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efields 3 hours ago [-]
Specialty cut flower grower here. Backyard scale, but we're profitable and have received some grants so that means we have had a USDA relationship for a couple years. The rep I've talked to and am closest with is skeptical of agrivoltaics due to past dealings with solar companies (not sure what she means). There doesn't seem to be enough reliable public data to make it seem like the win-win-win we want it to be. In their mind, you're adding a non-ag industry to the land and that could have downstream consequences in a generation. Maybe you're scheming to get the land re-zoned for light industrial; I honestly have no idea what they're thinking, but they're averse toward it.
Most flowers in 7b don't want extreme sun. We use shade cloth frequently, so solar coverage would be fine and of course have the energy co-production. Cut flowers aren't harvested mechanically at our scale, so we wouldn't have to worry about tractor access.
Meanwhile, more and more food is produced under cover for a lot of good reasons. Polytunnels, glass houses. You might get some summer shade from solar but what about season extension at the beginning of spring/end of fall? Depending on your crop and location, that could mean 4-8 extra weeks a year. What if you do geothermal energy generation for the tunnel? Now you can grow through the winter and not need the same footprint as solar. That's more appealing to me.
Anyway, I'm forever mad at corn ethanol and we should at least replace all that with solar farms. That's probably the right place to start. But also, again, zoning...
fblp 1 hours ago [-]
Would also love to hear more about your project!
Gibbon1 1 hours ago [-]
Very conservatively solar produces 30-50 times are much energy per acre as corn ethanol. I think if you consider just the ethanol to mix with gas vs charging an electric car with solar it's a 100 times more.
Something around 2500W of solar can provide enough energy to drive an EV 12,000 miles a year.
When it comes to zoning. The state should require offices to install chargers for employees cars when the solar share of electricity generation is highest.
AnonymousPlanet 10 minutes ago [-]
I agree, but I always wonder: where do you store the energy from solar? Ethanol just goes into a boring tank. Electricity is expensive to store, especially at the scale we're talking. Carrying via cable all the way from the farms to the industrial centers is expensive aswell.
idiotsecant 2 hours ago [-]
Completely off topic but I'm fascinated with this. How much acreage do you devote to this?
I've done hobbyist exotic (legal!) mushroom farming for a while, at a scale that is more than I could use but not like 100x what I could use. I've thought about selling but it seems like a lot of hassle doing the marketing and business parts of it.
How do you sell? Do you have a distributor that purchases product from you or is it a farmers market type deal?
dzhiurgis 1 hours ago [-]
> Meanwhile, more and more food is produced under cover for a lot of good reasons.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing about farming)
I somewhat agree - dumping pesticides and fertilizer into the ground every year and then letting it pollute rivers is low-key insanity. But then you look at just how much farmland is out there and realize some crops just can't be put indoors, probably ever.
There are lots of variables for sure, but I do wonder how much more efficient indoor growing must get to overcome outdoor growing? Land value is vastly different between regions, so does labour, crop type, etc.
p.s. Tom Scotts recent video on strawberries was amazing - special mites to fend off other bugs and UVC light sanitizing was a bit of wow for me.
declan_roberts 4 hours ago [-]
HN is probably over-indexed on people living in high-density cities, which might explain why tech like this and also things like vertical farming are popular here. However there's almost no dimensional constraint for farmland in the United States. We have vast amounts of it and there's really nothing to be gained from "stacking"
Often these "solutions" introduce more problems than they solve. One example being a solar farm designed to be grazed by sheep where the panels are so low to the ground that farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.
The best solution is still to put solar panels and farmland in different places where each can be optimized without concern for the other.
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
> The best solution is still to put solar panels and farmland in different places where each can be optimized without concern for the other.
There's significant evidence "add solar panels" is an optimization to at least some kinds of farmland.
> farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season
That season is typically "winter", and you wind up without much hay to cut at that point.
Jbird2k 3 hours ago [-]
You do realize that pole mounts exist that are tall enough to mow around. Yes it’s expensive ish but it definitely is a workable solution.
boringg 1 hours ago [-]
True but you also need to make those pretty robust and probably put deeper into the ground because the shear load increases significantly. That then eats into the actually money saved for putting the whole investment together.
As much as I want solar everywhere - it far from a sure thing for making/saving money.
chasd00 36 minutes ago [-]
> True but you also need to make those pretty robust
they also have to be able to get "bumped" by a brush hog, plow, and whatever else without collapsing and taking down a bunch of panels.
dzhiurgis 1 hours ago [-]
Mowing bots are likely a cheaper solution. But kinda silly when sheep exist.
declan_roberts 3 hours ago [-]
Believe it or not cattle is a low margin business and farmers can't buy hay (from a non-PV field) and sell meat at a profit. Ranchers cut hay to get their pastured cattle through the winter. They can't have portions of their field unreachable by a tractor. Reasons like this are why this type of tech will always be popular on HN but they just can't figure out why farmers don't want it.
asdff 48 minutes ago [-]
Why should the tractor be the old tractor when we are talking about a futuristic PV field? There is already a market for these autonomous tractors and seems they are all about half the height of a traditional tractor, basically the same vehicle with the cab cut off. Then for specifically mowers they can get pretty slender. I imagine a purpose built mower/hay harvester could be very slim. Huge advantage for the farmer if these are electric as well; power would be "free" from pv field and you only need a single technician or mechanic perhaps to maintain this operation.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> Ranchers cut hay to get their pastured cattle through the winter. They can't have portions of their field unreachable by a tractor.
"The solar canopy also protects the grasses, keeping them green and dewy, even as nearby fields blanch and crisp in the sunlight. Shallanberger rotates the herd every few days, a key tenet of regenerative farming philosophy, so they munch on fresh grass while the rest of the field grows back. They move through all 15 paddocks in about 45 days; if the site relied on mechanical mowers, they’d trim every 45 days, too."
"Vegetation management is one of the most significant costs for solar plant maintenance in the Southeast, Shallenberger said. In the first six months, the cattle took care of about 75% of the mowing — he had to bring in conventional equipment for some woody weeds that the cattle don’t care for. Once the pasture is more established, the herd could handle up to 95% of the site’s mowing needs."
> Reasons like this are why this type of tech will always be popular on HN but they just can't figure out why farmers don't want it.
Farmers come in different sizes, shapes, locations.
The largest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_station is several times the size of the state of Rhode Island, and chances are there're some spots where a bit of shade is welcome. I can also assure you no one's mowing/haying that size a property.
rossjudson 2 hours ago [-]
I bet the cows appreciate the shade!
ErroneousBosh 35 minutes ago [-]
> They move through all 15 paddocks in about 45 days; if the site relied on mechanical mowers, they’d trim every 45 days, too."
What do you think "trim" is here, and why do you think anyone would do it?
