90: A Growth Industry? Talking about Agrivoltaics

[Music] hi everyone welcome to the still to be determined podcast this is the podcast that follows up on topics from the youtube channel undecided with matt farrell i as you may know already i'm not matt farrell i'm sean farrell i'm matt's older brother i'm a writer i'll be asking the questions with me is of course matt matt say hello hello we also have another guest with us today it's rob vanderweil rob say hi hi there nice to be here and uh people who are regular listeners or viewers are probably scratching their heads saying matt shawn it's usually just two bald men [Laughter] we're branching out we're trying to bring in all the bald men so and rob is here because he lended a hand in crafting the episode with matt so he has another perspective to add to the conversation and we're looking forward to talking to him about this today's episode we're going to be focusing on matt's most recent episode which was titled solar panels plus farming question mark always a question mark agrivoltaics explained and this was from october 5th 2021 and right off the bat i saw in the comments there was a lot of very positive response to this this is an idea that really seems to hit a an intersection of needs in a very unique way so the public response seems to be this is great but as you point out there is a lot of pressure pushing back the other direction from people who are concerned about things changing in their environment where they live in ways that might impact their lives and sadly governmental bureaucracy which just hasn't caught up to being able to bring this into communities in a way that makes sense and i'm wondering from both of you do you get a sense that those two things are actually one thing is there public pressure being put on politicians to keep things the way they are or is there a lack of movement by government that is allowing for concretized thinking to stay in place here's what you think rob well i think it depends on where you live um where i live uh our governments especially in the eu are actually very open to these kinds of concepts but they struggle to give this these concepts a proper place and it has all all to do with uh current regulations and current ways of land use and and the way that we even work with them um you might have seen in in the video that there is some regulation that the eu has that actually subsidizes land use for um agriculture right and if if you put something else on that land that subsidy um that that might go away so it's a thorny uh subject there at that point but i guess that in other places in the world that it's an entirely different ball game yeah i think here in the us it's mainly the free market which seems to rule everything here and there's a conservative bent that doesn't i don't think there's a cabal that's working against something like this i think it's just a slow-moving reality that we're watching unfold and there's not a lot of government support pushing it yet and do you think that it's a matter of public education mainly like getting getting this information out in in front of the public to allow people to see what would this look like like one of the things that you point out is i love that there's a parallel between the high-tech version of farming raspberries and the low-tech version both of them need to protect the plants one of them is just using plastic tarps the other one with solar panels it really doesn't change the product underneath it really it solves certain problems like you mentioned the workers have better shade the plants are better protected in case of larger storms that's a kind of image of what this kind of farming could look like that really isn't one that people would have if they were just told what would you think about putting solar panels on a farm right yeah i do think there's a public education angle to this that needs to happen i was just talking to rob before the call of uh i just saw a story about in france they're becoming more of a semi-arid climate region and it's been impacting the vineyards and the grapes they're growing and there was this story i saw about the agrivoltaics over a vineyard and how his grapes were you know plump and healthy compared to the non agraval take crops in the area and so it's like this has a huge impact on farming in different regions depending on where you live and i think there's just a i don't think the public knows about it i don't think a lot of maybe a lot of people in government don't know about this so it's like i do think that there's a an education that has to happen more broadly so people know that this is a thing that we should be looking into more and studying more closely because rob correct me if i'm wrong this is still early days as far as the studies this is very early days just just a few years on the road we are with this concept and it seems that for certain crops this is a fantastic solution and for other types of crops it's it's just not feasible it's it's um it's it's not a one size fits all solution it's a solution that can benefit certain kinds of agriculture more than others great but the the the company jungle which did did these projects and which we showcased uh with the raspberry farm they also are doing uh projects with strawberries and uh other kinds of berries especially fruits that are originally coming from forest areas and shade loving fruits but they need to have sun once in a while and they don't tend to grow very high and that makes it easy to to just make a canopy of solar panels above them and it it creates an interesting and quite stable environment for those plants so in that case it's a interesting use case but for other for other types of crop um it it might just not not be feasible to do it yeah i was struck by the some of the imagery in the video that was used was clearly you know you i know matt you go and get stock video from various sources to be able to fill in imagery and it doesn't necessarily