In Colorado, a marriage of solar energy and farming
ksjd.org
ksjd.org
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/88816.pdf
Summary: This particular research project won’t quite break even purely on market-rate electricity sales, due to having 2x the installation cost of utility scale solar. If high value crops are successfully grown, there are scenarios where it could break even after including profits from crop sales.
Basically, heat energy is time shifting be it coolth or warmth. And heat and cool cost money.
Farmers in Oz are using droids to spray and weed, so battery charging could be another cost avoidance.
Or cold store for produce to sell at advantageous prices in winter. Basic arbitrage gains to permit the farm yield to maximise against predictable price variance.
Colorado has rich people. Grow microherbs out of season.
Farms often have a lot of less viable land for primary production. They could deploy flow batteries which have size costs, but massive mwh return and scale very nicely and last a very long time. Even just water pumping shifts energy into storage. Farms are giant machines for converting sunlight and water into produce anyway, this is a good fit: it's the same energy source, shifted.
Solar power + intermittent synthesis methods fits really well together for a less centralised economy.
I remember a science museum exhibit of a simple spark device. It was in an enclosed box to prevent gases from escaping, and the air inside was noticeably brown from all the accumulated NO2.
Something like that: https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/...
Commercially, a similar process was used for a while a century ago, the Birkeland-Eyde process. It passed air through an arc. It was phased out because it wasn't competitive with the HB process using hydrogen from fossil fuels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland%E2%80%93Eyde_process
Could potentially reuse elevated water tanks? Guess the cost of the pumps might make the savings on the structure very small, and no idea if the amount of energy would be significant to a farm.
I don't think a farm needs that. Better to pump the water to a headstock keeping cow troughs full, or for crop circles.
Not a farmer or an engineer. Happy to be corrected.
I'm assuming that each solar panel is 2 by 1 meter, which would mean that it produces about 400 watts (20% efficiency at 1000 watts per sq meter coming from the sun). You can use this calculator to estimate how power you can produce at the given location for a given system size in kilowatts: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php
The system above is 1310400 watts or ~1,310 kW, which according to the calculator produces about 2 million kWh/year.
If he makes $20,000 that would mean that he gets paid only $0.01 per kW of power. And even if my assumption above about the size of each individual panel is off by a factor of 2 and they are only 1 sq meter in size (which I think they are not because the article states that the solar farm can power about 300 average households, which require the annual power output to be more than what I estimated above) that would make $0.02 per kW of power. How is it possible that the amount earned per kW is so low when the utility companies in Colorado charge about $0.14 per kW (effective rate)? And who is actually the customer here and where is the money coming from? I'm just curious to learn more.
$0.02/kW does seem a bit low. Looking at my bill, it looks like I got paid ~$0.03/kW last month in California where my retail price is $0.17/kW off-peak. Looking at the current price charts for electricity, they're also currently ~$0.03/kW, so the numbers do check out since we're supposed to be paid the current wholesale price.
Electricity just doesn't cost all that much to generate, most of the cost comes from transmission and storage.
As far as I’m aware, commercial / industrial installations, and solar farms, get paid less per kWh.
Quick edit to fix a brain-fart, I doubt anyone read this prior anyways.
It means I'll never have a bill, and if I get too much credit (negative bill), I'll just get a used electric car. I'm not unhappy with that situation.
... from renewable resources.
Fossil energy can cost quite a bit to generate, but of course it comes with storage built in.
edit: I might be wrong on this, reading this on their site they have some significant donors. "With additional funding from the Walton Family Foundation, the Cielo Foundation, and donations from a myriad of individual donors and businesses in 2023"
I don't know either; what are the risks?
For example, is that 20k gross revenue (check from utility) or net revenue (after deducting financing costs?) Is he getting free grid power at night as well? Is he using power on the farm itself?
It's a pity the article didn't go down this road a bit, but since it didn't, I guess the 20k number (described as an "estimate") is really just a measure of scale.
Indeed, one gets the impression that the finances part is possibly not the main focus of the farmer (much less the article.) The farming land is being used by non-profits and research groups, he's not actually farming the land himself.
But it sounds like this is just a small part of his farm (4 acres), so perhaps more of a pilot project and finding out how to best use the land, before rolling out on a bigger scale.
As others have mentioned the off peak daytime wholesale rate for electricity is often just a few cents per kWh. Let's say 3-4c/kWh.
The other few cents above your calculated rate of 1c/kWh likely go to pay off the principle and interest on the financing for the system, plus any profit for the company maintaining and servicing the system. If the farm owner paid for the capital costs and maintenance directly themselves, their share of the returns would probably be higher.