How much do you think a hay field would grow in six weeks?
idiotsecant 2 hours ago [-]
HN has a particularly severe case of 'I can write software, so I know everything' disease. It turns out all the farmers, electricians, engineers, bricklayers, bakers, policy experts, and so so much more should have just come on here a few times a week and they'd be so much smarter.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
I've seen farmers on here, and it's a trivially verifiable fact that some farmers are using agrivoltaic approaches.
Nor are farmers immune to the "vote against your own interests" political bullshit that often comes up around renewables. Look at how many voted for the guy who started a trade war as a thank you.
(Plenty of bakers here, by the way. I used a literal ton of flour during COVID keeping the neighborhood supplied with sourdough. And I give hay to horses ~5x a week; I've seen what animals can do to a grassy field.)
asdff 50 minutes ago [-]
Why should the tractor be a 1950s tractor pulling a mower attachment? If we are talking about something so techy as a solar panel clad farm, it is definitely going to have electronic robotic mowers. These are already used in commercial landscape setting and barely 2 feet tall.
chasd00 39 minutes ago [-]
> These are already used in commercial landscape setting and barely 2 feet tall.
Can they mow a 1,000 acres and get through ruts from feral hogs and everything else? If so, then that's awesome (i really don't know) but you have to think of the scale.
asdff 26 minutes ago [-]
I mean they are used on golf courses which are quite large acreages. I don't see why not. What makes the tractor manage those conditions is not really it being a sensitive instrument, but being a sort of crude and heavy dgaf machine. You can certainly make that in a slimmer package than one that needs the farmer to sit up high and has had the same "bodyplan" for what 150 years maybe, just because that's how its always been done not for any other reason, and no real pressure until now to actually constrain the vertical space of the tractor.
KaiserPro 2 hours ago [-]
> cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.
But surely only certain places need to do this? for the UK, you need to make hay for the winter, assuming that your meadows flood, or are otherwise muddy. But if your in one of the more temperate areas of the southern USA, surely you don't need to do that?
ErroneousBosh 24 minutes ago [-]
Up here in Scotland (can't speak for England, it's half a day's drive south of me just to get to the border, but watch Clarkson's Farm) we tend not to make hay very much these days. Mostly we make silage, which is where you cut long grass but instead of allowing it to dry into hay you bale it up while it's still green and wrap it in plastic sheeting. It undergoes anaerobic fermentation, which preserves a lot more of the nutrients, and it doesn't spontaneously combust if it's still a tiny bit damp when you store it.
The silage that you get, then, is basically like a kind of grass sauerkraut, and smells exactly like you'd expect.
That combined with "draff" - distillery mash, the spent malt from brewing "pot ale" for making whisky, and a certain amount of shredded sugar beet tends to make up the majority of winter fodder.
Draff is great because it's still fermenting slowly and generating a lot of heat, so the cows are eating hot food in the winter. It's mostly the fibrey bits of the barley malt, which we can't eat but which cows and sheep - having cellulase in at least one of their stomachs - do incredibly well on. It's absolutely no use for anything else, humans can't eat it and it doesn't really compost down. It just rots, stinks, and emits masses of carbon dioxide and methane when it does. Far better for the environment to lock all that up in a cow.
Ideally your fields don't flood because you plant crops in the autumn that stay in the ground over winter to germinate in the spring, and if they get flooded that's it, you've lost the lot.
You tend not to see soya-based or other leguminous food here very much, because it's expensive, it has to be shipped halfway round the planet, and it's ineffective - you get shitty meat that no-one wants to buy.
You need the cows to graze pasture, chew up the grass, break down all that tough cellulose and poo it out as incredibly highly refined fertiliser.
We eat, just about everywhere in the world, because there's six inches of earth, it rains sometimes, and cows and pigs shit solid gold.
2 hours ago [-]
jMyles 4 hours ago [-]
Huge isolated fields of solar end up with the same problem as nuclear: they introduce multiple single-points of failure.
The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.
I think most people want highly distributed, reliable, affordable power. That's why off-grid tech is experiencing such a boom.
I live in a 36' skoolie, so I'm nomad-indexed, but I can confirm that over the past 10 years or so, most RV-lifers have transitioned their focus from recreation / comfort to off-grid experimentation. Essentially everywhere I go in the US, if I'm camped near others, they are going to have minimum viability for boondocking. That was not the case when I started.
Especially amidst the current political instability and apparent looming collapse of the US state, one of the simplest things that most of us can do is stabilize off-grid power in our neighborhoods, and that is quietly happening all over the place.
So, the role of vertically integrated solar (both literally and metaphorically) has more to do with the grid shape that serves our stability needs, and less to do with large-scale differences in efficiency.
labcomputer 3 hours ago [-]
> The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.
Who cares? One isolated field of solar represents a negligible amount of power at grid scale. Nobody is going to bother to go around attacking each individual field because the "ROI" of attacking a high-voltage transmission line (the kind that brings power from multiple thermal plants to a city) is so much higher.
roughly 3 hours ago [-]
Attacks scale in the drone age, infrastructure left where nobody’s looking at it is a vulnerability. Solar stacked on an active farm has the benefit of having eyes on it constantly - detection, repair and recovery cycles are dramatically shortened.
jMyles 37 minutes ago [-]
Totally. Solar stacked _anywhere_ has this benefit.
jMyles 38 minutes ago [-]
> One isolated field of solar represents a negligible amount of power at grid scale.
Maybe I was unclear: that's exactly my point! That's the problem with grid scale for most everyday uses.
In 2026, it's fairly trivial to have a setup such that, if "the grid" fails, I don't even notice for days. That's a nice feature! And it makes sense to build out communities that way from now on.
"The grid" is great for industry, but for residential, micro-grids are clearly the future. Allowing the state and the electric company to cut us off - intentionally or otherwise, let alone having no power during a disaster when it's needed most, is a very silly thing to trade for a tiny efficiency increase.
I sleep well at night knowing I have four bigass AGMs under me.
hnlmorg 2 hours ago [-]
You’re assuming such attacks cannot be automated. Which unfortunately they so often can.
Just take a look at the multiple fridge freezer attacks in the EU this year.
broken-kebab 3 hours ago [-]
>everywhere I go in the US, if I'm camped near others, they are going to have minimum viability for boondocking
Can you elaborate, please? What exactly has changed, and over what time period?
jMyles 2 hours ago [-]
I bought my bus in 2015, so my personal picture is of the past 11 years.
The big changes seem to have been:
* Better / more varied solar panels
* Lithium batteries (which I don't use for a house bank, but still benefit from by dint of them having driven the price deep-cycle lead batteries down)
* USB-C everything
When I first started this lifestyle, almost everyone had lead-acid batteries powering an inverter, and a zillion wall warts converting power back to DC. Some people had solar for sure, but a solid majority only camped where they were able to plug in.
At festivals, powered sites sold out quickly and at a premium. Dispersed camping in national forests was the purview of tent campers, truck campers, and people who don't use much power (ie, not a ton of remote workers). New campgrounds always focused on power pedestals and seemed to regard that as the MVP.