mean when you show an image this is a case where this is going to take place or where it makes sense necessarily some of the crops that you showed things like corn there are going to be complications depending on the size of the crop if something is if we're talking about a farm that is let's say an orchard that is growing apples oranges that kind of crop this isn't necessarily going to be like well let's just put solar panels above those trees this is not going to be that kind of thing right there's there's like ron pointed out there's certain crops where not just from how much sun they need but also from the size shape and how we cultivate those crops that may not make sense but this is one of those things that we have to study this we have to do this more and try it out and see what works and what doesn't work and there's also i have a video coming up on transparent solar panels that's coming up and that technology could have a huge impact on this kind of thing as well because as as we highlighted in this video which was the the farmer they tried different types of solar panels and discovered this one panel blocks too much light they had to use a different one that let a little bit more light through if you have transparent solar panels you could like finely tune how much light is being allowed through and the type in the spectrum of light that's being allowed through so i have a feeling like in the next 10 20 years this is going to get refined to a point where it's going to be kind of astounding and some of these transparent solar panels are already being used on greenhouses so right there's there's a path forward that's really interesting here yeah and i was wondering about that as well is this heading toward more greenhouse agriculture than what would i considered outdoor agriculture i mean there's so many things like i've also talked about uh vertical farming in a different video it's like there seems like this there's a sweet spot of like you have transparent solar panels that are providing the power for vertical farming systems inside of a building and all this kind of stuff so there's different angles that could be taken here and different combinations of things that it's like lego blocks it's like but we're at the very early days of what all this means and how we can use these different things together in different ways all right the the company jungle they explained to me when i visited their uh their farm in babric that they chose for just regular solar panels because they those are the cheapest ones to get and it's already a little bit more expensive to create those constructions and they can't put as many solar panels in in the same area to to generate that amount of energy that they could if they were just solely solar panels but they're just cramming together two two technologies to see what's uh what's possible and of course we can optimize it but just with current simple already proven technology we can already do a lot of things and it can be sustainable and it it can be profitable as well and that was a real surprise for me to see that yeah and the the facility that we highlighted in the video you rob actually visited and the thing i find fascinating about that one is not only did they choose the panels that were obviously the cheapest but they didn't use motorized like movements and articulating panels because that one that probably also increases the cost makes it more complicated and the system they have is like the most rudimentary way you could do this and to test it and to test the feasibility i thought it was really fascinating they didn't go that approach because some of the other ones i've come across like this one in france over the vineyards they were using the motorized articulated panels to adjust exactly how much sun was being allowed through at different times of the day and while that works that increases the cost and you've mentioned that rob actually visited one of these locations so i want to kind of take a step backward now and visit the technical putting together of this video yeah rob how did you come into this project with matt was this something matt that you had a project that you were working on and rob kind of surfaced and said hey i know a little bit about that or i can be a contact how did the two of you start working on this collaboratively well what's funny is i had agrivoltaics on my backlog of ideas to hit at some point but rob reached out to me and wait why don't you tell the story rob well it's it's a a series of coincidences um um i'm i'm 54 years old and five years ago i decided to engage in a bachelor study on environmental sciences and one of the courses i did was on environmentally improved production and as a course assignment i needed to write an essay on something that is related to environmentally improved production so i chose the subject of agrovoltaics because i thought it might be an interesting subject to investigate so i did a lot of research i wrote my essay and um i thought about that oh that that that that's something that might actually uh fit uh on the channel from uh from undecided from mad so since i'm a patreon producer from the first hour already yeah i just reached out and said how do you feel like uh let's make a video together and um well that map was open to it so i wrote a script um it was twice as large as the actual video because i think there's a lot a lot to tell about this subject and it was very much fun working with matt to to to to to get this subject in in in 12 minutes and um even get some fun and humor in it which is not my forte but matt is very good at it and i i think he just created the meme just like me i particularly enjoyed finding out that cows hate solar panels that was my favorite yeah yeah that there was actually somebody who who commented on it in in in the video and he he he thought we were serious so i i responded okay that was a joke yeah i may have been a little too dead pan in my delivery of that joke [Music] so you went through a first draft and you pared it down to fit into a 12-minute video um and then you actually visit the site so do you want to talk a little bit about where in europe you live and how what was the ease of your being able to visit these locations well um you might have guessed that i'm from the netherlands it's a small country in the north west of europe and well this this particular farm is just a one-hour drive from my home so it was very easy to visit it and i reached out to the farm because i was interested for my essay in in having some taking some pictures and getting to to to get some first-hand experience there and they responded okay we get so many questions for visits but um in a in a few weeks time we have a a slot where we invite a lot of people who are interested you can come on that date and then we will give you a tour and that tour was was done not just by the farmer but also by the company who owns the solar panels who installed the solar panels and um it was it was very easy for me to get there so i i made some footage that also appeared in the video yeah those were the footage where hoon lever was not credited that was my footage and uh just just a couple of pictures and and some some short videos on uh on both sides of the uh of the farmer so the plastic part and the the solar part so it was actually quite um accessible for me because you know it's just one hour drive from where i live and i'm curious how long has the farm been using this tech you mentioned that you started doing the the bachelor degree was it five years ago you said oh yeah in 2017. that's right so you had to write this paper when well i i wrote it just this summer and the this farm was uh starting with this project in 2019 so it was actually quite fresh on the radar okay to put it that way yeah and i'm curious about the growing season there here in the us in the news this past uh summer the past few months there's been some things that have been percolating in the news about how various cities in the u.s are effectively being reclassified as far as what what zone what environmental zone they live in like i live in new york city we are now considered subtropical so that's a that's a pretty big change and that's an impact that's hitting farms across the country as as this video talks about in particular and matt and you have talked about already in this recording of the impact in changes in weather patterns in the netherlands what kinds of changes have you seen there are you seeing rising temperatures or longer raining seasons is there is there something that's going on there that this kind of technology might help mitigate yeah absolutely um we are in a moderate climate here um you know we we are close to the atlantic ocean and what we are facing here is that we get more hot summers we get milder winters but in those hot summers we also get um more extreme weather more extreme hail more extreme rain all those kinds of stuff so for instance the the the damage that this farmer usually has during summer storms uh was it in in in in the past decade was negligible once in a few years his uh his plastic canopies were destroyed but now it happens almost every year um and and those storms and those hills they intensify i don't know if you've seen it in the news but we are now also getting floods here and um the point with um with global warming is that the air becomes warmer and a warm air can retain more water than cold air so there's more water in the air and it gets released once in a while in in in ways that we haven't seen um for a long time so that's really a benefit for this this type of agriculture because they can have a growing season um in in summer and and an entire uh crop yield can be destroyed just by one store and that's something that uh um this this typical this solution uh helps to prevent yeah the other thing about it is i i love the symbiotic relationship you get between the crops and the panels yeah because the panels can reduce the temperature by one to two degrees celsius which can help the crops as the climate shifts and gets warmer and hotter and more humid and then it also helps the panels because the crops actually keep the panels cooler right which makes their operations more efficient so it's like this wonderful little symbiotic relationship that happens between the two yeah the the farmer told me that beneath the solar panels uh compared with the plastic canopies um there was a temperature difference of seven degrees celsius so i don't know wow that's in fahrenheit but that's actually a lot and um that was not just nice for the the workers and where to harvest all those raspberries have to be harvested manually yeah because it's a very delicate fruit um but um those plants they suffer um much more heat stress and they have to use way more water under the plastic canopies and those plastic canopies they need to be there to give shade to protect them from hill and rain and those kinds of to protect them from the elements but also those those plastic canopies they are translucent so they let the light through and they still get the light and with the solar panels the same thing happens but um it's a more sturdier uh canopy for them yeah that's really remarkable that the as i said there's one other aspect of this that always strikes me the more videos i do than this the one issue that i'm becoming more and more concerned with over time is accessibility to clean fresh water and it's becoming it's clear that we are going to have a major water problem in our future and so it's like being able to reduce how much water it takes to maintain our crops is essential and the crops that grow under panels like this they take less water and that's a key thing that we need to focus on yeah and they are also a very good irrigation [Music] drainage solution yeah because the water falls between the rows and not on the plants so those raspberries they are not grown in the soil they are grown in pots so the