They grow vegetables under solar panels. Is Alaska betting on agrovoltaics?

Alaska is a land of paradoxes – on the one hand, it has vast areas of land, on the other hand, due to extreme climatic conditions, it pays for extremely high energy and food costs, which come mainly from imports.

This combination of factors encourages the use of less common and innovative solutions, including agrovoltaics – the combined use of agricultural land to generate electricity from the sun and grow crops.

In this context, a unique research project was created on the territory of the largest solar power plant in Alaska, which brought surprising results and has the potential to grow.

In the article you will read:

how agriculture can be combined with solar energy,
how solar park owners can benefit from growing crops,
which regions are particularly worth agrovoltaics.
Solar park turned into a laboratory
In the city of Houston, Alaska, a solar park with an installed capacity of 8.5 MW spreads over an area of ​​approximately 18 hectares, supplying electricity to approximately 1,400 households.

Given the high latitude in which it is located, its solar panels are placed at unusually wide intervals of approximately fifteen meters and are bifacial, meaning they capture sunlight from both the front and back, which is especially crucial during the Alaskan summer, when the sun shines almost continuously but moves low above the horizon.

This power plant recently became a kind of field laboratory for scientific research, which was carried out under the leadership of associate professor Glenna Gannon, who works at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Its goal was to investigate whether it would be possible to produce electricity and food simultaneously in Alaskan conditions.

The research was funded by the US Department of Energy with a $1.3 million grant and was originally intended to be a three-year project, as conditions at the solar farm vary from year to year.

However, the funding has so far only covered the planning phase and field research for one crop growing season, and the continuation of the project is uncertain due to the suspension of several government-funded research programs, despite the fact that the initial results were very promising.

Plants thrived around the panels
The research team decided to grow three crops that are adapted to colder conditions and shorter growing seasons on an Alaskan solar farm – potatoes, kale and spinach.

The crops were planted in June and harvested in September, with the researchers growing the same crops between the solar panels and in control areas outside the panels.

As part of the research, they used a complex monitoring system to collect data on the microclimate – they monitored the humidity and temperature of the soil and air, the rate of photosynthesis and the moisture in the leaves.

In parallel, they also recorded data on the performance of the solar panels to find out how growing crops can affect energy production.

The results of the measurements showed that crops grown in the immediate vicinity of the solar panels showed better growth parameters than those grown in more distant control fields.

According to the researchers, the plants did better with the solar panels because they were exposed to less “solar stress”, i.e. the negative impact of excessive exposure to sunlight during particularly long summer days.

The solar panels partially shaded the plants, which had a positive effect primarily on leafy vegetables. The differences were also visible to the eye – for example, spinach grown near the panels was a deeper green.

In addition, the panels stored heat, slightly extending the growing season, and at the same time captured rainwater, increasing the availability of moisture for crops growing in their immediate vicinity.

Agrovoltaics can bring multiple benefits
Although the initial research results are encouraging, the researchers emphasize that in order to draw definitive conclusions, they would need data collected over a longer period, as there is high interannual variability in Arctic conditions.

According to them, further development of the project could be of great importance for Alaska, since the Matanuska-Susitna Valley area, where the power plant is located, is an important agricultural center, which, however, has lost approximately 11% of its agricultural land due to construction in the last decade.

According to the scientists, agrovoltaics could become a tool for protecting the agricultural function of the country and at the same time bring additional profit to the owners of solar parks. By leasing land for agricultural purposes to power plant operators, the cost of maintaining vegetation between the panels decreases, creating a new economic model that can improve the return on investment in renewables.

The energy dimension of the project is also particularly important, as local natural gas reserves, which currently cover a significant part of the region's energy consumption, are dwindling. Renewables generate about 15% of the region's electricity, of which solar energy accounts for only 1.3%.