Summary: This particular research project won’t quite break even purely on market-rate electricity sales, due to having 2x the installation cost of utility scale solar. If high value crops are successfully grown, there are scenarios where it could break even after including profits from crop sales.
Yeah - that’s what I thought. The original article sounds like motivated reasoning - solar farms don’t look like “green technology” so there is that great need to make them more palatable and project like this cater to that need instead of economic calculation.
If he did any energy consuming processes to aide farming such as drying wheat to harden it and increase market price, or had greenhouses which needed heating, or a dairy adjunct which needed cooling, then his rate of return as cost avoidance and improved profit for the Ag. side could be a lot bigger than the 1c/kW to sell power back.
Basically, heat energy is time shifting be it coolth or warmth. And heat and cool cost money.
Farmers in Oz are using droids to spray and weed, so battery charging could be another cost avoidance.
Or cold store for produce to sell at advantageous prices in winter. Basic arbitrage gains to permit the farm yield to maximise against predictable price variance.
Colorado has rich people. Grow microherbs out of season.
Farms often have a lot of less viable land for primary production. They could deploy flow batteries which have size costs, but massive mwh return and scale very nicely and last a very long time. Even just water pumping shifts energy into storage. Farms are giant machines for converting sunlight and water into produce anyway, this is a good fit: it's the same energy source, shifted.
It also fits well with some ideas from Denmark to find new catalysts to allow intermittent processes to make ammonia from solar power, with the idea that the ammonia when mixed with water can be used as fertiliser.
Solar power + intermittent synthesis methods fits really well together for a less centralised economy.
The simplest way to make nitrogen fertilizer from excess electrical power is by electric discharge to make NOx.
I remember a science museum exhibit of a simple spark device. It was in an enclosed box to prevent gases from escaping, and the air inside was noticeably brown from all the accumulated NO2.
Commercially, a similar process was used for a while a century ago, the Birkeland-Eyde process. It passed air through an arc. It was phased out because it wasn't competitive with the HB process using hydrogen from fossil fuels.
> Even just water pumping shifts energy into storage
Could potentially reuse elevated water tanks? Guess the cost of the pumps might make the savings on the structure very small, and no idea if the amount of energy would be significant to a farm.
As i understand it mostly the best use of pumped water is gravity fed watering for stock, or crops. Pumped hydro is great at dam size scale but the losses exceed battery. What it's got is the sheer gwh scale - snowy 2.0 will run for days and days riding out a dunkelflaut with a lot of gw fed out. 2.2 gw and 150 gwh usable. (They claim more but it's disputed)
I don't think a farm needs that. Better to pump the water to a headstock keeping cow troughs full, or for crop circles.
Not a farmer or an engineer. Happy to be corrected.
This is a cool concept and I love the idea but the math on the money earned from the 3276 solar panel doesn't add up. The article says the farm owner makes about $20,000 a year from the solar farm.
I'm assuming that each solar panel is 2 by 1 meter, which would mean that it produces about 400 watts (20% efficiency at 1000 watts per sq meter coming from the sun). You can use this calculator to estimate how power you can produce at the given location for a given system size in kilowatts:
https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php
The system above is 1310400 watts or ~1,310 kW, which according to the calculator produces about 2 million kWh/year.
If he makes $20,000 that would mean that he gets paid only $0.01 per kW of power. And even if my assumption above about the size of each individual panel is off by a factor of 2 and they are only 1 sq meter in size (which I think they are not because the article states that the solar farm can power about 300 average households, which require the annual power output to be more than what I estimated above) that would make $0.02 per kW of power. How is it possible that the amount earned per kW is so low when the utility companies in Colorado charge about $0.14 per kW (effective rate)? And who is actually the customer here and where is the money coming from? I'm just curious to learn more.
~400W/panel @ 20% efficiency is pretty much spot on for my home rooftop solar panel specs, so your math checks out there.
$0.02/kW does seem a bit low. Looking at my bill, it looks like I got paid ~$0.03/kW last month in California where my retail price is $0.17/kW off-peak. Looking at the current price charts for electricity, they're also currently ~$0.03/kW, so the numbers do check out since we're supposed to be paid the current wholesale price.
Electricity just doesn't cost all that much to generate, most of the cost comes from transmission and storage.
Thanks for sharing this! That was the exact info I was looking for, didn't know the wholesale price was so low. But it does make sense that transmission and storage is what is inflating the retail price.
Here in Tasmania we can get between 0.08935 to 0.10 antipodean dineros per kWh for residential rooftop solar, with peak usage at around 0.35 and off-peak around the 0.17 antipodean diners per kWh. Max 10kW feed-in for residential, but you can have more installed to cover your own usage.
As far as I’m aware, commercial / industrial installations, and solar farms, get paid less per kWh.
