As solar companies continue to target farms as prime real estate for their arrays, scientists at Cornell have turned their research to agrivoltaics — the method of combining agricultural production and solar panels on the same farmland space. WAMC's Capital Region Bureau Chief Dave Lucas discussed the effort with Matt Sturchio, a postdoctoral associate at Cornell’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.
Researchers at Cornell AgriTech and Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences say approximately 84% of land suitable for future solar development in New York state is agricultural. Sturchio said the state is looking to compile data that could guide farmers and policymakers as the state's renewable energy initiatives grow.
"New York State Ag and Markets wanted to know if it's possible to do agrivoltaics. So the co-location of crop lands and solar in New York State, there's obviously a lot of land use tension, and developing solar on farmland is a pretty hot issue right now. So that's how it all came to be," said Sturchio.
New York’s large-scale solar projects currently use about 9,300 acres, so dual land use is a priority issue.
Sturchio says the first in a series of studies published in July examined a 2024 fall planting of radishes and radicchio grown within 20-foot spaces between solar panels on a farm near Albany.
"We found out root crops might not be the best idea in a fall growing season," Sturchio said. "We don't really know what happens in the summer growing season yet, but in the fall growing season, they end up putting more of their biomass into leaf tissue. So when they try to grow bigger leaves, they put less energy into growing roots and radishes. You want to grow more of that root tissue for the actual crop production. So that was interesting to see. And then radicchio, which is just this leafy green, it's less of that sort of contrast of above ground and below ground ability to grow, and more of just reduction in sunlight, reduction in temperature, reduces the crops productivity a little bit."
Sturchio says this year's data has yet to be analyzed, but deems early results as "promising" for plantings of strawberries, raspberries, winter wheat, soybeans, zucchini, peppers, chard and dry beans.
"This fall growing season, the paper that we published, we ended up seeing that the lack of sunlight leads to lower leaf temperatures and lower leaf temperatures when it's already cool and relatively shady outside, in the fall, leads to just less productive crops," said Sturchio. "The interesting thing is that the summer growing season that we've been having right now, you don't see as dark of differences, because in the summer you have more sunlight, higher temperatures, so you're not getting that reduction in the environmental conditions that are beneficial for crops."
Sturcio says with shared-space solar expansion come both opportunities and pitfalls.
"The actual capacity for photosynthesis is the same inside of the array as outside of the array. The plants don't have a functional change at all. It's just the environmental condition inside the array that changes things. So that's actually very encouraging, because it tells us that if you just plant them, potentially earlier in the season, or if you choose a variety that likes to be shaded more, you're going to have some potential synergies that you might not with other crop types," Sturchio said.
Researchers have been identifying crops that can thrive under partial shade during New York's short growing season while keeping an eye on test arrays in Europe, where panels are being oriented parallel to the sun’s rays to allow more light through, reducing shading effects. Sturchio says the Albany field's array is the same as any utility scale solar development where panels are spaced equally, relatively narrow apart to prioritize energy generation, with crops planted in between.
"We are going to be developing a research facility at Cornell in Ithaca that's going to be testing more of these new tracking technologies and also different heights of panels, so allowing more sunlight in, through diffuse sunlight. So if you raise the panel up, it's like having an umbrella. If you put the umbrella higher up, more light gets in underneath it. And then new tracking technologies, which would mean you can go parallel with the sun's rays instead of perpendicular. So instead of creating all of the panel array shade, you create a little bit less shade, get more sunlight into the array. But that's all stuff that we're testing out right now, and we're excited to see what happens," he said.
Sturchio is hopeful construction in Ithaca will begin by 2027.