But they would probably prefer to focus on farming crops.
Most farmers (even in developed countries) are cash poor and most farmers are deep in debt.
The ones that aren’t can quickly become so given a little bad luck. Farms have to hedge against bad yields to protect against undesirable weather.
Family farms only make financial sense if there is a lot of free labor (slavery, indentured servants, or unpaid labor of children).
Reminded me of Charge Robotics' mission: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics
The area has many FiFo (Fly In Fly Out) mine site workers and farmers all of whom are capable of fixing panels to roofs and racking batteries .. the wiring and looms are either "done by a mate" or done from a sketch on the back of envelope, or reading the sheet of instructions that come with an order.
The important part, safety, comes at the end when one of the few working town electricians (or an "off duty" mine electrician) checks the wiring for safety and compliance and signs off on the work for a fee.
Like many things the total cost is sweat equity + mail order prices + professional inspection and sign off (for insurance and peace of mind).
And then California wonders why construction is sooooo expensive.
I got a good lump sum saved up by the end of university and I was ticketed with experience on bobcats, haulpaks, loaders, mini-cranes, heavy rigid trucks, etc. along with trades assistant experience working for electricians, gas fitters, fitter and turners, riggers, plumbers, radio technicians, belt splicers, etc.
That meant that while I wasn't a qualified electrician I did know how and what they did and had done most of the work myself under supervision.
I veered into Engineering (Trad.) then Mathematics, then Geophysics .. but I was well set up to go into trades had I wanted to .. more importantly I could do a full gas fitting layout for a glass blowing studio (isolation valves, pressure valves, furnace, annealing oven, glory hole, leakproof joins, etc) just not legally connect it .. for insurance and peace of mind I get an actual working tradie with insurance to inspect and signoff on the connection to a large rented LPG tank.
It's a very Weddings, Parties, Anything * kind of state (ie. many people here are comfortable taking on many types of work; typical for large area low population places).
* Any song you want
Playing requests now on the bandstand
El Clash combo
Paid fifteen dollars a day
Weddings, parties, anything
And Bongo Jazz a specialityAs the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
Looks like that report is a year old, but I doubt the installation costs have really gone down much since then. (Panel prices come down, but labor costs, etc don't.)
Providing the infrastructure and reliability of the grid is very expensive, so there is a huge difference between the wholesale costs and retail rates for delivered electricity. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar.
Thats more or less what I expected.
So yes, your locality matters. As does your current consumption, cost of electricity, and so on.
Prices are also falling quite a bit as time passes.
Labor costs either track or exceed inflation, and net metering arrangements get less lucrative as the grid becomes more solar heavy, like what happened in California last year.
But relying on net metering for ROI is a pre-2024 thing. Batteries are getting so cheap.
The same thing will happen with grid-connected residential solar + batteries. Rates will be changed to be based on capacity rather than consumption. There might, for example, be a charge based on your maximum usage during a period rather than total usage.
Grid electricity incurs two basic costs. Generation and Distribution. Traditionally electricity was charged purely on consumption (ie Generation). This made sense when everyone bought all their electricity.
It makes less sense when I benefit from being connected all the time, but only actually purchase electricity when my batteries run flat.
It's like being able to make endless backups for free, but only paying to restore.
As with many other things I makes sense to align billing to cost to value. Thus the cost of "connectedness to the grid" needs to separate from the cost of "electricity consumed".
Nitrogen fixation is energy-intensive, so something has to provide energy. Additionally, nitrogen fixation has to happen in anaerobic conditions, oxygen kills the enzymes responsible for nitrogen fixation. In legumes, the oxygen is carried away by hemoglobin (the same one used in "artificial meat"), but engineering these conditions for free-living bacteria is likely going to be problematic.
I'm personally hoping for a catalyst that can work in mild conditions.
Only because geoengineering is off the table. If you take climate change seriously and want to avoid it, solar radiation management is pretty much the last remaining option for prevention. Here’s a nice article for an overview: https://climate.benjames.io/someone-is-going-to-dim-the-sun/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
The use of mass timber for construction is a great way to make sustainable forestry sequester carbon for the long term.
https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/66069
Cloud seeding via containerships is another low cost, high impact method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
But if we really want the ability to pause climate change, we need to do some more research on Stratospheric Aerosol Injection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Stratospheric Injection of Calcium carbonate is a very promising approach that would have the benefit of reducing ocean acidification.
its simpler, but also, if its like algal blooms, easy to fuckup and cause complete decimation of plantlife in the area.
I don't know of any research on the danger of algal blooms in deep sea.
But monitoring seems critical no matter what.
Planting trees is good thing to do but not even getting close to a solution.
for carbon, no.