Quick edit to fix a brain-fart, I doubt anyone read this prior anyways.
Here in BC Canada we don't get paid anything for feed-in, but we do get credit on our bill - so 1 kWh in during the day means I can use 1kWh at night without paying anything.
We have 6.8kW on the roof, and it looks like over 12 months it will cover our needs.
It means I'll never have a bill, and if I get too much credit (negative bill), I'll just get a used electric car. I'm not unhappy with that situation.
It’s not entirely different here, the feed-in is applied as a credit to your account. I suppose they’d have to pay out if pushed, I’m yet to know anyone who has received actual money though. I guess I’m about to find out, if my retailer ever fixes the issue with their billing system that’s preventing any of my solar data showing correctly / at all.
I have heard from a couple farmers that some venture energy corporation will pay a yearly fee to put panels on the farmland, which is probably the 20k/year he gets paid from a corporation like that. I doubt he's selling the power directly, nor was able to invest money for all those panels. He just get's a check every month. He also doesn't know the risks he's taking allowing that.
edit: I might be wrong on this, reading this on their site they have some significant donors.
"With additional funding from the Walton Family Foundation, the Cielo Foundation, and donations from a myriad of individual donors and businesses in 2023"
I think the 20k number is something of a throw-away, and not really explained.
For example, is that 20k gross revenue (check from utility) or net revenue (after deducting financing costs?) Is he getting free grid power at night as well? Is he using power on the farm itself?
It's a pity the article didn't go down this road a bit, but since it didn't, I guess the 20k number (described as an "estimate") is really just a measure of scale.
Indeed, one gets the impression that the finances part is possibly not the main focus of the farmer (much less the article.) The farming land is being used by non-profits and research groups, he's not actually farming the land himself.
But it sounds like this is just a small part of his farm (4 acres), so perhaps more of a pilot project and finding out how to best use the land, before rolling out on a bigger scale.
> If he makes $20,000 that would mean that he gets paid only $0.01 per kW of power. And even if my assumption above about the size of each
As others have mentioned the off peak daytime wholesale rate for electricity is often just a few cents per kWh. Let's say 3-4c/kWh.
The other few cents above your calculated rate of 1c/kWh likely go to pay off the principle and interest on the financing for the system, plus any profit for the company maintaining and servicing the system. If the farm owner paid for the capital costs and maintenance directly themselves, their share of the returns would probably be higher.
But they would probably prefer to focus on farming crops.
That isn't an issue with farming. It's the competitive pressures of the electricity market in the US. Most of the US is currently powered by natural gas, which is about five times less expensive in the US than in Europe. Colorado is a bit different, they still have 33% from coal (US wide coal is 16%). The quick and easy solution would be for electricity to be more like the rest of the world and more expensive. Europe will actually be much worse soon due to a price cap is expiring at the end of this month.
Or if they can act as a quasi-shell corporation for an agribusiness concern to cash in on tax breaks. And at that point, if the family makes any money at all, the parent corp will surely find a way to harvest that too.
There was a link here a few weeks ago about UK energy that said that only about 30% of the cost of energy is the cost to produce, the rest is the infrastructure and the costs to pay some suppliers to stay online in case they are needed.
> "A lot of the cost of the solar array is the people — installing the solar panels and all the wiring that goes into it. Inverters and the transformers and the switchgear. None of that changes"
Yeah this came as a big shock to me as I was hearing acquaintances say their solar and battery install would payback in 3-4 years compared to 15-20 years timeline I read on hackernews etc. Turns out the cost of equipment is so cheap now that in countries with cheaper labour and other costs they can get a similar system with install at 1/3 the price.
Here in Australia in a semi rural non big city town there are a lot of professional grade DIY installs.
The area has many FiFo (Fly In Fly Out) mine site workers and farmers all of whom are capable of fixing panels to roofs and racking batteries .. the wiring and looms are either "done by a mate" or done from a sketch on the back of envelope, or reading the sheet of instructions that come with an order.
The important part, safety, comes at the end when one of the few working town electricians (or an "off duty" mine electrician) checks the wiring for safety and compliance and signs off on the work for a fee.
Like many things the total cost is sweat equity + mail order prices + professional inspection and sign off (for insurance and peace of mind).
Stupid thing I didn't do when I was in my 20's was take the contractors license exam. Back then you took a few classes, took the exam and you had a license. Now you need to work several thousand hours under someone with a license and then you're only allowed to do that type of work.
And then California wonders why construction is sooooo expensive.
Smart thing I did in my teens and early 20's was to work part time at mine sites every vacation break.
I got a good lump sum saved up by the end of university and I was ticketed with experience on bobcats, haulpaks, loaders, mini-cranes, heavy rigid trucks, etc. along with trades assistant experience working for electricians, gas fitters, fitter and turners, riggers, plumbers, radio technicians, belt splicers, etc.