the the soil beneath them is not um how do you how do you say that um it it it it doesn't uh uh flow away when it rains uh uh very hard and those those crops still can work because they are actually not on the ground themselves they are just in pots there so it's controlling the water distribution which is beneficial to the plants as well that's it's a nice it's all of these things that are accidental benefits but once you recognize that they're there and you can take advantage of it it seems like it all starts to fit together beautifully and that for me raises the question of who is the the mastermind behind saying like what if we did this is this something that is a governmental research project or is this a university was this started by agriculture centers where maybe they were looking from the side of the farmer where did this all start um as far as i know uh this is a commercial uh enterprise so the company that we showcased is a company which is already doing a lot on sustainable energy sustainable technology and energy production and they found it interesting to see if this will also work in an agricultural setting and they have engaged with the wagoning university um that's a well renowned of a well-renowned university on agriculture and they they partnered together with the wagoning university to to have this studied scientifically as well but it's it's just a commercial enterprise trying to to to do this and see if they can make profit uh on the long term so there was no government incentive here it was not sponsored by any university it was just normal business right it's it's it's energy companies recognizing renewables like wind and solar there's a potential here and they can make more money and so it's right it's one of those aspects where this is where the free market comes in handy because it's like it's that extra little incentive like as soon as dollar signs are seen companies will jump in that direction and this goes back to something you've brought up in other videos matt that there sometimes could be more positive pressure to making this kind of change when it's not coming from the environmentalist side of it the environmentalist there's a certain amount of white noise that comes with that where people tune it out because oh those tree huggers but when it's an energy company and this and this ties in with something else you brought up in your video the question of ownership of the electronic of the electricity produced and of the panels themselves because of the layers of subsidies around the farms and if they have to be considered a structure and that would then undermine the subsidy farmers aren't going to want that want that unless the law is changed so in this case it's the panels are owned by an electric company and the electricity is owned by them and they would be paying the farmers for how would the farmers benefit from this financially if at all do you want to take that rob yeah in this particular case it was very easy because the farmer was able to sustain his business as usual um with less troubles in maintaining the structures he needs for the the growth of of his product which produced um so the farmer benefits from having these structures um his his employees benefit from it they they like to work there more than they like to work under the plastic canopies because it can get very hot there yeah um and um that that was one of the the key points uh if if if your your your produce is less than than than before why would you even bother thinking about it um and that's something that the fraunhofer institute also investigated and they said that okay farmers when they are owning the solar panels they they can have um two kinds of products uh on the same land and they can have energy and they can have crops and if for instance the crop yield is uh is not as good but they can compensate with the energy yield and and vice versa but um it's not uh 100 plus 100 percent so it usually boils down to 180 or 186 percent of what what could be done instead of just using the land just for crops or just for for solar [Music] what i found in my study is also that [Music] not all farming is economically viable anymore these days and for instance some farmers in the uk they have been they say okay we have this land uh it doesn't make sense to to grow anything here um let's put solar panels on it and uh okay we also have some chicken and some geese let's uh let's let them move around there and then we have um dual use of this land but that's not what we call agrovoltaics it's it's just um doing something extra with it but they just turned from agriculture to becoming an energy farmer right and that's something entirely different right and there's also it's not just utilities that are doing this like in the us one of the largest agrovoltaic test centers was a i think it's called uh what is it called jack's solar garden it's in boulder colorado and it's a community solar project so it's not owned by a major electric company it's a commun community solar so the farmer themselves is actually benefiting from the electricity generation in addition to the benefits they're getting from what they're growing so there's many ways that you can handle these projects but that's the other interesting part the the fraunhofer institute also says when these have these projects are most uh fruitful and successful if the energy which is generated can can be used locally in instead of just pushing it back back to the grid so those synergistic effects um these are the things that um make it interesting to to to explore these kinds of options yes and when it comes to energy production you want it to be especially fruitful on a raspberry farm [Laughter] this it's i think one of the the key things that stands out for me is is this is something that could be done globally this is this is a practice and when you talk about agrovoltaics it occurred to me that the key you you pointed out the rob the the uk example of change of land