Now, festivals are a sea of solar and/or off-grid-cooled beers. Campgrounds are often a de-facto swap meet of usb-c oddities (I have a USB-C coffee grinder - what a world!). Dispersed camping in national forests are often transient standing desk communities. Nary an inverter in sight - everything is direct-to-USB-C.
The difference between most people needing to plug in within a few hours in order to have their basic comforts vs. being able to live indefinitely without the grid has significantly changed what it feels like to be on the road.
ErroneousBosh 23 minutes ago [-]
> I live in a 36' skoolie, so I'm nomad-indexed,
Cool, cool.
So what do you run the engine on? How many single points of failure?
idiotsecant 2 hours ago [-]
This is silly. Solar fields are cheap and easily replaced. The grid already has enormous single points of failure that are actually hard to replace - they are called substations.
jMyles 36 minutes ago [-]
But as we refine and revise power delivery to our communities, why then do we want to emulate the substation model?
Tiny deployments of off-grid solar beat the pants off that model.
defrost 4 minutes ago [-]
Sure, for individuals or pairs roaming about in an RV, small homesteaders, etc.
How many tiny off-grid solar deployments are required to power the people and industries of a small city of two million?
Many acres of grain are required to feed such a city, why not many fields of solar panels, community batteries (roughly one per 1-2 hundred houses), smart grids, etc.
solyin 3 hours ago [-]
In the theorical sense, sure. We could cover all of the world's needs with a solar panel in the Sahara that's 700 km on each side and handwave the transmission lines for that.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how the real world works.
idiotsecant 2 hours ago [-]
That is exactly how the real world works, as evidenced by the enormous number of purpose built solar sites and the vanishingly small number of dual use solar fields.
2 hours ago [-]
alliao 1 hours ago [-]
surely someone is busy breeding the tastiest salad that just can't survive being transported for more than 30mins so you end up NEEDING that stacking right in the city where all the michelin star restaurants are... get the rich to fund and perfect the tech, as "green" as it can be, get some patent under your belt for your investor (mars garden anyone?)
andrewflnr 3 hours ago [-]
Some of us are interested in ways to do things outside the US. Yes, even some who live in the US.
solyin 3 hours ago [-]
In the theorical sense, sure. We could cover all of the world's needs with a solar panel in the Sahara that's 700 km on each side and handwave the transmission lines for that.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how things work.
tty456 2 hours ago [-]
> The best solution is
is it?
foolfoolz 5 hours ago [-]
if your initial reaction is we have tons of empty land why would we ever build solar panels over a farm?
this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation. just like a hospital may want to cover their parking lot to offset costs.
at giant scale do these solar location choices optimize the absolutely best use of land for cheapest possible electricity generation? no. but at small scale it can make sense for these individual owners
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.
> 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.
Iolaum 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe today but with the rise of automation, who knows?
kempbellt 4 hours ago [-]
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.
cm2012 5 hours ago [-]
You can farm and do industrial scale solar on the same land. It works extremely well for lamb herds, shade tolerant crops like strawberries, and greenhouses. I'm extremely interested in this area and actually starting some personal projects where I live, around agri-solar that is actually farming.
botanrice 4 hours ago [-]
any recommended reading resources or documentation of your projects? building a resource database on this field and don't personally know anyone with experience, especially being in the NE
beambot 4 hours ago [-]
Optimization for land area in agriculture is already a catch-22 type affair: We subsidize the planting of corn to produce ethanol -- one of the most inefficient forms of solar energy 'harvesting' possible. So going directly to electrical harvesting while retaining the ability to grow high-value crops is certainly still advantageous...
To put some numbers: ~40% of the corn grown in the US (approx. 5.4 billion bushels out of roughly 14.9 billion bushels total production) goes toward ethanol production
labcomputer 3 hours ago [-]
> this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation.
Also: Many plants don't want/need full sun. In fact, they adapt by varying production of a chemical called zeaxanthin throughout the day to manage the amount of energy they take in.
Partially shading crops with bifacial panels (which are semi-translucent) can be beneficial to the crops as well as producing energy.
Initial reaction is how do you harvest? Is the farm well connected to the grid? Is the cost of making this practical just much higher than land. Land is cheap in the scheme of things here.
Sure, but given that a 100 acre corn farm in Ohio would make about $80k in revenue and if you're lucky about $40k in profit
A 100 acre solar plant in Ohio would make well about $1m-$1.5m in revenue
Why would you increase the cost and complexity to try to increase your revenue from $1-1.5m to a massive $1-1.5m?
Or you could just lease the land to a solar operator for about $100k a year, with no expenses
It's a solution looking for a problem.
brainwad 4 hours ago [-]
Don't know about the US, but where I live farmland is restrictively zoned to preserve its agricultural use. You can't just turn prime cropland into a (normal) solar power plant, but perhaps you can get away with this dual use trick.
alex43578 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder how little farming you’d have to do if this did count. Does letting a few sheep walk around a solar farm count? Growing a few strawberry plants? If the economics from elsewhere in thread are accurate, the farming feels like it would add 0 value other than the regulatory dodge, and would therefore be minimized.
wtch98 3 hours ago [-]
> Don't know about the US, but where I live farmland is restrictively zoned to preserve its agricultural use
So central land use planning? Rural America won't be that Commumist -- not even by law, just look at the way it votes.
Freedom means a farmer can do whatever they want with their land
brainwad 3 hours ago [-]
Freedom-loving, R-voting America is full of restrictive zoning. I don't think it's necessarily the contradiction you make it out to be. Especially if, like here, the government doesn't tell you what or how to farm, only that farmland is for farming.
dzhiurgis 58 minutes ago [-]
Solar plant in Ohio will likely require 50m in grid connection. If you find grid connection near the city the land there is likely more expensive and not growing corn but something more substantial.
What I'm saying - these dual-use agrivoltaics are for higher-margin crops, where land is somewhat constrained.
chasd00 28 minutes ago [-]
> Solar plant in Ohio will likely require 50m in grid connection.
there needs to be some way to harvest and transport electricity like you do corn or some other crop. Like an 18 wheeler size lipo that is charged up and delivered to a train of lipo cars and discharged. Then that train goes somewhere and connects to the grid and offloads all that electricity. Rinse/repeat. It's not as efficient as directly connecting ot the grid but maybe it's more feasible than waiting years for a grid connection.
SamBam 6 hours ago [-]
One thing the article doesn't mention is that some plants prefer a little shade.
So while broccoli yields may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere where it might normally be too sunny. So leafy vegetables like spinach might be doing equivalently fine under the magenta shades in New Jersey, but might actually be even better in Texas.
dbreunig 5 hours ago [-]
They certainly do mention this:
> Broccoli cultivated under them grew more slowly, requiring an additional 25 days for harvest, but produced roughly the same yield. Meanwhile, these magenta sunscreens improved the microclimate below, reducing the “vapor pressure deficit”—a measure of when plants need to halt photosynthesis to avoid excessive water loss. This may have improved the plants’ efficiency in converting sunlight into plant biomass, which increased by 2.8- to 4.5-fold compared to unshaded plants.
