What did the western states agrivoltaics tour reveal about this alternative?

When UNR’s Northern Nye County Cooperative Extension Educator Misha Allen started researching the potential in agrivoltaics, the phrase “too good to be true” tempered her initial excitement. Could this system really provide an alternative to the traditional commercial solar model that has been drawing such ire in recent years? Could it be a solution for the state of Nevada as it continues to see a solar industry boom?

Could it even help ease the strain on agricultural producers as they wrangle with changing weather patterns and water limitations? Hesitant to take the data she’d found at face value, Allen set off on a tour to get an in-person look at what agrivoltaics systems are like.

Funded by a Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Grant, Allen visited several sites throughout Arizona, California, Oregon and Colorado, including agrivoltaic research, education and demonstration sites and a utility-scale agrivoltaics operation, each with its own twist on the combination of solar and agriculture. She also made a stop at a nonprofit solar panel manufacturer, an operation she felt might be of great interest to the communities of Nye County.

University of Arizona School Garden and Rooftop Project

The first stop along Allen’s agrivoltaics tour took her to Arizona, a location with desert conditions similar to the southern portion of Nye County and therefore, a good place to begin proving out potential. While there, she saw three different University of Arizona projects – the Manzo Elementary School solar garden and the university’s rooftop solar garden, both in Tucson, and its biosphere 2 research test plot in Oracle, Arizona.

“This is one of the sites that, when I saw it, I thought, oh, Pahrump will love this,” Allen remarked of the elementary school solar garden. “It’s a partnership between the school district, the community, the university and its cooperative extension. It incorporates elevated solar panels – they look a lot like carports – and underneath they grow a variety of native species, some that are culturally important species. And the power that they generate goes to offset the school’s utilities usage, so it helps to reduce their utility bills.”

As part of this project, university students conduct science education courses on site, teaching the youngsters how to collect research data. “They are equipped with iPads and help with research data that they get from the different sensors in the ground for moisture and other units measure. Then the university takes that research data that they’ve collected and uses it in what they publish,” Allen explained.

Another University of Arizona project that Allen toured was its rooftop research and demonstration garden, nestled atop the university’s natural resources building.

“A standard rooftop garden is not typically feasible down in an area like this, because it’s just so hot, there’s so much extreme sun and hot wind,” Allen detailed. “But, you put in elevated solar for that rooftop garden and suddenly it becomes viable.”

As with the elementary schoolsite, the rooftop garden is also being used for research on native plants and what she found most intriguing, all of it is done without the use of irrigation.

“I made them prove that to me,” Allen remarked. “I went and inspected and made sure of that… It uses water that runs off of the panels and then into the system… It’s really pretty amazing what we could potentially do with little to no water, just by simply adding shade.”

Jack’s Solar Garden

Though the projects in Arizona were intriguing, what really captured Allen’s imagination was the operation in Denver, Colorado known as Jack’s Solar Garden, home to the nonprofit Colorado Agrivoltaics Learning Center and the largest agrivoltaics research site in the country.

“This is my favorite,” Allen enthused as she displayed photographs of the site to the Pahrump Valley Times. “If you can only visit one agrivoltaic site, visit this one, it’s just inspirational. It’s four acres of panels that produce 1.2 megawatts of electricity and it includes both farming and livestock. Jack confirmed this system helps reduce water requirements and the farmers I was able to talk to, they appreciate the shade. That was actually one of their favorite things about working on this farm.”

While Jack’s Solar Garden includes solar panels to generate electricity, along with both produce cultivation and forage for livestock, Allen believes the thing that makes Jack’s Solar Garden truly special is its community-oriented aspect.

“He has just such an incredible social, community component and when I saw this, I felt that folks here would love it,” Allen said. “Jack provides all of this land under the panels as free leases and he has different universities that are conducting research there. He also has a partnership with the local food program, so the produce that they grow and harvest there goes to local tables.

“I love that he’s challenging what can be done,” Allen continued. “When you talk of a traditional solar development, there’s a ‘no, you can’t have people and the public underneath the panels,’ and I think it’s amazing that he’s really demonstrating that doesn’t have to be the case. All the time, people are under these panels – there are community events, weddings, live music, performances, art classes, exercise classes, they’re constantly busing in kids from different areas in Colorado to come in and spend time learning about agrivoltaic systems. It’s just the coolest place. He’s taken something that’s traditionally thought of as like off-limits and turned it into a gathering place.”

CSU SLO, Gold Tree Solar Farm

Another operation Allen saw first-hand was an 18.5 acre, 4.5 megawatt solar facility in San Luis Obispo, California, which is a research and education partnership between California State University and Gold Tree Solar Farm.

“They have done such a great job with graze management on this site and the power generated is estimated to save the university $17 million over a 20-year period. They grow forage under their panels and then they bring in their university-owned sheep herd to graze whenever they need some vegetation management,” Allen detailed. “They do not employ mowers, there are zero mowers within this program and I love that this looks very natural, they’ve retained some of the native plants and between the panels, they planted the forage. I also liked this site because it shows the ability to integrate grade, demonstrating that these sites do not have to be perfectly level, they do not have to use the blade-and-grade method.”

CHERP Solar Works

Of course, with the increase in solar farms, there is a corresponding increase in the need for the solar panels themselves and Allen included one such facility on her tour. However, this particular facility is not a for-profit operation, making it rather unique in the solar field.

“This is something that I thought would be great for Pahrump as well,” Allen stated. “CHERP Solar Works — this is a nonprofit made-in-the USA solar panel factory. They focus on job creation, economic stimulus and environmental justice. I really like that they had a strong workforce development program, a sub-component which had a second-chance type of program where a portion of their workers came through a previously incarcerated program.”

If anyone in Nye County is interested in the possibility of bringing an operation of this type to their communities, Allen noted that CHERP Solar Works offers mentoring on the subject. “They’ll provide guidance and help, they just suggest that that if this is something someone is interested in, they’ll need at least a 10,000-square-foot manufacturing space,” Allen noted.

At the conclusion of her tour, which included a variety of other sites, Allen said her excitement was not only rekindled, it was burning bright. With examples of different co-priority models to follow, Nevada doesn’t have to start from scratch. But there are still challenges to be faced in the pursuit of making agrivoltaics a mainstay in the Silver State.

Read about these challenges and how Nye County can leverage the solar alternative to its best advantage in the final installment in our three-part series on agrivoltaics, scheduled for the Wednesday, May 21 edition of the Times.

Contact reporter Robin Hebrock at rhebrock@pvtimes.com