use does not make it agric voltaic it's when it's enmeshed with the actual agriculture process that seems to me like this could be done in a lot of different environments globally but it's going to have a lot of different types of bureaucratic and governmental regulation to jump through and it's not going to be an apples to apples comparison from somewhere in iowa to somewhere in europe it's going to be each of those cases is going to be very unique and i'm wondering are there some crops that stand out as raspberry the raspberry production uh the the the bush fruit um that is referenced in that like strawberries where you mentioned things that would have grown naturally in wooded areas would benefit from this is there another crop that just stands out as like this is clearly a crop that might benefit from this like how would this interact with maybe rice production is a rice paddy something where you could put these kinds of panels around a rice paddy and have a similar impact or does there happen to be a crop that it just oh this could never ever work we already mentioned things like tree orchards and stuff like that it's that's a difficult question but i've been thinking about that as well and there's one particular example which is very appealing to me i don't know if you know anything about cotton production cotton is extremely water hungry and i don't know if you've ever seen pictures of the lake um aryl somewhere in um i think it was uh somewhere on the uh on the asian continent um i think it was something between russia and china something like that i'm not sure exactly where it where it is but that lake has been drained of all water in just a few decades just for cotton production and now it's it's it's a a mere shimmer of what it was before if we were able to to do cotton production with 50 less water then that entire ecosystem could recover from what it has become so that was just one thing that i i thought might be interesting i i i just don't know enough about uh about those plans to to make that judgment um i'm not a biologist so yeah but that was one thing that i thought that might be actually quite interesting and there was some someone uh in in the comments on the on the video from nigeria who said i live in an area where water is a problem we have we have lots of land we we need to feed a lot of mouths um this would be an ideal solution for our growing economy and and they don't have existing grids that they need to adapt to they can just build the grids around these decentralized solutions and i think for those kinds of use cases and and those kinds of areas that would be an amazing opportunity yeah a mess and i don't think it's it's a solution for every region or every crop yeah i think i think that's that's uh nonsense and i think the i think another benefit from this is you're talking about as you mentioned before these are crops that require hands-on they require there to be farm workers that are going in and harvesting these things because in some cases the delicacy of of the the crop itself the the bushes that are growing these and so it occurs to me that if you managed to make a highly productive farm that would create more jobs for people who would need to be the workers going in and working with you know harvesting those things it seems to me like that's another benefit that could potentially come out of this a less productive farm doesn't need to hire as many farm hands and somebody who's growing close to the maximum yield that they can get out of something is going to need more people so that's another thing i think to consider definitely well this conversation has been terrific rob thank you so much for joining us yeah thank you rob and thank you for all the work on the video it was great fun to do it and i learned a lot about by doing it so and and there's one thing that i would like to add i've never had the opportunity to actually present a topic that i'm interested in or enthusiastic about to um a half a million people so i'm i'm i'm i'm amazed by that [Laughter] so that that's also something that i find here amazing in this uh in this cooperation that we did so it was a lot of fun and uh i learned a lot of yeah what are the next steps for you rob when are you finishing up your degree i hope to finish it to um the end of next year so i'm almost at the end of my of my tour but it's all done in my spare time because i'm just a uh i'm working in um in it consultancy for about 35 years so um it's really a labor of love it's a it's a it's a passion project for you absolutely absolutely that's fantastic yeah and i hope i can finish it on time yeah it's always challenging yes yeah life gets in the way a lot of times yes it does yeah but thank you again for joining us this has been fantastic you're welcome and uh so our listeners should let us know what they think oh absolutely our listeners should let us know what they think and like rob pointed out people in different regions have been reaching out and saying this would make sense here i'm very curious are any of our listeners in that group do you think that there's a place where this could fit into your local agricultural community let us know you can find the contact information in the podcast description or if you're on youtube you can just go down below the video and leave a comment there don't forget we do have a way to directly support the podcast you can visit still tbd.fm you'll see the

support the podcast link there or if you're watching us on youtube don't forget there's a membership button you can press and you can make a donation directly to us here just press the join button and join us be sure to give us a rating a review and share us with your friends all that really does help the podcast the podcast helps the channel the channel helps matthew and then matthew tries to convince the cows to stop hating so hard on sola thanks so much for listening everybody we'll talk to you next time [Music] you

2021-10-13 22:44

Other news