> The shaded plants’ levels of macronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus were either higher than or similar to unshaded plants, while levels of some micronutrients such as iron, copper, and zinc were slightly lower.
Zedseayou 3 hours ago [-]
I think you're missing the point made above: the paper compares apples to apples (broccoli with and without shade) for good reason, but the ability to cool the microclimate may enable crop substitution that has better output/value in areas where it is normally too hot for that crop.
KaiserPro 1 hours ago [-]
This isn't something that's particularly obvious unless its pointed out, poly tunnels work on two fronts:
1) extend the growing season/climate control
2) scatter direct light into bright ambient light meaning that plants aren't scorched.
"leafy" plants like pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers etc "wilt" when in direct sun. they go floppy to stop evaporation. THis means they don't grow as fast. If you even out that light so its not directly heating the living shit out of the leaves, they grow faster, because they have less time in stress.
lantry 3 hours ago [-]
little known fact: US currently grows a lot of corn for ethanol production. If we replaced that all with solar panels we'd have plenty of electricity. The solar vs farm debate is usually framed as a tradeoff with food production but that's not really true
About a third! Way more than I thought. I wonder how much of that would have to be covered in panels to get the same energy.
lantry 24 minutes ago [-]
The article I linked claims 3.2%, which seems incredibly low, but maybe ethanol production is really just that inefficient.
rossjudson 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if we are depleting the soil to create all that corn. I really don't understand how the lifecycle of soil works, and maybe it's time to go off and ask AI...
KaiserPro 2 hours ago [-]
depends on how its done, but almost certainly yes.
soil is a living thing, and varies by location. Clay, loam, sandy, etc etc. Then there is a layer of fungus that forms filaments. The roots of the plants grow into this, and then the invertebrates move shit about creating voids and pockets of nutrients.
ploughing can be disruptive to this. but more likley pumping pesticides and herbicies, along with moving the water table causes it to die off leaving only part of the biome behind.
Basically think of it like your intestines. You can live with a "clean"[1] gut, but you'll have the shits constantly, which'll make you dry and windy. Same with soil.
[1] think post antibiotic.
mangecoeur 6 hours ago [-]
I find the physics of wavelength-dependent materials properties oddly satisfying. You can do clever things like this, extracting energy from different parts of the spectrum by combining materials and conversion processes. You can beam waste heat back to space through the atmosphere’s “infrared window”. You can explain global warming from first principles. Fascinating stuff!
roughly 3 hours ago [-]
One thing I’m curious about this from the plant perspective - we’re pretty sure we’re passing everything relevant down to the plant, but nature doesn’t normally leave signal or energy lying around without leveraging it somewhere, so what don’t we know about how the broccoli use the parts we’ve been assuming they don’t?
0cf8612b2e1e 32 minutes ago [-]
As far as I know, plants are not usually limited by sunlight, but CO2. Grabbing more wavelengths is not going to improve their growth potential.
cyberax 1 hours ago [-]
Plants are green because they _reflect_ non-magenta light! This energy is wasted. If you saw artificial grow lights, they are now often magenta-colored exactly because the green part of the spectrum does nothing, and you might as well save some energy.
These panels absorb that light before it gets to the plant, so it's a win-win.
roughly 4 minutes ago [-]
The history of everything in biology is us looking at a plant and going “oh wow, it’s green, that means it’s only absorbing magenta!” and then finding out years later that the plant is almost entirely green except that every hundredth cloroplast is actually magenta and that’s the signal the plant uses to tell when the sun is up which is how it times its seed releases, which is why our crops all died this year and won’t grow back.
MINECRAFT_BIOLO 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
detourdog 5 hours ago [-]
I'm current taking composite construction certification courses because modern manufacturing provides for customizing the material for very specific uses. Low volume production with very specific mechanical and physical properties.
contron 6 hours ago [-]
I feel the same way about how fiber optics can create bandwidth by just slicing up the spectrum for different channels of data (my rudimentary understanding anyway). I like how even after all this time we find new and clever ways to work with light.
mangecoeur 6 hours ago [-]
Even more wild than spectrum slicing is polarisation encoding multiple data streams on the same wavelength.
temp0826 4 hours ago [-]
Is that something in practice (and does it have a name?)? (The thought tickled my brain as QAM/PSK but for light...ish)
lefra 3 hours ago [-]
QAM can absolutely be used in fiber optics communication. Encoding and decoding systems are complicated (I won’t pretend to understand it), but it exists.
Radio is just low frequency light, so all of the same encoding methods apply as-is.
temp0826 4 hours ago [-]
I meant it makes sense! I just never considered it and it's a nifty thought
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
And then doing amplification on that light without converting it back to electrical signals.
ranger_danger 4 hours ago [-]
Wavelength-division multiplexing[1]... it's what they use with fiber-to-the-home to get bidirectional signals with a single strand of fiber. Or the big-boy version is DWDM which ISPs use to stuff dozens of customers on a single strand.
Wait we could reflect back infrared heat into space and still collect solar energy as electricity - so doing two jobs at once in, say, a desert.
Re-greening at a profit?
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
Careful engineering can help here.
Reflect back shortwave IR sunlight below the bandgap of the solar panels.
Make the solar panels "black" at longer IR wavelengths corresponding to the temperature of the panels and to IR windows in the atmosphere, to maximize emission of heat back into space.
mangecoeur 3 hours ago [-]
It would be challenging but theoretically possible. You need very clear skies for the infrared heat not to be trapped by clouds
crazygringo 5 hours ago [-]
Are there realistic ways of harvesting vegetables at scale that are underneath mounted solar panels, with all their supports?
Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
I'm just imagining that you are going to need a lot of vertical clearance for tractors, and support posts will have to be widely spaced enough that the horizontal beams supporting the panels will have to be quite strong, and that at some point this is less solar panels in a field, and more like constructing a building with solar panels on its roof.
onlyrealcuzzo 4 hours ago [-]
> Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.
Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.
Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.
I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.
roughly 3 hours ago [-]
The good news is that as someone else pointed out, we mostly grow corn for energy, so in a way, this is more about getting the ground we use for corn back than it is getting more energy.
wongarsu 4 hours ago [-]
We are right at the point where fully automated harvesting machines start to gain ground. And removing the operator (or moving the operator outside the machine) allows for designs that are less tall. The benefit of wider and wider machines also shrinks with full automation, even if it doesn't fully go away
goda90 2 hours ago [-]
Smaller scale market gardens could benefit. Many rely on more manual labor and smaller machines.
There are some small organic farms using a system of chained paper pots and frames to quickly fill them with soil and sow with seeds, then once they're sprouted you use a hand pulled machine that spreads the chain out while directly placing each plant into the soil automatically.
cm2012 4 hours ago [-]
You can see there are already huge examples of this in Australia with sheep grazing under panels and it's just barely starting in New York state with a cornell pilot. In my opinion it's the future of electricity in agricultural areas.
