Hops for beer flourish under solar panels. They’re not the only crop thriving in the shade.::A farm in Bavaria is covering its hops with solar panels, providing electricity to 250 households and shading the plants from the increasingly scorching summer heat in the process.
Sounds good to me. My only real complaint about solar panels is the space they occupy. That complaint goes away if that space can also be used for crops. It’s a win/win
Solar panels are about 70x as efficient in getting energy when compared to corn ethanol. If all corn ethanol land (which is heavily irrigated, fertilized, and subsidized) were converted to solar, it would generate 3x the yearly electricity needs of the US.
30.2 million acres * 400 MWh/acre/year = 12,080 TWh/year. US energy use is about 4,000 TWh/year.
We are already taking cropland away for energy production, might as well make it way more efficient.
Well people also complain on expansion of agriculture land so I don’t think consideration on land usage will disappear.
Real problem is that many people want the energy source which is clean, cheap, invisible, safe, doesn’t consume any land or resources and of course has a easy to understand functioning. What could possibly go wrong ?
Driving through rural corn country, you see yard signs at every second residence saying to keep solar out of farming land, so there is land usage consideration, but by the farmers themselves
I’ll bet that tune would change if we stopped subsidizing corn. I find it hilarious when “farmers” (read just land owners) talk about land usage being wasted like that without even thinking for a second about the amount of subsidies corn gets or the random AG pay to not grow. Which is the most wasteful of land usage.
There is that idea to ring the equator in floating solar panels. Not actually sure how viable that is but sounds awesome. Like something you do in that game Dyson Sphere Project. That would certainly alleviate any worries about land usage.
Best use of space was argued for by…ME. Back in 2002 I argued at length with colleagues that California should build solar panel covers for their aqueducts. This would provide electricity as well as significantly decrease algae growth and evaporation from the aqueducts.
Then car parks at airports.
There’s a ton of places they can go.
Hell yeah. Bring on the Solarbeerpunk future!
Hops isn’t only for beer. You can dry them and make it into a tea to help you go to sleep.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
AU in der HALLERTAU, Germany (AP) — Bright green vines snake upwards 20 feet (six meters) toward an umbrella of solar panels at Josef Wimmer’s farm in Bavaria.
He grows hops, used to make beer, and in recent years has also been generating electricity, with solar panels sprawled across 1.3 hectares (32 acres) of his land in the small hop-making town of Au in der Hallertau, an hour north of Munich in southern Germany.
Researchers look into making the best use of agricultural land, and farmers seek ways to shield their crops from blistering heat, keep in moisture and potentially increase yields.
In addition to shielding plants from solar stress, the shade could mean “water from precipitation lasts longer, leaving more in the soil” and that “the hops stay healthier and are less susceptible to diseases,” Gruber said.
In the U.K., where weather is also getting hotter and more variable, a team of researchers is looking at how to retrofit solar panels onto greenhouses or polytunnels — frames covered in plastic where crops grow underneath — with semi-transparent or transparent installations.
In East Africa, which has suffered from a long and punishing drought that scientists said was worsened by human-caused climate change, solar panels can also help keep moisture in plants and soil and reduce the amount of water needed, said Richard Randle-Boggis, a research associate at the University of Sheffield who’s developing two agrivoltaic systems in Kenya and Tanzania.
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