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.
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.
Center pivot irrigation is hardly universal - its main use is in low / sparse rainfall areas in order to deplete the finite resource of the water table. There are already strong signs a number of significant basins are in terminal decline from agricultural use.
There are no universal one setup suits all solutions here.
One advantage of large scale agrisolar projects (trialled since at least 2020) is better moisture retention through shade of increased condensation drip.
It's a balancing act - you appear to have a position hard up one end of a see saw.
Hmm, well we got the [flagged][dead] for AI touchups sorted at least.
FWiW I'm in a rural agricultural district with broad acre grains processed by large machinery, shaded acres of fruit trees and other varieties, solar farms, and more.
There's no issue here with having stock feed growing under solar panels, sheep and goats clean up there pretty well and we have many types of small vehicle, manned and unmanned, that can remote inspect, spray, sow, trim as necessary.
> Solar panels on cars are fascinating too, and the cost-benefit still isn’t there.
I'd disagree - solar panels on cars are not going to fully charge them by any means, here in Australia we have been running a long distance solar only "car" race for many years now and it's a game for uncomfortable transport of single humans in extremely lightweight streamlined custom one-offs (so far).
However, solar panels on cars are great for remote power and can serve to juice up an electric vehicle enough to get back to somewhere in the event of low charge, no stations, and need (less so in high population / reasonable density areas with good phone coverage)
Where I grew up, and what it seems like the article points to as a goal, a large farm is typically 100+ acres. They are very often of center-pivot design, and are harvested by combines pushing 15 feet tall (~4-5 meters). And typically require grain carts running alongside them. Nobody I know who owns and operates one of these farms would put panels over it and would ask "why not an empty plot somewhere else?"
And that question is my entire argument, in two parts:
One: The physics of an installation. On a pivot design, the panels have to sit high above everything on a structure that spans the field. And that's either a materials science problem - with spans that would need to be massive, or an engineering problem with spans that need to move with the irrigation system. Both are not easy. And even forgoing center-pivots, fields that are harvested by large equipment would need to install panels high enough up to easily clear equipment (at least 6 meters in my estimate).
Two: Cost. Cost scales with complexity, for installation, and maintenance. There are logistical costs of having dual-purpose land. You can't do PV installations or maintenance during planting and harvesting seasons. So if a row has technical issues at the wrong time, it needs to coordinate scheduling with the crop it is over. Dust maintenance would also be a major issue from the amount that is kicked up during harvest season. Completely ignoring the engineering cost and difficulty of a center-pivot field, a raised installation is much more expensive and technically demanding than a ground-based one. All of the PVs need to be raised by some sort of crane and placed, and crew need to use boom trucks to fasten and connect the panels and cables.
To reiterate my original point, unless land is a constraint, I don't see a strong case for stacking solar over crops. Fruit crops might be a better use case in your region specifically, and an argument could be made, but with the numbers the article was suggesting, that would make up a very small percentage of overall crops required to make numbers work.
On solar in cars, I think we are in agreement. I believe roof solar on a house that charges an electric car beats solar on the car for just about everyone, and only in some rare situations, like a cross-desert competition, or for those who really want to be able to drive completely on solar for long distances, does it make sense. Which is analogous to my point about agri-solar installations.
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.
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
TL;DR - found the term "solarpunk" interesting but dismayed by how fantasy-like it was. i feel like we have the means to live in a solarpunk society rn. Gathering climate tech innovations and cool aesthetics & culture in one place. that's the goal, at least.
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
No sure if the reference to catch-22 was meant to be specific but this is one of my fave quotes from the book:
> His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.
That's a great plan... except that we're degrading the soil in the process, significantly reducing it's long-term growing capacity to maximize short-term profits.
I'm all about sound long-term land management and subsidized capacity. The current system is not that.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
TA is an amazing game. Forged Alliance is a better game because it was made 10 years later. The open source FAF project to mod it and keep it alive can only go so far without engine replacement. I’m hoping we can see something like this for Forged Alliance. BAR is a TA clone, missing out on the structural improvements from Forged Alliance
For me the 3.5 teirs of units in Supcom feels better then the TA style. The simple start with teir 1, the expantion of options with teir 2, sledge hammer of teir 3, ending with the experimentals. TA and clones felt like simple straight to end game.
I think it's a reasonable point to make. Writing things down is a part of "thought" for many, including those who keep diaries/journals. If you write in a private journal you do so with the expectation that is not shared, and that wouldn't seem to break this law (with my naive reading).