That meant that while I wasn't a qualified electrician I did know how and what they did and had done most of the work myself under supervision.
I veered into Engineering (Trad.) then Mathematics, then Geophysics .. but I was well set up to go into trades had I wanted to .. more importantly I could do a full gas fitting layout for a glass blowing studio (isolation valves, pressure valves, furnace, annealing oven, glory hole, leakproof joins, etc) just not legally connect it .. for insurance and peace of mind I get an actual working tradie with insurance to inspect and signoff on the connection to a large rented LPG tank.
It's a very Weddings, Parties, Anything * kind of state (ie. many people here are comfortable taking on many types of work; typical for large area low population places).
* Any song you want
Playing requests now on the bandstand
El Clash combo
Paid fifteen dollars a day
Weddings, parties, anything
And Bongo Jazz a speciality
How long ago did you hear that it would take 15-20 years to break even? When I had solar installed on my house in Seattle back in 2013, they estimated it would take seven years, but it was actually closer to six. Equipment is only cheaper and better now.
When utilities are required to do net metering (i.e. buy power whenever it is produced at essentially the retail rate rather than buy what they need at the wholesale rate) it is a huge unsustainable subsidy to wealthier homeowners paid for by the less wealthy. It's free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting large costs on the less well off. As these costs grew, that has also provided an incentive for consumer solar installations to increase.
As the statista.com report says
>...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
Looks like that report is a year old, but I doubt the installation costs have really gone down much since then. (Panel prices come down, but labor costs, etc don't.)
Providing the infrastructure and reliability of the grid is very expensive, so there is a huge difference between the wholesale costs and retail rates for delivered electricity. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar.
I'm looking at getting a few panels installed as well, as my roof needs re-shingled and the bundled price seems like a good deal. What company did you go with? Are they still operating? Ive heard thats an issue with some of the smaller/local installers
I used A&R Solar (https://www.a-rsolar.com/), and had such a good experience I recommended them to all of my friends. The company seemed to have some growth issues - friends who hired them two years later were less impressed - but that was a good while ago now and they're certainly still in business.
Awesome! Thanks for the lead, I'll check em out. Seems likely to be a rush next year to reap the federal incentives before the upcoming admiistration likely guts them
Heavily depends on labor market, costs, and subsidies. I dont think I can make the numbers work out in the Bay Area. Panels are cheap but maybe 10% of the total price.
Yep panel costs are falling, maybe close to bottom by now, but everything else (labor and supplies) is going up. Panels are no longer the driver of a solar project cost.
I'm currently getting 16% return on capital invested, just with domestic savings. Thats an annualized return over all capital spent, including panels, equipment and labor.
Thats more or less what I expected.
So yes, your locality matters. As does your current consumption, cost of electricity, and so on.
Prices are also falling quite a bit as time passes.
The two things that get worse over time are labor costs and net metering arrangements.
Labor costs either track or exceed inflation, and net metering arrangements get less lucrative as the grid becomes more solar heavy, like what happened in California last year.
But relying on net metering for ROI is a pre-2024 thing. Batteries are getting so cheap.
Net metering changed when it become economically unsupportable as PV adoption scaled.
The same thing will happen with grid-connected residential solar + batteries. Rates will be changed to be based on capacity rather than consumption. There might, for example, be a charge based on your maximum usage during a period rather than total usage.
Yes, the formula for grid connectivity will need to change. In some places it already has.
Grid electricity incurs two basic costs. Generation and Distribution. Traditionally electricity was charged purely on consumption (ie Generation). This made sense when everyone bought all their electricity.
It makes less sense when I benefit from being connected all the time, but only actually purchase electricity when my batteries run flat.
It's like being able to make endless backups for free, but only paying to restore.
As with many other things I makes sense to align billing to cost to value. Thus the cost of "connectedness to the grid" needs to separate from the cost of "electricity consumed".
In my opinion electricity grid just like other infrastructure like road needs to be owned and maintained by government. 2-5 year contracts can be given out for maintenance and upgrades with performance and reliability targets to induce competition. Then connection to the grid charges can be charged to everyone according to the type of power connection and bandwidth they require. If this is not done as prices for solar and batteries keep dropping people will defect from the grid and the people left on the grid will need to pay more and more resulting more defections from the grid.
For farmers in regions with intense sun like colorado, I would imagine that some kind of solar netting would ultimately be the best solution for mixed agriculture. If you could hang a net like 10 feet off the ground that has tiny solar panels linked together to block out 50% of the sun, that would probably create an ideal environment for growing certain berries and vegetables.
The comment is referring to finding something to replace the Haber-Bosch Process, which is mostly fossil fuel driven, which makes most of our food itself dependent on fossil fuels.
