Sheep graze under solar panels in a renewable energy farm in Germany. Photo from Pexels
By Joey Harris | Indianapolis Business Journal
For proponents of solar energy, the fields of panels that increasingly dot Indiana landscapes are essentially an expansion of the state’s agricultural production.
Instead of harvesting crops for biological energy, the panels are harvesting the sun to meet society’s growing demand for electric energy.
Not everyone sees it that way.
In fact, the potential for solar panels to compete with crops has been a sticking point for some project opponents in recent years. And those concerns have fed into zoning restrictions, project denials and a few outright bans on solar farms.
But the two land uses don’t necessarily need to compete.
At least one project in Indiana integrates solar energy and agricultural production alongside each other — a practice referred to as agrivoltaics.
Over the past year, a group of Purdue University researchers has been looking into how far the approach could go in Indiana and surrounding states as part of the Midwest Agrivoltaics for Resilient Communities incubator, or MARC.
Widespread adoption of agrivoltaics is not necessarily simple, MARC researchers told IBJ. There are a lot of questions about costs, design, what type of agriculture production is compatible with solar and where agrivoltaics could take place.
But if the technical and economic questions get worked out, agrivoltaics could help bring more communities on board with solar projects.
“The question for us is really whether agrivoltaics could be a solution to help resolve this conflict, and really, there’s a tremendous amount of potential [from solar farms] for growing not only resilience but prosperity across the rural Midwest,” said Dan Chavas, professor of atmospheric science at Purdue and a member of MARC’s leadership team.
Sheep shade
Despite frequent pushback against projects, Indiana has quickly climbed the ranks of states for solar energy production.
The Solar Energy Industries Association reported in June that Indiana has the 11th-highest installed solar capacity in the United States. It was 26th at the same point in 2020.
And Indiana ranked No. 3 in the country for the amount of capacity added last year.
That growth has been assisted by Doral Renewables’ huge Mammoth Solar project in Starke and Pulaski counties, which will total about 1,300 megawatts upon completion this year. Philadelphia-based Doral is seeking zoning approval for an additional 1,000 megawatts of solar nearby.
The project is set to be one of the largest solar farms in the world and is also a proof of concept for agrivoltaics.
About 2,500 sheep — along with some pigs and chickens — share 1,200 acres, or 15%, of the farm with the solar panels. They eat the plants that grow along the panels and rest in the panels’ shade.
The animal program began as a small pilot.
Now, Doral has plans to expand agriculture production across the entire project, said Ed Baptista, the company’s vice president of development and agrivoltaics.
In this instance, the sheep perform a job that is typically done by humans at most solar farms: mowing the grass.
Solar developers can’t let the grass grow too high; it can block the sun and create a fire hazard.
Baptista said the budget otherwise allocated to mowing can be used to help farmers buy the sheep. Raising sheep, he said, “is also producing something.”
One factor that has limited expansion: “We don’t have enough sheep yet,” he said.
Design adaptations
Sheep and some other animals provide a clear path for an agrivoltaic project to work because integrating the animals requires few, if any, changes to a solar farm’s design.
But introducing some animals and crops isn’t so easy.
Setting cattle to graze among solar panels is tricky; the panels need to be elevated so the cows don’t bump into them. The panels need to be elevated for some crops, too.
“[With elevated panels], you have both solar and ag production, which is great, but you also have a huge capital expenditure,” said Juan Sesmero, a Purdue professor of agricultural economics and researcher with MARC.
“That will kill the economics of any project,” he added. “It’s just way too expensive.”
A project needs to make sense financially for both the energy company and the farmer, said Katie Nelson, executive director of public policy at the Indiana Farm Bureau.
“We’re not just going to graze sheep because it looks pretty [and] it makes the land look like it’s still in agriculture,” Nelson said.
Doral, for its part, plans to initiate a pilot project with cattle on a relatively small piece of land next year, though the company has a warranty from its supplier for those panels due to the unknowns associated with the larger animals, Baptista said.