KaiserPro 1 hours ago [-]
Depends on what the crop is. Broccoli I imagine, is manually cut. same with tomatoes.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
CdTe panels are limited by availability of tellurium. Maybe we'll mine that in space one day; much of the Earth's Te was lost as volatile H2Te. The abundance of Te in carbonaceous chondrites is about 1000x that in the Earth's crust.
myrmidon 5 hours ago [-]
Given that it's about as abundant as platinum (which trades at ~$50000/kg), tellurium is pretty cheap right now (~120$/kg, about 10 times the price of copper).
Since it's an almost free byproduct of copper electrorefining (>1% concentration in copper anode slime, but low annual production of ~800 tons, limiting CdTe panel production to ~100GW/year short term [1]), I don't think that mining it in space is ever gonna pay off for terrestrial panel production, because if it was priced somewhat comparably to platinum group metals you could never ever justify any demand for it (panels would be much too expensive compared to alternatives, tellurium is already a relevant cost factor for them despite being cheap-ish) => and you'd obviously use all interplanetary mining/transport capability on platinum and its ilk instead.
Yeah. Probably it would be better to look at alternative terrestrial sources, like manganese nuggets (which are maybe 40 ppm Te).
The layer of CdTe on a thin film PV module is extremely thin, so at current prices the cost of Te is a very small fraction of the cost of the module.
nkmnz 4 hours ago [-]
On top of that, there are 53% more atoms in a kg of Tl than there are atoms in a kg of Pt!
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
Tellurium is Te. Tl is thallium.
nkmnz 43 minutes ago [-]
Of course, thank you for pointing that out. The math still maths :)
chuckadams 5 hours ago [-]
There's the minor issue in that the technology to bring all that metal back home is also a weapon of mass destruction :-/
myrmidon 4 hours ago [-]
Kinetic orbital bombardment is utterly worthless from a military perspective.
People tend to have a completely inaccurate view on this because of bad popsci, out-of-context feasibility studies from the 1950s and fiction that just leans toward the "fantasy" on that.
The reasons for this is are very simple:
1) There is no "high ground". Being in orbit does not enable you to throw things "down" for free, thats simply not how orbital dynamics work. All the impact energy you have to pay for up front, and delta-v on some orbital object is almost inevitably more expensive than the equivalent amount of explosives on the ground.
2) Anything launched from beyond earth orbit would be unusably delayed. And telegraphed.
3) The concept does not have a single selling point from a military perspective; not really faster than an ICBM, penetration is limited by newtonian physics regardless of speed and more expensive than just delivering the equivalent amount of explosives (or nuclear payload) via missile.
edit: Yes an interplanetary transport system could be weaponized. But so could the explosives currently used in mining (~tens of millions of tons per year), no one cares.
andrewflnr 3 hours ago [-]
If North Korea or Iran could hold the world hostage with a threat of a mass-extinction-level event, they absolutely would. Similar for many terrorists of various stripes. Are you sure the control systems of whatever company ends up trying to bring back mass from space will be sufficiently resilient to hacking? I'm not. So, I worry.
And we're not even talking about "orbital" bombardment. We're talking about a continuous stream of material at well above escape velocity, whose delta-V is already paid for. Simply redirecting a few pieces of this stream would not be more telegraphed than any other attack. By the way, are you sure the control systems of the mine owners are resilient to coercion of their executives by "legitimate" terrestrial governments? I'm not. None of your reasons are effective.
The energies are substantially more than mining explosives, with wildly different properties as far as threat detection and mitigation. To put it charitably, that's a quite silly comparison.
Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, maybe the best mitigatiom would be to extrude all the mined material into some other very high surface area shape that can't survive reentry, no matter the mass, but can survive being accelerated for the trip home. Maybe a big long truss, with the engine at one end. And then also limit the payload size.
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
Moving 1000 tons of Te back to Earth, and moving maybe 10^14 tons to hit Earth, are rather different capabilities.
andrewflnr 2 hours ago [-]
1000 tons of Te would only be a fraction of what's brought back by a realistic mining operation. Don't you also want all the platinum and palladium and gold hiding out there? Don't you want the iron for building space habitats? No, we'll bring back as much as we can manage, whether it's availability or transport logistics or fear of attacks that turns out to be the limiting factor.
pfdietz 2 hours ago [-]
1000 tons is how much Te is mined each year on Earth.
Global annual production of platinum is 180 tons.
andrewflnr 2 hours ago [-]
How is that relevant to the weaponizability of space mining systems, the thing I was actually talking about?
pfdietz 39 minutes ago [-]
It shows that the claim that space mining enables mass-extinction level events is nonsense. Space mining can involve 11 orders of magnitude less mass annually than the K/T mass extinction impact.
roughly 3 hours ago [-]
What’s your opinion on the US’s MAD nuclear strategy?
andrewflnr 2 hours ago [-]
It's pretty bad. I hate it. I wish there was a better one but I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed. Let's try to do something smarter with space mining.
pfdietz 5 hours ago [-]
If it gets separated at the asteroid the mass brought back is small. Total world production of Te is about 1000 tons/year.
engineer_22 5 hours ago [-]
I imagine a time long long ago, early humans debating the proliferation of fire.
addaon 6 hours ago [-]
I'd love this for a home greenhouse... I live in an area where during the summer insolation is high enough that some combination of large amounts shading and airflow (wasting humidity) is needed... wavelength-selective shading seems like an interesting idea to start with, and energy recovery from it is a nice add-on.
metalman 5 hours ago [-]
For a larger greenhouse a mix of clear non solar and solar pv pannels optimised for different plants could be the way to go.
The polycarbonate clear pannels are actualy cheap and likely strong enough that I am considering mounting solar pv directly to them. So: scratch building a greenhouse frame, that will support all the loads, and attaching the panels, and run the wires right through the polycarb, standard solar pannels, install@40" width and that works out to 3 per 12', 12 pannels for 40', for a neat eve to eve install.
SoftTalker 5 hours ago [-]
There are countless square miles of vacant land in the USA that are unsuitable for farming and ideal for solar. This might be useful in areas where vacant land is actually scarce.
shermantanktop 5 hours ago [-]
The US is huge. The problem is efficiency of transmission. But maybe we just install 2x the solar to overcome that? When energy is so low cost we can afford to be a bit less efficient.
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
More storage too (transmit in time rather than in space).
bullfightonmars 3 hours ago [-]
A huge amount of corn goes into producing ethanol to burn as fuel in cars. We can safely take a small portion of agricultural land out of "food" production and replace it with photovoltaics and electrical production instead of using it to produce ethanol and produce productive stable returns for farmers instead of subsiding corn and fuel.
wongarsu 4 hours ago [-]
That vacant land tends to be far away from electricity users. Not always - lots of desert around Las Vegas - but people historically like settling around arable land. Producing electricity close to where you need it is great, both because of transmission losses and because building more long-distance transmission lines is neither easy, cheap nor fast
declan_roberts 4 hours ago [-]
The better solution to this vacant land is to remove the regulatory and permitting burden that made it vacant in the first place.