Unrelated to the above, except in the mix of sustainability and agriculture - there are a bunch of companies working on bacteria to fix nitrogen for crops without requiring separate fertilizer similar to how legumes do it. I think Pivot Bio is the furthest along in the space - they’ve got a commercially available product - but it’s an active area of development in the industry right now.
> Unrelated to the above, except in the mix of sustainability and agriculture - there are a bunch of companies working on bacteria to fix nitrogen for crops without requiring separate fertilizer similar to how legumes do it.
Nitrogen fixation is energy-intensive, so something has to provide energy. Additionally, nitrogen fixation has to happen in anaerobic conditions, oxygen kills the enzymes responsible for nitrogen fixation. In legumes, the oxygen is carried away by hemoglobin (the same one used in "artificial meat"), but engineering these conditions for free-living bacteria is likely going to be problematic.
I'm personally hoping for a catalyst that can work in mild conditions.
There’s been some success here already - as mentioned, there’s some commercial products on the market already that do some amount of nitrogen fixation for at least corn and I believe wheat as well, so it’s not unsolvable.
I've been interested to see some small (1 acre-ish) solar panel installations popping up on local farmland near me in Northwest Indiana. I'm a bit surprised because although we get quite a few sunny days it's nowhere near Colorado levels of sun. So I guess the economics must be getting to the point where it's either profitable now or is expected to be profitable soon.
> “Having shade on the ground is a climate adaptation. I hate to say it, but I've kind of given up on the thought that we're going to fix climate change whatsoever,” said Komenik. “Climate change is going to happen. It's going to be rapid. It's going to be terrible. So we need to figure out how to adapt to that changing climate.”
Only because geoengineering is off the table. If you take climate change seriously and want to avoid it, solar radiation management is pretty much the last remaining option for prevention. Here’s a nice article for an overview: https://climate.benjames.io/someone-is-going-to-dim-the-sun/
> Planting trees is good thing to do but not even getting close to a solution.
for carbon, no.
For stopping heat being absorbed by the earth, yes. Some of the anti-desertification work being done in africa has yielded something like an average 8 degree c drop in temperature.
We have already been planting tress for a long time. In Sweden it is the law that after a forest is cut down it must either be replanted or have enough viable trees remaining for natural regrowth. For managed forests it is often a revenue increase to replant trees since it increase the efficiency of the land. The amount of tree planting that goes into environmental purposes are tiny compared to the amount of trees planted as part of the natural cycle of tree harvesting and regrowth.
However, cutting down tress and then replanting it do not capture a lot of carbon. Much of it either get burned or decompose into methane. Planting trees without protecting it from being cut down is not going to do much to compensate excess greenhouse gases that get created from burning fossil fuels.
Trees also reduce or eliminate urban heat island effects, improve soil absorption during downpours thus mitigating runoff, provide food and habitat for wildlife, increase humidity through evaporation, and on and on...
They're so good at improving the localized climate, it's why they're trying to use millions of them to stop the Sahara Desert from expanding southwards.
If that was simple, it would have happened. It’s not simple to stop—if governments stopped it over night, they’d be thrown out of power the next day by mass protests.
Technology is stopping it, though! The continued exponential growth of solar (~30% CAGR) suggests that we could get to 1% of the earth’s surface in solar in about 20-30 years. That would be more than all current sources of energy.
Hey. I live literally 30 seconds from this place, and know Bryce. Cool dude!
I do wonder why solar panels in fields aren't more common, as opposed to rooftop solar. It seems like such a burden doing all those one-off jobs aren't worth it compared to the ease of just putting more up in an easy to access location on the ground. Especially since most people aren't set up so they can go off grid with their panels in case the grid goes down.
Land is expensive in many places. Go somewhere it is very cheap, and you'll find fields of windmills and the occasional field full of solar panels.
In fact, Texas had a 350 megawatt install taken out by a hail storm earlier this year. It made the rounds in the news and even here on HN if memory serves. That's still not even close to the big projects though. Vista Sands in Wisconsin has a 1.3 gigawatt install planned that will cover nearly ten thousand acres.
The only reason residential rooftop solar became the industry it did was the massive subsidies handed out to consumers to make it financially viable. Without that, larger field installs and off-grid setups would be the bulk of what you hear about in most of the country.
> The only reason residential rooftop solar became the industry it did was the massive subsidies handed out to consumers to make it financially viable.
Savings per Watt can be a lot larger for residential though, as you save the all-in price of electricity (electricity price + transport fees + other fees + taxes) while solar farms only earn the wholesale price.
Yes, the return on rooftop solar is way better than commercial solar.
Firstly, is saving a cost (which you would pay with after-tax money.) So as a saving, not income, the return is tax free.
Secondly homes buy electricity at retail rates (thus rooftop is effectively earning at retail rates) whereas commercial sells at wholesale rates, which is likely a small multiple. (And of course, being commercial, that income is taxed.)