“Those products are not there yet, commercially,” he said.
Sesmero said developers of agrivoltaic projects will likely opt to keep panels mounted closer to the ground because of the steep costs of elevating them.
So in order to grow crops alongside solar panels, developers need to consider how the panels are spaced out to allow for the right level of sun to hit the crops and provide enough space for farm equipment to travel through, Sesmero said.
The design could be complex even for certain crops that appear especially well-suited for agrivoltaics.
Aaron Thompson, Purdue associate professor of horticulture and landscape architecture, pointed to southwestern Indiana’s melon farms, which could use the shade from the panels to prevent scalding.
Melon farmers “are really excited about the possibility, but the design is going to have to change quite a bit. … You don’t grow melons on the same field year after year after year,” he said. “So we’ve got to be able to develop a rotation [by growing other crops] and the physical layout that supports that.”
Community acceptance
In MARC stakeholder meetings across the state, including in central Indiana, farmers and others showed enthusiasm for agrivoltaics, Thompson said.
“We don’t have uniform acceptance from the farm community about solar … but we’ve got a lot of creative farmers that are thinking about the future and thinking about ways to bring solar into their operation,” he said.
Still, solar’s political problems aren’t likely to disappear. Hoosier communities in recent years have turned down permit requests and passed restrictive zoning ordinances in response to projects.
In the grand scheme of land uses, solar energy does not intrude that much on farmland, said Jerome Dumortier, an Indiana University economics professor who recently published a paper on solar’s impact on food prices. The total area needed for the highest estimates of U.S. solar production are about 7 million hectares, or 17 million acres.
“It’s a big number, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nothing like the amount of cropland out there in the U.S.,” he said.
But solar projects can have an impact locally. That’s why the Indiana Farm Bureau supports local zoning, Nelson said.
“It’s hard when it’s your neighbor’s land, and you’ve always lived in a rural community and now you are living next to a solar development,” she said.
There have also been instances of direct competition for land, Thompson said.
“At a very local level, that can raise the rent costs for leasing farm ground for farmers,” he said.
More broadly, some communities say they are sacrificing their local resources for someone else’s energy needs, he said.
“The early pushback we heard from rural communities and farmers in particular against solar was, ‘Why are we the place that has to accommodate this new land use if all of the energy is being put into the grid to power Chicago?’” Thompson said.
“And that’s a legitimate question in rural areas that suffer from the most frequent power outages. … They want to know what’s in it for them.”
The answer is, potentially a lot.
The upsides
Among the topics the MARC incubator is examining is whether these solar systems could also be the power source for “microgrids” for rural areas that could help keep the lights on when disaster hits.
“Basically, it’s a localized system liberating local resources to pick up the local [demands],” said Xiaonan Lu, Purdue associate professor of electrical engineering technology.
The benefits of a microgrid are mostly hypothetical for now, but others plusses aren’t.
“The farm economy is tough, and dual-use systems — like having agrivoltaics, or even just having a solar lease — helps stabilize farm income during really volatile commodity [price] cycles,” Nelson said.
Meanwhile, the surrounding area sees benefits from renewable energy development, too, said Dagney Faulk, director of research at Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research.
A recent study by the center found that the Indiana counties with restrictions on solar power saw a combined dip of $204 million in gross domestic product and a net employment loss of more than 8,700 jobs.
A lot of that can be explained by where manufacturers are choosing to locate operations, Faulk said.
“Often, big users of electricity locate near the source, and they have these power purchasing agreements to buy the electricity,” she said.
Dumortier said he doesn’t see agrivoltaics being the norm for solar projects anytime soon.
“It’s just going to be in different places,” he said, adding, “land is only a very small proportion of the investment costs.”
But for Doral, agrivoltaics “is the future of the industry,” Baptista said.
“As the year passes by and people start to understand, some [project opponents] are converting into participating farmers,” he said. “Some of them are now being hired to do some vegetation management.”•
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