Let the people build.
goda90 2 hours ago [-]
We should be increasing the amount of wilderness space in the world. Let the people build denser before building wider.
apercu 5 hours ago [-]
I feel like starting with parking lots might be better than filling "empty" land though?
rockostrich 5 hours ago [-]
It really does seem like a no brainer. They should already be close to other infrastructure and they provide shade for parked cars which reduces the energy spent cooling the cars when people drive away. Even if you make very safe assumptions about the total area of parking lots in the US and their sun exposure, the amount of energy they could generate from solar panels on average rivals the current solar output.
declan_roberts 3 hours ago [-]
Plenty of rooftop space for solar.
KaiserPro 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, but not plenty of support or access to make it practical.
its _far_ cheaper to retrofit carparks than it is roofs. generally there is nothing under a carpark apart from tarmac. Unlike a roof which was designed for a specific weather loading (be it wind, rain or snow)
You also need to attach the panels to the roof, its generally simpler to bolt into tarmac compared to bonding to a weather proof seal.
Ylpertnodi 5 hours ago [-]
Where i am in the eu, car parks are where its at.
Apart from on dirty great field which is being filled with panels for some reason.
twobitshifter 5 hours ago [-]
Wild, I did a science fair experiment on plant growth vs light color as a young kid! i had each plant in a different shade of upside down tumbler cup and compared the growth. N=1 for each cup, but I remember being surprised that the plants really didn’t seem to care when you filtered out certain shades.
ortusdux 4 hours ago [-]
I like the idea of hybridizing the solar infrastructure to work with advanced AG systems. I watched a recent tour of a modern strawberry farm, and I was surprised that they were using wheeled robots instead of overhead tracks.
I especially like how this could reduce the need for irrigation in dryer climates.
4 hours ago [-]
polarsanel 3 hours ago [-]
Literal children of the magenta.
formvoltron 4 hours ago [-]
This is WAY more interesting than SpaceX launch number yada yada or whatever.
Datacenters in space are for Elon & his stock price, nothing more. Meanwhile we are not prioritizing things like this nearly enough. Solar on earth is what needs to be rolled out in a massive way, for our current energy needs and for datacenters.
declan_roberts 3 hours ago [-]
Theory is always more interesting than practice, because theory never has to make money.
Remember spacex is a public company and you can short the company at any time if you believe what you're saying. Why not profit off it?
rubing 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
wjnc 6 hours ago [-]
Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels. You still need lights with magenta panels to hit 18+hrs of light a day. Once the lights are already installed, specialized panels would be hard to justify a mark-up.
233mhz 6 hours ago [-]
> Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels.
Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants.
This is the classic out of depth HN take
wjnc 6 hours ago [-]
I was thinking this further through. What you write was indeed the next thought… and the reason we don’t grow in multistory factories is… cost! So sunlight is the OG for greenhouse growing. Cost of m2 free ground or glass do not matter when compared to building space, lights and energy.
This does lead me back to the idea that to cover greenhouses with translucent panels, you would need translucent panels to have undergone a price drop comparable only with regular panels. Which is unlikely. And then you have risks like hail risks that multiply when covering greenhouses with panels. Although that might be an upside, since greenhouses in NL are actively going towards break free glass which is pretty expensive. So perhaps there is a break free translucent solar panel upgrade route that could work out. (I am sceptical, but it is a nice idea indeed. Light is a spectrum and not all light is equal in photosyntesis.)
omgwtfbyobbq 5 hours ago [-]
I think the question is, are these panels less expensive than taking normal panels, maybe with LEDs to help growth at night, and adding solar tracking to optimize solar generation, plant shading, and plant growth?
Most flowers in 7b don't want extreme sun. We use shade cloth frequently, so solar coverage would be fine and of course have the energy co-production. Cut flowers aren't harvested mechanically at our scale, so we wouldn't have to worry about tractor access.
Meanwhile, more and more food is produced under cover for a lot of good reasons. Polytunnels, glass houses. You might get some summer shade from solar but what about season extension at the beginning of spring/end of fall? Depending on your crop and location, that could mean 4-8 extra weeks a year. What if you do geothermal energy generation for the tunnel? Now you can grow through the winter and not need the same footprint as solar. That's more appealing to me.
Anyway, I'm forever mad at corn ethanol and we should at least replace all that with solar farms. That's probably the right place to start. But also, again, zoning...
Something around 2500W of solar can provide enough energy to drive an EV 12,000 miles a year.
When it comes to zoning. The state should require offices to install chargers for employees cars when the solar share of electricity generation is highest.
I've done hobbyist exotic (legal!) mushroom farming for a while, at a scale that is more than I could use but not like 100x what I could use. I've thought about selling but it seems like a lot of hassle doing the marketing and business parts of it.
How do you sell? Do you have a distributor that purchases product from you or is it a farmers market type deal?
(Disclaimer: I know nothing about farming)
I somewhat agree - dumping pesticides and fertilizer into the ground every year and then letting it pollute rivers is low-key insanity. But then you look at just how much farmland is out there and realize some crops just can't be put indoors, probably ever.
There are lots of variables for sure, but I do wonder how much more efficient indoor growing must get to overcome outdoor growing? Land value is vastly different between regions, so does labour, crop type, etc.
p.s. Tom Scotts recent video on strawberries was amazing - special mites to fend off other bugs and UVC light sanitizing was a bit of wow for me.
Often these "solutions" introduce more problems than they solve. One example being a solar farm designed to be grazed by sheep where the panels are so low to the ground that farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.
The best solution is still to put solar panels and farmland in different places where each can be optimized without concern for the other.
There's significant evidence "add solar panels" is an optimization to at least some kinds of farmland.
> farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season
That season is typically "winter", and you wind up without much hay to cut at that point.
As much as I want solar everywhere - it far from a sure thing for making/saving money.
they also have to be able to get "bumped" by a brush hog, plow, and whatever else without collapsing and taking down a bunch of panels.
No one's banning hay fields. You can do both.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/wheres-t...
"The solar canopy also protects the grasses, keeping them green and dewy, even as nearby fields blanch and crisp in the sunlight. Shallanberger rotates the herd every few days, a key tenet of regenerative farming philosophy, so they munch on fresh grass while the rest of the field grows back. They move through all 15 paddocks in about 45 days; if the site relied on mechanical mowers, they’d trim every 45 days, too."
"Vegetation management is one of the most significant costs for solar plant maintenance in the Southeast, Shallenberger said. In the first six months, the cattle took care of about 75% of the mowing — he had to bring in conventional equipment for some woody weeds that the cattle don’t care for. Once the pasture is more established, the herd could handle up to 95% of the site’s mowing needs."