Yes, in high-cost places (like the US) subsidies were necessary to foster the industry and get enough demand to get prices down. In other places the math makes sense without subsidies.
Incidentally it's a LOT easier to do 1000 rooftop installs than 1 solar farm. There's no planning, utility agreements, large scale financing etc. You just install and move on. A small team (4 people) can easily do 2 houses a week. With only one qualified electrician needed.
The cost of land is a minor part of the cost of a PV field. As for wind, it uses only a small fraction of the land in which a wind field is placed, because the turbines have to be spaced so they don't interfere with each other.
rooftop solar in the summer is more efficient since it shaddows the roof, reducing cooling demand. in meant areas that is enough to pay for the extra install cost.
The big utility-scale solar plants tend to be on the ground in big fields. I think the preference for rooftop solar for individual houses comes mostly because it's convenient for suburban installations, as they don't usually want to give yard space and the panels would be in the shade anyways. Roofs aren't being used for anything useful, so that's where the panels go. In a rural setting there's less incentive to install on a roof, but you still might put them there anyways if that's where you get the best sun.
I suppose people might also be afraid of theft or vandalism if the panels are accessible to random passers-by without a ladder.
To add-on, utility scale solar generation is the majority of generation and has consistently outpaced small scale generation in growth.
Starting at 11,233 small scale out of 26,482 in 2014, ~42.5%, versus 73,406 out of 236,090 in 2023, ~31% [1].
So, despite a ~6.5x increase in small scale generation over 10 years, ~19% compounded annual growth, utility scale generation increased by ~10.66x, ~24% compounded annual growth.
In UK it’s extremely common. I think economic demand is a large factor though. Energy generation prices in US are significantly lower than over here. For example I am paid a variable export rate for solar energy from my home that varies between £0.0468 and £0.2621 per kWh. That’s significantly more than the gentleman in this article is receiving, like an order of magnitude more most of the time. Solar installers over here can’t keep up with the demand.
I like it. I believe that this path of compromise is elegant way to implement these technologies which can take a lot of space to use.
But more importantly, it can demonstrate to those who argue that solar farms are taking up fertile soil that there are alternative ways to implement solar energy without using valuable farmland.
Where I live, the chief risk (aside from the usual risks of investments) are spending years and years fighting bureaucrats and NIMBYs to get the necessary permissions to put solar panels on land zoned for agriculture.
The risks are the investment in foundations and trenchwork necessary to install the panel support infrastructure. There are companies doing interesting things with low-mounted high-density installations that would be more efficient and require less infrastructure.
While a great idea, we don't necessarily need this. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
From ChatGPT:
<chatGPT>
Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
Real-World Context (I didn't ask ChatGPT this question, it provided without asking!):
(1) The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year.
(2) The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
</chatGPT>
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
I used to think this was a wonderful idea, with the greatest of intentions, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out it's inevitable that a hail storm hits or mother nature somehow will break/cracks those panels, allowing heavy metals to leach into the soil and make it unusable for farming in perpetuity. This actually happened to a guy I spoke with during lunch one day.
So seeing the actual reality over a longer timeframe of solar farms, and wind turbines (those huge blades made of not friendly chemicals last only 10 years, do you know how they are disposed of?), have greatly reduced any excitement I had for solar/wind as environmentally friendly longer term sustainable solutions. I guess it's sort of good to diversify but they most definitely aren't "earth friendly" as advertised. Fusion seem our only real hope.
not sure where you're getting 10 years for windd turbines from, but it's closer to 20. they also aren't nasty chemicals. it's fiberglass and epoxy and are disposed the same way pretty much everything is disposed of, putting them in a pit in the middle of nowhere.
I would actually consider epoxy pretty nasty. 10 years for actual use is pretty accurate, 20 years is extremely optimistic. They are just buried or piled up somewhere, not burned as far as I know.
That seems like a pretty biased source, how about these actual cases at the top of google search? We are just getting started perhaps 10 years into this, now imagine this after another 100 years? And of course maybe they can technically be "recycled" now but it's not actually happening in a significant way yet.
They typically contain copper, silver, lead, and tin, but those don't leach out of them at a significant rate, and of those four heavy metals, only lead is a real toxicity risk even if you digest the panels in acid instead of leaving them out in the rain. Another comment suggests that the dopants in the silicon are the relevant heavy metals, but those are present at parts-per-million levels, locked inside the silicon's diamond-structures crystalline lattice, and passivated with silicon dioxide, so that's not plausible either.
The most likely explanation is that this is a lie.
CdTe solar panels [0] do, but it's a bit of red herring because almost nobody is using those panels for large scale installations (they're mainly used where being "thin and light" is important. The common crystalline silicon panels [1] don't have any major toxic components.