For stopping heat being absorbed by the earth, yes. Some of the anti-desertification work being done in africa has yielded something like an average 8 degree c drop in temperature.
Yet, I don't see much of it being done, at least in my countries (Poland and Italy).
However, cutting down tress and then replanting it do not capture a lot of carbon. Much of it either get burned or decompose into methane. Planting trees without protecting it from being cut down is not going to do much to compensate excess greenhouse gases that get created from burning fossil fuels.
At best it will make the planet prettier and at worst it will simply be feelgood.
Technology is stopping it, though! The continued exponential growth of solar (~30% CAGR) suggests that we could get to 1% of the earth’s surface in solar in about 20-30 years. That would be more than all current sources of energy.
I do wonder why solar panels in fields aren't more common, as opposed to rooftop solar. It seems like such a burden doing all those one-off jobs aren't worth it compared to the ease of just putting more up in an easy to access location on the ground. Especially since most people aren't set up so they can go off grid with their panels in case the grid goes down.
In fact, Texas had a 350 megawatt install taken out by a hail storm earlier this year. It made the rounds in the news and even here on HN if memory serves. That's still not even close to the big projects though. Vista Sands in Wisconsin has a 1.3 gigawatt install planned that will cover nearly ten thousand acres.
The only reason residential rooftop solar became the industry it did was the massive subsidies handed out to consumers to make it financially viable. Without that, larger field installs and off-grid setups would be the bulk of what you hear about in most of the country.
Savings per Watt can be a lot larger for residential though, as you save the all-in price of electricity (electricity price + transport fees + other fees + taxes) while solar farms only earn the wholesale price.
Firstly, is saving a cost (which you would pay with after-tax money.) So as a saving, not income, the return is tax free.
Secondly homes buy electricity at retail rates (thus rooftop is effectively earning at retail rates) whereas commercial sells at wholesale rates, which is likely a small multiple. (And of course, being commercial, that income is taxed.)
Yes, in high-cost places (like the US) subsidies were necessary to foster the industry and get enough demand to get prices down. In other places the math makes sense without subsidies.
Incidentally it's a LOT easier to do 1000 rooftop installs than 1 solar farm. There's no planning, utility agreements, large scale financing etc. You just install and move on. A small team (4 people) can easily do 2 houses a week. With only one qualified electrician needed.
That's 40km² btw
Also, just under 16 square miles. 160,000 tennis courts or 9,000 basketball courts.
I suppose people might also be afraid of theft or vandalism if the panels are accessible to random passers-by without a ladder.
Starting at 11,233 small scale out of 26,482 in 2014, ~42.5%, versus 73,406 out of 236,090 in 2023, ~31% [1].
So, despite a ~6.5x increase in small scale generation over 10 years, ~19% compounded annual growth, utility scale generation increased by ~10.66x, ~24% compounded annual growth.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01...
But more importantly, it can demonstrate to those who argue that solar farms are taking up fertile soil that there are alternative ways to implement solar energy without using valuable farmland.
Aesthetics over economics.
To be convinced I would need to hear the benefits from many more (commercial ) farmers. The quoted farm is a hobby farm, small scale farm.
What are the risks in such installations ?
Planting for forage is much harder than growing a field for hay/soy/beet/other feed crop.
obviously you can't use normal combines to harvest between the rows, so you need different, custom, equipment to harvest at scale.
so how much did he have to get a loan for to pay for 3.2k solar panels + install + make the land suitable for em?
Seems like that will take a long time to recoup (if ever).
I'd like to hear more about this. Do you need specialized tractors, harvesters, etc to fit under the panels?
From ChatGPT:
<chatGPT>
Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
Real-World Context (I didn't ask ChatGPT this question, it provided without asking!): (1) The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. (2) The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
</chatGPT>
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
So seeing the actual reality over a longer timeframe of solar farms, and wind turbines (those huge blades made of not friendly chemicals last only 10 years, do you know how they are disposed of?), have greatly reduced any excitement I had for solar/wind as environmentally friendly longer term sustainable solutions. I guess it's sort of good to diversify but they most definitely aren't "earth friendly" as advertised. Fusion seem our only real hope.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-t... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
For now we have to be realistic, but hopeful that some better use than landfills can be found and be viable.
The most likely explanation is that this is a lie.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride_photovoltaic... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystalline_silicon
They're not merely similar to a photodiode, but using giant photodiodes as batteries is literally the idea.
There are some versions based on toxic organic chemicals in place of toxic inorganic elements, few and far between, and I guess the technology will eventually move onto engineered nanoparticles later in this century after they've cracked fusion, but that hasn't happened yet.