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Hops for beer flourish under solar panels. They're not the only crop thriving in the shade. (apnews.com)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hops for beer flourish under solar panels. They're not the only crop thriving in the shade.::A farm in Bavaria is covering its hops with solar panels, providing electricity to 250 households and shading the plants from the increasingly scorching summer heat in the process.

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[–] evasive_chimpanzee 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not necessarily a great way to do it. Hops grow super tall, so to have solar over them, you need a tall structure. To have a tall structure that can withstand wind loads, you need pretty substantial materials. You are probably better off just using wind permeable shade cloth that you can deploy during the heat of the summer and take down during the cooler months.

[–] ikidd 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As a farmer and a solar offgridder, I agree. I build my own mounts and would not want to try to build a 20' high mount that would take 100 km/h winds, which we have seen around here. Not only are the mounts going to go down, now they're 20' in the air when they start picking up speed to the ground.

I have bifacials and while I don't have them out over crop, the grass and trees underneath them in the shade have to be dealt with all summer. I'm pretty sure crop would grow fine but then you'd have to figure out how to harvest it with panels and mounts in the way. Which would be doable, but hardly worth the trouble for the insignificant amount of crop I would gain.

[–] evasive_chimpanzee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've seen people use sheep to keep the plants around panels down. There's even people who rent herds to big solar farms. That seems like as much of a win-win as I can think of.

[–] ikidd 3 points 1 year ago

I've thought about that. Sheep can be pretty destructive on any shrubs or trees you're wanting to keep alive though, you'd have to protect each one. Not as bad as goats, though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you seen the pictures? The solar panels are fairly small, mounted on top of the poles.

This is in the Hallertau, one of the more famous hop regions. It's not some random farmer, hop is how he makes his living.

[–] evasive_chimpanzee 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, there's actually some better pictures from presumably the same company linked in the article about apples.. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy people are trying out different stuff like this, but it doesn't seem like the juice is worth the squeeze in this instance. Some quick numbers I found showed that average household energy consumption in Germany is about 4 MWh, and 200 MWh/acre is what you would expect from a traditional solar installation. Should be able to power 50 homes per acre. He's getting ~8.