Solar panels are giant photodiodes. Heavy metal doped silicon. a-Si something or SiGe or GaAs or InP or whatever pairs and trios of toxic metals. Generally more toxic more electronically open to trade therefore broader spectral response and better performance. You can't do, say, Al substrate PtFeCu semiconductor, that's not going to make sense.
They're not merely similar to a photodiode, but using giant photodiodes as batteries is literally the idea.
There are some versions based on toxic organic chemicals in place of toxic inorganic elements, few and far between, and I guess the technology will eventually move onto engineered nanoparticles later in this century after they've cracked fusion, but that hasn't happened yet.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/88816.pdf
Summary: This particular research project won’t quite break even purely on market-rate electricity sales, due to having 2x the installation cost of utility scale solar. If high value crops are successfully grown, there are scenarios where it could break even after including profits from crop sales.
Basically, heat energy is time shifting be it coolth or warmth. And heat and cool cost money.
Farmers in Oz are using droids to spray and weed, so battery charging could be another cost avoidance.
Or cold store for produce to sell at advantageous prices in winter. Basic arbitrage gains to permit the farm yield to maximise against predictable price variance.
Colorado has rich people. Grow microherbs out of season.
Farms often have a lot of less viable land for primary production. They could deploy flow batteries which have size costs, but massive mwh return and scale very nicely and last a very long time. Even just water pumping shifts energy into storage. Farms are giant machines for converting sunlight and water into produce anyway, this is a good fit: it's the same energy source, shifted.
Solar power + intermittent synthesis methods fits really well together for a less centralised economy.
I remember a science museum exhibit of a simple spark device. It was in an enclosed box to prevent gases from escaping, and the air inside was noticeably brown from all the accumulated NO2.
Something like that: https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/...
Commercially, a similar process was used for a while a century ago, the Birkeland-Eyde process. It passed air through an arc. It was phased out because it wasn't competitive with the HB process using hydrogen from fossil fuels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland%E2%80%93Eyde_process
Could potentially reuse elevated water tanks? Guess the cost of the pumps might make the savings on the structure very small, and no idea if the amount of energy would be significant to a farm.
I don't think a farm needs that. Better to pump the water to a headstock keeping cow troughs full, or for crop circles.
Not a farmer or an engineer. Happy to be corrected.
I'm assuming that each solar panel is 2 by 1 meter, which would mean that it produces about 400 watts (20% efficiency at 1000 watts per sq meter coming from the sun). You can use this calculator to estimate how power you can produce at the given location for a given system size in kilowatts: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php
The system above is 1310400 watts or ~1,310 kW, which according to the calculator produces about 2 million kWh/year.
If he makes $20,000 that would mean that he gets paid only $0.01 per kW of power. And even if my assumption above about the size of each individual panel is off by a factor of 2 and they are only 1 sq meter in size (which I think they are not because the article states that the solar farm can power about 300 average households, which require the annual power output to be more than what I estimated above) that would make $0.02 per kW of power. How is it possible that the amount earned per kW is so low when the utility companies in Colorado charge about $0.14 per kW (effective rate)? And who is actually the customer here and where is the money coming from? I'm just curious to learn more.
$0.02/kW does seem a bit low. Looking at my bill, it looks like I got paid ~$0.03/kW last month in California where my retail price is $0.17/kW off-peak. Looking at the current price charts for electricity, they're also currently ~$0.03/kW, so the numbers do check out since we're supposed to be paid the current wholesale price.
Electricity just doesn't cost all that much to generate, most of the cost comes from transmission and storage.
As far as I’m aware, commercial / industrial installations, and solar farms, get paid less per kWh.
Quick edit to fix a brain-fart, I doubt anyone read this prior anyways.
It means I'll never have a bill, and if I get too much credit (negative bill), I'll just get a used electric car. I'm not unhappy with that situation.
... from renewable resources.
Fossil energy can cost quite a bit to generate, but of course it comes with storage built in.
edit: I might be wrong on this, reading this on their site they have some significant donors. "With additional funding from the Walton Family Foundation, the Cielo Foundation, and donations from a myriad of individual donors and businesses in 2023"
I don't know either; what are the risks?
For example, is that 20k gross revenue (check from utility) or net revenue (after deducting financing costs?) Is he getting free grid power at night as well? Is he using power on the farm itself?
It's a pity the article didn't go down this road a bit, but since it didn't, I guess the 20k number (described as an "estimate") is really just a measure of scale.
Indeed, one gets the impression that the finances part is possibly not the main focus of the farmer (much less the article.) The farming land is being used by non-profits and research groups, he's not actually farming the land himself.
But it sounds like this is just a small part of his farm (4 acres), so perhaps more of a pilot project and finding out how to best use the land, before rolling out on a bigger scale.
As others have mentioned the off peak daytime wholesale rate for electricity is often just a few cents per kWh. Let's say 3-4c/kWh.
