on the same land with high efficiency.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AgriSolar-Library-.png400600Carl Berntsenhttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngCarl Berntsen2022-03-23 15:38:272022-03-23 15:38:28Waveguide Concentrator Photovoltaic with Spectral Splitting for Dual Land Use
In this paper, the researchers applied the InVEST modeling framework to investigate the potential response of four ecosystem services (carbon storage, pollinator supply, sediment retention, and water retention) to native grassland habitat restoration at 30 solar facilities across the Midwest United States.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AgriSolar-Library-.png400600Carl Berntsenhttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngCarl Berntsen2022-03-23 11:16:262024-03-20 14:01:07Modeling the Ecosystem Services of Native Vegetation Management Practices at Solar Energy Facilities in the Midwestern United States
Colloidal quantum dots (QDs) are nanometer-sized semiconductor crystals grown via low-cost solution processing routes for a wide array of applications encompassing photovoltaics, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), electronics, photodetectors, photocatalysis, lasers, drug delivery, and agriculture. A comprehensive technoeconomic cost analysis of perovskite quantum dot optoelectronics is reported. Using economies-of-scale considerations based on price data from prominent materials suppliers, we have highlighted that increased QD synthesis yield, solvent recycling, and synthesis automation are critical to market adoption of this technology and driving quantum dot film fabrication costs down from >$50/m^2 to ∼$2−3/m^2
Decomposition models of solar irradiance estimate the magnitude of diffuse horizontal irradiance from global horizontal irradiance. These two radiation components are well-known to be essential for the prediction of solar photovoltaic systems performance. In open-field agrivoltaic systems, that is the dual use of land for both agricultural activities and solar power conversion, cultivated crops receive an unequal amount of direct, diffuse and reflected photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) depending on the area they are growing due to the non-homogenously shadings caused by the solar panels installed (above the crops or vertically mounted). It is known that PAR is more efficient for canopy photosynthesis under conditions of diffuse PAR than direct PAR per unit of total PAR. For this reason, it is fundamental to estimate the diffuse PAR component in agrivoltaic systems studies to properly predict the crop yield.
https://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AgriSolar-Library-.png400600Carl Berntsenhttps://www.agrisolarclearinghouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AgriSolar_stacked_1-338x400.pngCarl Berntsen2022-03-09 15:58:442022-11-22 14:26:34Photosynthetically Active Radiation Decomposition Models for Agrivoltaic Systems Applications
We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.
Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.
Essential Website Cookies
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.
Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.
We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.
We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.
Google Analytics Cookies
These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.
If you do not want that we track your visit to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:
Other external services
We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.
Google Webfont Settings:
Google Map Settings:
Google reCaptcha Settings:
Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:
Other cookies
The following cookies are also needed - You can choose if you want to allow them:
Privacy Policy
You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.