By Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco
Thousands of wildflowers are blooming under rows of solar panels in eastern Illinois. Milkweeds, black-eyed Susans and native prairie grasses catch the sunlight that streams past solar panels on one end of this 54-acre property near Champaign.
“Obviously, this setting is not perfect for the farming system,” D.K. Lee, a professor of crop sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said about the narrow space between solar panel arrays.
But this experimental station called Solar Farm 2.0 could help UIUC scientists determine whether the marriage between Midwestern agriculture and solar power will be a happy one. Researchers are piloting how crops such as grains and soybeans used primarily to feed livestock grow with solar panels obstructing their full view of the sun. The counterintuitive practice is called agrivoltaics, a nascent industry that partners solar developers looking for large plots of land and farmers looking to make additional income.
That’s why two parallel experiments are underway here to find out what can grow and thrive under solar panels. To hit the ambitious clean energy targets set by state and federal officials, solar power will have to increase close to seven times over current capacity by 2035. That will mean millions of acres devoted to solar power — many of which could be in America’s farmlands. But to make sure that agricultural communities aren’t left behind by the clean energy transition, scientists want to know what it will take for life to persist beneath solar panels — potentially a first step for farmers and solar power to co-exist.
“We can only farm about 70% of the land here,” said Bruce E. Branham, professor of horticulture at UIUC. “So we’ve got 30% of the land that would be farmed in full sun that is just vacant.”
But in just two years and despite physical constraints, initial findings suggest that the sorghum grain could be a promising crop to grow alongside solar panels. Branham said that so far it appears that combining sorghum with solar panels has resulted in a 59% increase in efficiency. And wildlife, including birds and bees, are flocking to the improved habitat. It’s a good start, but there’s still ways to go before solar farms like these are generating serious energy.
“This is a 54-acre site, and we’re getting 12 megawatts,” Banham said. “A lot of power plants are much, much greater than that.”
In all, Solar Farm 2.0 produces close to 1% of the generating power of the Clinton Power Station, a nuclear power plant just a 45 minute drive east. But for Banham and others, this presents an opportunity to combine Midwestern row crops with solar power to generate enough energy to compete with fossil fuels and other clean energy alternatives.
Cropland typically benefits from unobstructed sunshine and is often located near a grid connection, according to Madhu Khanna, the director of the Institute for sustainability, energy and environment at UIUC. All that makes it ideal for solar power, also there’s also a lot of cropland in the United States — over 300 million acres as of 2020.
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