The other few cents above your calculated rate of 1c/kWh likely go to pay off the principle and interest on the financing for the system, plus any profit for the company maintaining and servicing the system. If the farm owner paid for the capital costs and maintenance directly themselves, their share of the returns would probably be higher.
But they would probably prefer to focus on farming crops.
Most farmers (even in developed countries) are cash poor and most farmers are deep in debt.
The ones that aren’t can quickly become so given a little bad luck. Farms have to hedge against bad yields to protect against undesirable weather.
Family farms only make financial sense if there is a lot of free labor (slavery, indentured servants, or unpaid labor of children).
Reminded me of Charge Robotics' mission: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics
The area has many FiFo (Fly In Fly Out) mine site workers and farmers all of whom are capable of fixing panels to roofs and racking batteries .. the wiring and looms are either "done by a mate" or done from a sketch on the back of envelope, or reading the sheet of instructions that come with an order.
The important part, safety, comes at the end when one of the few working town electricians (or an "off duty" mine electrician) checks the wiring for safety and compliance and signs off on the work for a fee.
Like many things the total cost is sweat equity + mail order prices + professional inspection and sign off (for insurance and peace of mind).
And then California wonders why construction is sooooo expensive.
I got a good lump sum saved up by the end of university and I was ticketed with experience on bobcats, haulpaks, loaders, mini-cranes, heavy rigid trucks, etc. along with trades assistant experience working for electricians, gas fitters, fitter and turners, riggers, plumbers, radio technicians, belt splicers, etc.
That meant that while I wasn't a qualified electrician I did know how and what they did and had done most of the work myself under supervision.
I veered into Engineering (Trad.) then Mathematics, then Geophysics .. but I was well set up to go into trades had I wanted to .. more importantly I could do a full gas fitting layout for a glass blowing studio (isolation valves, pressure valves, furnace, annealing oven, glory hole, leakproof joins, etc) just not legally connect it .. for insurance and peace of mind I get an actual working tradie with insurance to inspect and signoff on the connection to a large rented LPG tank.
It's a very Weddings, Parties, Anything * kind of state (ie. many people here are comfortable taking on many types of work; typical for large area low population places).
As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
Looks like that report is a year old, but I doubt the installation costs have really gone down much since then. (Panel prices come down, but labor costs, etc don't.)
Providing the infrastructure and reliability of the grid is very expensive, so there is a huge difference between the wholesale costs and retail rates for delivered electricity. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar.
Thats more or less what I expected.
So yes, your locality matters. As does your current consumption, cost of electricity, and so on.
Prices are also falling quite a bit as time passes.
Labor costs either track or exceed inflation, and net metering arrangements get less lucrative as the grid becomes more solar heavy, like what happened in California last year.
But relying on net metering for ROI is a pre-2024 thing. Batteries are getting so cheap.
The same thing will happen with grid-connected residential solar + batteries. Rates will be changed to be based on capacity rather than consumption. There might, for example, be a charge based on your maximum usage during a period rather than total usage.
Grid electricity incurs two basic costs. Generation and Distribution. Traditionally electricity was charged purely on consumption (ie Generation). This made sense when everyone bought all their electricity.
It makes less sense when I benefit from being connected all the time, but only actually purchase electricity when my batteries run flat.
It's like being able to make endless backups for free, but only paying to restore.
As with many other things I makes sense to align billing to cost to value. Thus the cost of "connectedness to the grid" needs to separate from the cost of "electricity consumed".
https://youtu.be/NngCHTImH1g?si=XVLJAfkJi3MqZN1d
https://youtu.be/ekEdq6PhC0Q?si=Wpr_DKcAvtX-Tsi-
Nitrogen fixation is energy-intensive, so something has to provide energy. Additionally, nitrogen fixation has to happen in anaerobic conditions, oxygen kills the enzymes responsible for nitrogen fixation. In legumes, the oxygen is carried away by hemoglobin (the same one used in "artificial meat"), but engineering these conditions for free-living bacteria is likely going to be problematic.
I'm personally hoping for a catalyst that can work in mild conditions.
Only because geoengineering is off the table. If you take climate change seriously and want to avoid it, solar radiation management is pretty much the last remaining option for prevention. Here’s a nice article for an overview: https://climate.benjames.io/someone-is-going-to-dim-the-sun/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
The use of mass timber for construction is a great way to make sustainable forestry sequester carbon for the long term.
https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/66069
Cloud seeding via containerships is another low cost, high impact method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
But if we really want the ability to pause climate change, we need to do some more research on Stratospheric Aerosol Injection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Stratospheric Injection of Calcium carbonate is a very promising approach that would have the benefit of reducing ocean acidification.
its simpler, but also, if its like algal blooms, easy to fuckup and cause complete decimation of plantlife in the area.