I mean, at this point it's pretty well known that all tech services will be hacked by fable, anthropic themselves promised it, so writing your journal in google docs or claude or a txt document on your laptop or such is the same as releasing it publicly yeah?
If it were written on paper, and only in a room with no phones or cameras so fable couldn't hack it, then I think you wouldn't be sharing it.
I think the zero-risk approach common nowadays is insanely corrosive to democracy and freedom. If a million people fantasise about shooting the sheriff, and one ever goes on to do it, I don't believe avoiding it warrants creating an apparatus of mass surveillance. After all, if people were really serious about zero murder, the only practical solution would be to lock up everyone. Some (most?) tradeoffs have exponential costs at the limit and we/lawmakers should recognise that.
> If a million people fantasise about shooting the sheriff
I think it’s fair to pre-identify folks who fantasise about shooting anyone. It’s a small fraction of the population that looks into logistics versus making offhand comments.
I don't have any number on murder, but rape is a fantasy shared by 55% of Americans, women more than men, many/most of whom necessarily thinking about its logistics in at least some detail without ever doing anything to anyone non-consenting. On murder, the popularity of true crime media means many people enjoy thinking about motives and logistics. I don't think it's a small fraction.
PHEV are going away across the industry and solidifying into pure EV or classical hybrid. the market for those who will pay more for the PHEV prefers EV
if you write a prompt, and see the code and edit it by writing another prompt, you the human wrote that code. you may not have typed the keyboard for each character in the code. but the llm did not write it all for you. this is the same as a pair programmer, 2 authors
People dont seem to realize prompt to code is just another interface. Is the human review part that we should care about, did this code get reviewed and reiterated on? Is it fully AI generated and reviewed?
Those are the important tasks.
Whoever feels like a better programmer because they write all the terraform files by hand and not use an llm, dislike.
flock isn’t going away. this feels like the 1990s web that grew into a more regulated system with safeguards. flock or a (more advanced) replacement are going to be part of policing in the us forever
Once upon a time, one of the largest companies of the USA, Bell Labratories, was declared an illegal monopoly and eradicated.
In the correct political environment, entire companies can be dismantled with one executive action. Not our current political environment, but in the 1980s one it could happen.
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Oh, also, companies were literally an act of Congress when this country started. We can change the rules back and dismantle any company that refuses to work for the benefit of this country.
Remember that one time when a large global company (The Dutch East India company) got a tax break from the king, and it angered the population so much that we took a bunch of tea (a symbol of the Dutch East India Company) and threw it into the Boston Harbor?
Ahhhhh yeah. I remember. Oh right, we teach that situation a bit differently today don't we? People probably don't remember exactly how easy it used to be or how this country used to treat companies that betrayed our values.
We can go back. But lets start with understanding that we _can_ go back. Step 2 is electing people who will agree with this political message.
If we don't like a technology we can easily get rid of it in practice.
And by that, I mean that Leaded Gasoline is infeasible to be profitable anymore. So no gas station serves it any more.
And please, it will be easier to regulate all public camera companies than to regulate all independent gas stations. So don't give me any crap about difficulties. Especially when said companies are all individually being purchased by government services like police.
not the good jobs. not the jobs that were comparing to mistral level equivalents in the US. i haven’t had metered PTO since 2015 and everyone i know is the same
Well, I take about 2 month off every year. Not all at once, but a week here, week there. No issues.
I also worked in company where this guy was on PTO 6 months a year, but he kept working during his PTO, just on his own schedule. However, at the same company, I recall one coworker had to cancel his flight and company booked him another flight because "we need you to finish this pls". His manager basically beg him to stay one day.
However, in another company, I had issues taking a few days off because "your teammate been here for 2 years didn't a single day off" (I gave them my notice the same day)
So to answer your question from my experience: coin toss and you won't know it until you signed with them. I'd rather take 5 weeks for sure and no calls/emails/texts after the work day.
I'd say the Paris job provides noticeably greater day-to-day life vs Los Angeles with the same before tax salary.
unlimited does not mean unlimited because then you would take 365 days off each year. it means you don’t accrue or worry about a balance. i work at an “unlimited” company i see most engineers taking 25-30 days of PTO. it’s a bell curve and there’s outliers on either side but 4-5 weeks/year is quite reasonable
> it means you don’t accrue or worry about a balance
The flip side of this, is that you don't have a visible balance, so you have to calibrate what is an "acceptable" number of vacation days against what your coworkers take, and in competitive environments, that necessarily tends towards zero.
Plus, when you leave/are fired, the company doesn't have to payout a vacation balance, so they laugh all the way to the bank
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...
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