Rural communities across the Corn Belt are skeptical about solar taking up farmland. Research is working on how to grow crops and solar together.
in the United States –– but it would represent nearly 9.5 million actual acres. That's close to that of all the corn and soybeans planted in Indiana alone.
But this year, something else joined them in the field: signs denouncing industrial solar. Next door, the community center was filled with residents awaiting the fate of a proposed 200-megawatt solar installation. The project would be sited on agricultural land near town. Its not agrivoltaics, but a more traditional approach where the panels would not sit above any crops.
Communities and counties across the Midwest are saying no to solar — like in Indiana, where nearly a third of counties have ordinances restricting, if not prohibiting, renewable projects.This skepticism is a big motivator for researchers who think agrivoltaics is the right win-win approach. Crops and panels can work in concert on the same sites, they contend, instead of competing.
Still, professors like Tuinstra at Purdue and Bowman at Illinois want to know if the corn and soy that predominate in the Midwest will work, too. At first glance, the likelihood seems low: Planting and harvest requires more sun and bigger equipment. And farmers across Indiana, Illinois and Iowa plant roughly 56 million acres of corn and soy each year, compared to just a few hundred thousand acres of specialty crops.
But there is no “average” cost for agrivoltaics yet, Poor said, because very few large-scale projects have been completed in the U.S. And now, rising demand and limited availability of solar panels is driving prices up as well.Poor’s company is currently working on smaller agrivoltaics projects with partners willing to pay for the cost of materials, hoping to eventually ramp up to more expansive production as data rolls in.
Social and economic scientists on the Purdue research team are researching concerns surrounding agrivoltaics and how to address them with farmers using facts, Tuinstra said. “No one is doing research like this because these crops are viewed as temperamental so people think it can’t be done,” Gupta said. “But if we can optimize crops like this, corn and soy, then we can do agrivoltaics with anything.”
That’s why Cohen said the project needs to be designed for crops from the beginning. Instead, his company is considering other ways of implementing agrivoltaics under and around the Mammoth panels.
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