I don't know of any research on the danger of algal blooms in deep sea.
But monitoring seems critical no matter what.
Planting trees is good thing to do but not even getting close to a solution.
for carbon, no.
For stopping heat being absorbed by the earth, yes. Some of the anti-desertification work being done in africa has yielded something like an average 8 degree c drop in temperature.
Yet, I don't see much of it being done, at least in my countries (Poland and Italy).
However, cutting down tress and then replanting it do not capture a lot of carbon. Much of it either get burned or decompose into methane. Planting trees without protecting it from being cut down is not going to do much to compensate excess greenhouse gases that get created from burning fossil fuels.
At best it will make the planet prettier and at worst it will simply be feelgood.
Technology is stopping it, though! The continued exponential growth of solar (~30% CAGR) suggests that we could get to 1% of the earth’s surface in solar in about 20-30 years. That would be more than all current sources of energy.
I do wonder why solar panels in fields aren't more common, as opposed to rooftop solar. It seems like such a burden doing all those one-off jobs aren't worth it compared to the ease of just putting more up in an easy to access location on the ground. Especially since most people aren't set up so they can go off grid with their panels in case the grid goes down.
In fact, Texas had a 350 megawatt install taken out by a hail storm earlier this year. It made the rounds in the news and even here on HN if memory serves. That's still not even close to the big projects though. Vista Sands in Wisconsin has a 1.3 gigawatt install planned that will cover nearly ten thousand acres.
The only reason residential rooftop solar became the industry it did was the massive subsidies handed out to consumers to make it financially viable. Without that, larger field installs and off-grid setups would be the bulk of what you hear about in most of the country.
Savings per Watt can be a lot larger for residential though, as you save the all-in price of electricity (electricity price + transport fees + other fees + taxes) while solar farms only earn the wholesale price.
Firstly, is saving a cost (which you would pay with after-tax money.) So as a saving, not income, the return is tax free.
Secondly homes buy electricity at retail rates (thus rooftop is effectively earning at retail rates) whereas commercial sells at wholesale rates, which is likely a small multiple. (And of course, being commercial, that income is taxed.)
Yes, in high-cost places (like the US) subsidies were necessary to foster the industry and get enough demand to get prices down. In other places the math makes sense without subsidies.
Incidentally it's a LOT easier to do 1000 rooftop installs than 1 solar farm. There's no planning, utility agreements, large scale financing etc. You just install and move on. A small team (4 people) can easily do 2 houses a week. With only one qualified electrician needed.
That's 40km² btw
Also, just under 16 square miles. 160,000 tennis courts or 9,000 basketball courts.
I suppose people might also be afraid of theft or vandalism if the panels are accessible to random passers-by without a ladder.
Starting at 11,233 small scale out of 26,482 in 2014, ~42.5%, versus 73,406 out of 236,090 in 2023, ~31% [1].
So, despite a ~6.5x increase in small scale generation over 10 years, ~19% compounded annual growth, utility scale generation increased by ~10.66x, ~24% compounded annual growth.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01...
But more importantly, it can demonstrate to those who argue that solar farms are taking up fertile soil that there are alternative ways to implement solar energy without using valuable farmland.
Aesthetics over economics.
To be convinced I would need to hear the benefits from many more (commercial ) farmers. The quoted farm is a hobby farm, small scale farm.
What are the risks in such installations ?
Planting for forage is much harder than growing a field for hay/soy/beet/other feed crop.
obviously you can't use normal combines to harvest between the rows, so you need different, custom, equipment to harvest at scale.
so how much did he have to get a loan for to pay for 3.2k solar panels + install + make the land suitable for em?
Seems like that will take a long time to recoup (if ever).
I'd like to hear more about this. Do you need specialized tractors, harvesters, etc to fit under the panels?
From ChatGPT:
<chatGPT>
Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
Real-World Context (I didn't ask ChatGPT this question, it provided without asking!): (1) The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. (2) The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
</chatGPT>
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
So seeing the actual reality over a longer timeframe of solar farms, and wind turbines (those huge blades made of not friendly chemicals last only 10 years, do you know how they are disposed of?), have greatly reduced any excitement I had for solar/wind as environmentally friendly longer term sustainable solutions. I guess it's sort of good to diversify but they most definitely aren't "earth friendly" as advertised. Fusion seem our only real hope.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-t... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
For now we have to be realistic, but hopeful that some better use than landfills can be found and be viable.
The most likely explanation is that this is a lie.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride_photovoltaic... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystalline_silicon
They're not merely similar to a photodiode, but using giant photodiodes as batteries is literally the idea.
There are some versions based on toxic organic chemicals in place of toxic inorganic elements, few and far between, and I guess the technology will eventually move onto engineered nanoparticles later in this century after they've cracked fusion, but that hasn't happened yet.