> Reasons like this are why this type of tech will always be popular on HN but they just can't figure out why farmers don't want it.
Farmers come in different sizes, shapes, locations.
The largest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_station is several times the size of the state of Rhode Island, and chances are there're some spots where a bit of shade is welcome. I can also assure you no one's mowing/haying that size a property.
What do you think "trim" is here, and why do you think anyone would do it?
How much do you think a hay field would grow in six weeks?
Nor are farmers immune to the "vote against your own interests" political bullshit that often comes up around renewables. Look at how many voted for the guy who started a trade war as a thank you.
(Plenty of bakers here, by the way. I used a literal ton of flour during COVID keeping the neighborhood supplied with sourdough. And I give hay to horses ~5x a week; I've seen what animals can do to a grassy field.)
Can they mow a 1,000 acres and get through ruts from feral hogs and everything else? If so, then that's awesome (i really don't know) but you have to think of the scale.
But surely only certain places need to do this? for the UK, you need to make hay for the winter, assuming that your meadows flood, or are otherwise muddy. But if your in one of the more temperate areas of the southern USA, surely you don't need to do that?
The silage that you get, then, is basically like a kind of grass sauerkraut, and smells exactly like you'd expect.
That combined with "draff" - distillery mash, the spent malt from brewing "pot ale" for making whisky, and a certain amount of shredded sugar beet tends to make up the majority of winter fodder.
Draff is great because it's still fermenting slowly and generating a lot of heat, so the cows are eating hot food in the winter. It's mostly the fibrey bits of the barley malt, which we can't eat but which cows and sheep - having cellulase in at least one of their stomachs - do incredibly well on. It's absolutely no use for anything else, humans can't eat it and it doesn't really compost down. It just rots, stinks, and emits masses of carbon dioxide and methane when it does. Far better for the environment to lock all that up in a cow.
Ideally your fields don't flood because you plant crops in the autumn that stay in the ground over winter to germinate in the spring, and if they get flooded that's it, you've lost the lot.
You tend not to see soya-based or other leguminous food here very much, because it's expensive, it has to be shipped halfway round the planet, and it's ineffective - you get shitty meat that no-one wants to buy.
You need the cows to graze pasture, chew up the grass, break down all that tough cellulose and poo it out as incredibly highly refined fertiliser.
We eat, just about everywhere in the world, because there's six inches of earth, it rains sometimes, and cows and pigs shit solid gold.
The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.
I think most people want highly distributed, reliable, affordable power. That's why off-grid tech is experiencing such a boom.
I live in a 36' skoolie, so I'm nomad-indexed, but I can confirm that over the past 10 years or so, most RV-lifers have transitioned their focus from recreation / comfort to off-grid experimentation. Essentially everywhere I go in the US, if I'm camped near others, they are going to have minimum viability for boondocking. That was not the case when I started.
Especially amidst the current political instability and apparent looming collapse of the US state, one of the simplest things that most of us can do is stabilize off-grid power in our neighborhoods, and that is quietly happening all over the place.
So, the role of vertically integrated solar (both literally and metaphorically) has more to do with the grid shape that serves our stability needs, and less to do with large-scale differences in efficiency.
Who cares? One isolated field of solar represents a negligible amount of power at grid scale. Nobody is going to bother to go around attacking each individual field because the "ROI" of attacking a high-voltage transmission line (the kind that brings power from multiple thermal plants to a city) is so much higher.
Maybe I was unclear: that's exactly my point! That's the problem with grid scale for most everyday uses.
In 2026, it's fairly trivial to have a setup such that, if "the grid" fails, I don't even notice for days. That's a nice feature! And it makes sense to build out communities that way from now on.
"The grid" is great for industry, but for residential, micro-grids are clearly the future. Allowing the state and the electric company to cut us off - intentionally or otherwise, let alone having no power during a disaster when it's needed most, is a very silly thing to trade for a tiny efficiency increase.
I sleep well at night knowing I have four bigass AGMs under me.
Just take a look at the multiple fridge freezer attacks in the EU this year.
Can you elaborate, please? What exactly has changed, and over what time period?
The big changes seem to have been:
* Better / more varied solar panels
* Lithium batteries (which I don't use for a house bank, but still benefit from by dint of them having driven the price deep-cycle lead batteries down)
* USB-C everything
When I first started this lifestyle, almost everyone had lead-acid batteries powering an inverter, and a zillion wall warts converting power back to DC. Some people had solar for sure, but a solid majority only camped where they were able to plug in.
At festivals, powered sites sold out quickly and at a premium. Dispersed camping in national forests was the purview of tent campers, truck campers, and people who don't use much power (ie, not a ton of remote workers). New campgrounds always focused on power pedestals and seemed to regard that as the MVP.
Now, festivals are a sea of solar and/or off-grid-cooled beers. Campgrounds are often a de-facto swap meet of usb-c oddities (I have a USB-C coffee grinder - what a world!). Dispersed camping in national forests are often transient standing desk communities. Nary an inverter in sight - everything is direct-to-USB-C.
The difference between most people needing to plug in within a few hours in order to have their basic comforts vs. being able to live indefinitely without the grid has significantly changed what it feels like to be on the road.
Cool, cool.
So what do you run the engine on? How many single points of failure?
Tiny deployments of off-grid solar beat the pants off that model.
How many tiny off-grid solar deployments are required to power the people and industries of a small city of two million?
Many acres of grain are required to feed such a city, why not many fields of solar panels, community batteries (roughly one per 1-2 hundred houses), smart grids, etc.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how the real world works.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how things work.
is it?
this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation. just like a hospital may want to cover their parking lot to offset costs.
at giant scale do these solar location choices optimize the absolutely best use of land for cheapest possible electricity generation? no. but at small scale it can make sense for these individual owners
https://electrek.co/2026/10/05/six-flags-has-installed-one-o...
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
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.
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.
To put some numbers: ~40% of the corn grown in the US (approx. 5.4 billion bushels out of roughly 14.9 billion bushels total production) goes toward ethanol production
Also: Many plants don't want/need full sun. In fact, they adapt by varying production of a chemical called zeaxanthin throughout the day to manage the amount of energy they take in.
Partially shading crops with bifacial panels (which are semi-translucent) can be beneficial to the crops as well as producing energy.
https://www.science.org/content/article/too-much-good-thing
https://farmbuy.com/1595-florina-road-katherine-nt-0850-4368...
1% of panel cost according to Gemini.
A 100 acre solar plant in Ohio would make well about $1m-$1.5m in revenue
Why would you increase the cost and complexity to try to increase your revenue from $1-1.5m to a massive $1-1.5m?
Or you could just lease the land to a solar operator for about $100k a year, with no expenses
It's a solution looking for a problem.
So central land use planning? Rural America won't be that Commumist -- not even by law, just look at the way it votes.
