Swedish vitality agency Vattenfall has been given a allow to construct a challenge in the Netherlands that plans to combine solar power with farming, in the newest instance of how renewables and agriculture can doubtlessly dovetail with each other.
In an announcement earlier this week Annemarie Schouten, Vattenfall’s head of solar growth for the Netherlands, defined how the challenge would “alternate rows of panels with strips where various crops are grown for organic farming.”
The pilot, often called Symbizon, is slated to final 4 years and be situated in Almere, to the east of Amsterdam. Funding has come from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.
Schouten stated that double-sided solar panels can be used in order to guarantee “sufficient light yield.” Such a setup would additionally allow the panels to “catch the reflected light from the soil, the crops and the adjacent rows and use it to produce solar energy.”
While plans have taken a step ahead, Vattenfall has but to affirm if the challenge will truly progress. A choice on that is anticipated by the top of 2021. If it does get the inexperienced gentle, building work will begin in 2022.
A variety of stakeholders are set to be concerned if the scheme is absolutely realized. These embrace impartial analysis group TNO, which might develop a “solar tracking algorithm” to observe vitality and crop yields, amongst different issues.
The thought of deploying solar panels on farmland has been round for a few years. One strand of that is referred to as agrivoltaics, which additionally goes by the identify of agrophotovoltaics.
According to Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, agrivoltaics “enables the dual use of land for harvesting agriculture and solar energy.”
The thought behind the idea traces its roots again to the early Nineteen Eighties and is attributed to Adolf Goetzberger, founding father of Fraunhofer ISE, and his colleague Armin Zastrow.
According to the Institute, agrivoltaic installations grew from round 5 megawatts in 2012 to roughly 2.9 gigawatts in 2018.
Solar panels can be used to assist these working in agriculture with their day-to-day actions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, as an illustration, has famous that “solar technologies are becoming a viable option for both large and small-scale farmers.”
In 2020, CNBC’s “Sustainable Energy” reported on how one Zimbabwe based mostly farmer, Cheneso Ndlovu, was using solar tech to help her grow produce.
“We do gardening using a solar powered borehole for watering,” she stated.
“We planted tomatoes on a small patch we were watering and we realized it was thriving, so we decided to grow other vegetables,” she added. “We use the water for other domestic needs like washing.”
TNO