photo by: University of Kansas

Kansas Geological Survey researchers Sam Zipper and Hanna Szydlowski take soil infiltration measurements as part of a project related to solar energy and agriculture.

Sam Zipper, a scientist at the KU-based Kansas Geological Survey, has no involvement in the big, controversial solar project that has been proposed for more than 600 acres of farmland in northern Douglas County.

But he’s sure heard the debate it has created.

On one side, supporters say the solar project — the Kansas Sky Energy Center — is critical in order for Lawrence to do its part in producing renewable energy and fighting climate change. On the other side, opponents say the climate fighting goals are admirable, but the solar project will take too much prime agricultural land out of production.

Zipper, who also is an assistant professor in KU’s geology department, thinks there is an idea to lessen such debates in the future. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it doesn’t start with geology, but rather geometry.

Farm fields almost everywhere are square or rectangular. However, the irrigation systems often used on some of the most prime lands — the irrigation systems are called center pivots — travel in a circle. The combination means that in many prime farm fields, the portion of the land that is getting watered is a giant circle inside a square. That leaves four corners of a field that don’t get much water and are far less valuable as farmland.

The idea that Zipper and a team of researchers has recently received nearly $900,000 in grants to explore is whether it would be feasible to place solar panels in the corners of those fields.

Additionally, the project also aims to tackle another contentious point with solar panels — stormwater runoff. The pilot project will include a rainwater collection system. Stormwater runoff from the solar panels will be collected on site, and then sent back into the ground to help recharge the aquifer from which the irrigation system gets its water. Zipper hopes that about a third of irrigation needs could be met from that water.

Could this be a system that allows agriculture and solar development to get along better?

“Call me back in three or four years,” Zipper said.

In other words, that is one of the key questions the pilot project hopes to answer. The pilot project is still in its planning stages, with hopes that it will be operational next year. The team of researchers has secured a farm field site just outside of Garden City to house the solar panels and rainwater collection system.

The pilot project would house 36 solar panels, which is in no way comparable to the proposed Kansas Sky Energy Center for north of North Lawrence. That project would have more than 237,000 panels, or about 8 million square feet of the structures. It would provide power to about 30,000 homes. The pilot project, on the other hand, may not provide enough power to fully offset the electricity used by the irrigation pump.

Keep in mind, though, Kansas has tens of millions of acres of farm fields. If large numbers of those farm fields could have solar panels in their corners and rainwater collection systems that would help irrigate those fields, solar energy production in the state could be boosted without the fight between the agriculture and renewable energy sectors.

“We are trying to bypass the big debate we are seeing in North Lawrence right now with farms versus solar,” Zipper said.

Finding resolutions to that solar vs. agriculture conflict seem important because the two industries have a natural tension, Zipper said. Flat, wide-open farm fields are some of the most desirable sites for large solar projects. But any loss of land can have outsized impacts on the profitability of farming operations.

“Agriculture and renewable energy are both very low-margin businesses, so it is hard to combine them in a way that makes financial sense,” Zipper said.

Zipper — whose team includes not only geologists but also other experts on energy, agriculture and related topics — hopes the pilot project can be an important part of future solutions. When completed, the project will have data about how much water was captured and put back in the soil, how much energy was produced, the dollar amounts the farmer received for that energy, and other key findings.

But Zipper is hopeful the pilot project will help introduce a new mindset as well.

“I think where we start to see opportunities for solutions is when we think about it from the perspective of the landscape,” he said. “Once you think about it from the perspective of the landscape, you can figure out where on that landscape does it make the most sense to focus agriculture activities, where does it make the most sense to focus on renewable energy activities. . . By putting those pieces together, hopefully in a strategic way, we hopefully can get past some of this either/or mentality and start seeing how there are ways that we can do both effectively.”

photo by: Adobe Stock

Aerial drone view of solar panels at a solar energy generation farm at Sunset in South Wales, UK

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While reporting for this article, I did check in with Douglas County officials for an update on where the approval process for the Kansas Sky Energy Center stands. The project has received some approvals from the Douglas County Commission, but the developers still must submit a stormwater management plan and an agrivoltaics plan.

In case you have forgotten, agrivoltaics refers to how agriculture activities can continue to happen in conjunction with the solar panels. The Douglas County Commission has been insistent that the Kansas Sky Energy Center have a strong agrivoltaics plan, but such a plan was not ready for presentation to commissioners when the conditional use permit for the solar project was voted on in April. The same holds true for the stormwater management plan.

This week, a county spokeswoman said there’s no update on when those plans will be completed and presented to county commissioners for approval. We’ve asked for an update several times since April, but the county has been steadfast in being tight-lipped about when those plans may be done.

The Kansas Sky Energy Center is the subject of a lawsuit, as we’ve reported. A group of landowners and North Lawrence stakeholders have sued the county over the approvals they have granted thus far for the project. But the county, which is fighting the lawsuit, has said the legal matter hasn’t put the completion of the plans on hold.

Both the stormwater and agrivoltaics plans will be important, but the agrivoltaics plan will be particularly interesting. That’s because the idea of solar and agriculture working together is a relatively new one with many tensions, as listed above.

I recently came across an article from The Wall Street Journal that mentions the developer of the Kansas Sky Energy Center and its agrivoltaics efforts. Savion — a subsidiary of the oil giant Shell — is developing Kansas Sky Energy Center for the Kansas-Missouri utility Evergy.

The WSJ article notes that Savion is “building the first-ever utility-scale solar array with row crops in Ohio.” The WSJ article doesn’t provide many details, but it sounds like the Ohio project is producing alfalfa and other such forage crops.

Whether that is the plan for the Douglas County project, I don’t know because we haven’t gotten any updates. Regardless, I thought it would be good to pass along some of the national reports about Savion.

The WSJ article was interesting for another reason though. It highlighted the division that exists in the solar industry itself about the feasibility of agrivoltaics. While Savion officials were quoted about the high potential of mixing agriculture and solar, Sheldon Kimber, chief executive of solar developer Intersect Power, said otherwise.

“Generally speaking, (agrivoltaics is) just absolutely not feasible at scale,” WSJ quoted Kimber as saying. “Beyond sheep and pollinators, it’s just not really a thing.”

The article said that to do more traditional agriculture in conjunction with solar panels, the height of the panels must be raised significantly to allow farming equipment under the panels. However, researchers said raising the height of the panels increases their costs “exponentially.” The article cited numbers that suggest the per-watt installation costs for taller solar panels are about 300% higher than traditional panels.

The article, though, also highlighted that technology around agrivoltaics is new and evolving, which provides hope that solar and agriculture can soon better co-exist. The headline of the WSJ article summed up where many people see the issue standing: “Combining Solar Power with Farming is Getting Easier. Developers are Wary of Added Costs.”