Freedom means a farmer can do whatever they want with their land
What I'm saying - these dual-use agrivoltaics are for higher-margin crops, where land is somewhat constrained.
there needs to be some way to harvest and transport electricity like you do corn or some other crop. Like an 18 wheeler size lipo that is charged up and delivered to a train of lipo cars and discharged. Then that train goes somewhere and connects to the grid and offloads all that electricity. Rinse/repeat. It's not as efficient as directly connecting ot the grid but maybe it's more feasible than waiting years for a grid connection.
So while broccoli yields may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere where it might normally be too sunny. So leafy vegetables like spinach might be doing equivalently fine under the magenta shades in New Jersey, but might actually be even better in Texas.
> Broccoli cultivated under them grew more slowly, requiring an additional 25 days for harvest, but produced roughly the same yield. Meanwhile, these magenta sunscreens improved the microclimate below, reducing the “vapor pressure deficit”—a measure of when plants need to halt photosynthesis to avoid excessive water loss. This may have improved the plants’ efficiency in converting sunlight into plant biomass, which increased by 2.8- to 4.5-fold compared to unshaded plants.
> The shaded plants’ levels of macronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus were either higher than or similar to unshaded plants, while levels of some micronutrients such as iron, copper, and zinc were slightly lower.
1) extend the growing season/climate control
2) scatter direct light into bright ambient light meaning that plants aren't scorched.
"leafy" plants like pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers etc "wilt" when in direct sun. they go floppy to stop evaporation. THis means they don't grow as fast. If you even out that light so its not directly heating the living shit out of the leaves, they grow faster, because they have less time in stress.
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2025/04/new-study-compa...
> The department has raised its corn production forecast by 234 million bushels to 16 billion bushels.
https://bioenergytimes.com/usda-raises-2026-27-us-corn-use-f...
About a third! Way more than I thought. I wonder how much of that would have to be covered in panels to get the same energy.
soil is a living thing, and varies by location. Clay, loam, sandy, etc etc. Then there is a layer of fungus that forms filaments. The roots of the plants grow into this, and then the invertebrates move shit about creating voids and pockets of nutrients.
ploughing can be disruptive to this. but more likley pumping pesticides and herbicies, along with moving the water table causes it to die off leaving only part of the biome behind.
Basically think of it like your intestines. You can live with a "clean"[1] gut, but you'll have the shits constantly, which'll make you dry and windy. Same with soil.
[1] think post antibiotic.
These panels absorb that light before it gets to the plant, so it's a win-win.
Example of a research paper using it: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290224766_Investiga...
You might also be interested in https://phys.org/news/2026-11-air-holes-silicon-wafers-flat....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexi...
Re-greening at a profit?
Reflect back shortwave IR sunlight below the bandgap of the solar panels.
Make the solar panels "black" at longer IR wavelengths corresponding to the temperature of the panels and to IR windows in the atmosphere, to maximize emission of heat back into space.
Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
I'm just imagining that you are going to need a lot of vertical clearance for tractors, and support posts will have to be widely spaced enough that the horizontal beams supporting the panels will have to be quite strong, and that at some point this is less solar panels in a field, and more like constructing a building with solar panels on its roof.
It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.
Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.
Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.
I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.
There are some small organic farms using a system of chained paper pots and frames to quickly fill them with soil and sow with seeds, then once they're sprouted you use a hand pulled machine that spreads the chain out while directly placing each plant into the soil automatically.
Since it's an almost free byproduct of copper electrorefining (>1% concentration in copper anode slime, but low annual production of ~800 tons, limiting CdTe panel production to ~100GW/year short term [1]), I don't think that mining it in space is ever gonna pay off for terrestrial panel production, because if it was priced somewhat comparably to platinum group metals you could never ever justify any demand for it (panels would be much too expensive compared to alternatives, tellurium is already a relevant cost factor for them despite being cheap-ish) => and you'd obviously use all interplanetary mining/transport capability on platinum and its ilk instead.
[1]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/10/global-cadmium-tellur...
The layer of CdTe on a thin film PV module is extremely thin, so at current prices the cost of Te is a very small fraction of the cost of the module.
People tend to have a completely inaccurate view on this because of bad popsci, out-of-context feasibility studies from the 1950s and fiction that just leans toward the "fantasy" on that.
The reasons for this is are very simple:
1) There is no "high ground". Being in orbit does not enable you to throw things "down" for free, thats simply not how orbital dynamics work. All the impact energy you have to pay for up front, and delta-v on some orbital object is almost inevitably more expensive than the equivalent amount of explosives on the ground.
2) Anything launched from beyond earth orbit would be unusably delayed. And telegraphed.
3) The concept does not have a single selling point from a military perspective; not really faster than an ICBM, penetration is limited by newtonian physics regardless of speed and more expensive than just delivering the equivalent amount of explosives (or nuclear payload) via missile.
edit: Yes an interplanetary transport system could be weaponized. But so could the explosives currently used in mining (~tens of millions of tons per year), no one cares.
And we're not even talking about "orbital" bombardment. We're talking about a continuous stream of material at well above escape velocity, whose delta-V is already paid for. Simply redirecting a few pieces of this stream would not be more telegraphed than any other attack. By the way, are you sure the control systems of the mine owners are resilient to coercion of their executives by "legitimate" terrestrial governments? I'm not. None of your reasons are effective.
The energies are substantially more than mining explosives, with wildly different properties as far as threat detection and mitigation. To put it charitably, that's a quite silly comparison.
Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, maybe the best mitigatiom would be to extrude all the mined material into some other very high surface area shape that can't survive reentry, no matter the mass, but can survive being accelerated for the trip home. Maybe a big long truss, with the engine at one end. And then also limit the payload size.
Global annual production of platinum is 180 tons.
Let the people build.
its _far_ cheaper to retrofit carparks than it is roofs. generally there is nothing under a carpark apart from tarmac. Unlike a roof which was designed for a specific weather loading (be it wind, rain or snow)
You also need to attach the panels to the roof, its generally simpler to bolt into tarmac compared to bonding to a weather proof seal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TumxO2glmPQ
Datacenters in space are for Elon & his stock price, nothing more. Meanwhile we are not prioritizing things like this nearly enough. Solar on earth is what needs to be rolled out in a massive way, for our current energy needs and for datacenters.
Remember spacex is a public company and you can short the company at any time if you believe what you're saying. Why not profit off it?
Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants.
This is the classic out of depth HN take
This does lead me back to the idea that to cover greenhouses with translucent panels, you would need translucent panels to have undergone a price drop comparable only with regular panels. Which is unlikely. And then you have risks like hail risks that multiply when covering greenhouses with panels. Although that might be an upside, since greenhouses in NL are actively going towards break free glass which is pretty expensive. So perhaps there is a break free translucent solar panel upgrade route that could work out. (I am sceptical, but it is a nice idea indeed. Light is a spectrum and not all light is equal in photosyntesis.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428018
Image: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.xcrp.2026.103555/asset/c8...
Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...