if your initial reaction is we have tons of empty land why would we ever build solar panels over a farm?
this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation. just like a hospital may want to cover their parking lot to offset costs.
at giant scale do these solar location choices optimize the absolutely best use of land for cheapest possible electricity generation? no. but at small scale it can make sense for these individual owners
You can farm and do industrial scale solar on the same land. It works extremely well for lamb herds, shade tolerant crops like strawberries, and greenhouses. I'm extremely interested in this area and actually starting some personal projects where I live, around agri-solar that is actually farming.
Optimization for land area in agriculture is already a catch-22 type affair: We subsidize the planting of corn to produce ethanol -- one of the most inefficient forms of solar energy 'harvesting' possible. So going directly to electrical harvesting while retaining the ability to grow high-value crops is certainly still advantageous...
To put some numbers: ~40% of the corn grown in the US (approx. 5.4 billion bushels out of roughly 14.9 billion bushels total production) goes toward ethanol production
One thing the article doesn't mention is that some plants prefer a little shade.
So while broccoli yeilds may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere. So leafy vegetables like spinach might be doing equivalently fine under the magenta shades in New Jersey, but might actually be even better in Texas.
> Broccoli cultivated under them grew more slowly, requiring an additional 25 days for harvest, but produced roughly the same yield. Meanwhile, these magenta sunscreens improved the microclimate below, reducing the “vapor pressure deficit”—a measure of when plants need to halt photosynthesis to avoid excessive water loss. This may have improved the plants’ efficiency in converting sunlight into plant biomass, which increased by 2.8- to 4.5-fold compared to unshaded plants.
> The shaded plants’ levels of macronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus were either higher than or similar to unshaded plants, while levels of some micronutrients such as iron, copper, and zinc were slightly lower.
Are there realistic ways of harvesting vegetables at scale that are underneath mounted solar panels, with all their supports?
Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
I'm just imagining that you are going to need a lot of vertical clearance for tractors, and support posts will have to be widely spaced enough that the horizontal beams supporting the panels will have to be quite strong, and that at some point this is less solar panels in a field, and more like constructing a building with solar panels on its roof.
> Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.
Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.
Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.
I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.
You can see there are already huge examples of this in Australia with sheep grazing under panels and it's just barely starting in New York state with a cornell pilot. In my opinion it's the future of electricity in agricultural areas.
I find the physics of wavelength-dependent materials properties oddly satisfying. You can do clever things like this, extracting energy from different parts of the spectrum by combining materials and conversion processes. You can beam waste heat back to space through the atmosphere’s “infrared window”. You can explain global warming from first principles. Fascinating stuff!
Reflect back shortwave IR sunlight below the bandgap of the solar panels.
Make the solar panels "black" at longer IR wavelengths corresponding to the temperature of the panels and to IR windows in the atmosphere, to maximize emission of heat back into space.
I'm current taking composite construction certification courses because modern manufacturing provides for customizing the material for very specific uses. Low volume production with very specific mechanical and physical properties.
I feel the same way about how fiber optics can create bandwidth by just slicing up the spectrum for different channels of data (my rudimentary understanding anyway). I like how even after all this time we find new and clever ways to work with light.
Wavelength-division multiplexing[1]... it's what they use with fiber-to-the-home to get bidirectional signals with a single strand of fiber. Or the big-boy version is DWDM which ISPs use to stuff dozens of customers on a single strand.
There are countless square miles of vacant land in the USA that are unsuitable for farming and ideal for solar. This might be useful in areas where vacant land is actually scarce.
The US is huge. The problem is efficiency of transmission. But maybe we just install 2x the solar to overcome that? When energy is so low cost we can afford to be a bit less efficient.
It really does seem like a no brainer. They should already be close to other infrastructure and they provide shade for parked cars which reduces the energy spent cooling the cars when people drive away. Even if you make very safe assumptions about the total area of parking lots in the US and their sun exposure, the amount of energy they could generate from solar panels on average rivals the current solar output.
CdTe panels are limited by availability of tellurium. Maybe we'll mine that in space one day; much of the Earth's Te was lost as volatile H2Te. The abundance of Te in carbonaceous chondrites is about 1000x that in the Earth's crust.
Given that it's about as abundant as platinum (which trades at ~$50000/kg), tellurium is pretty cheap right now (~120$/kg, about 10 times the price of copper).
Since it's an almost free byproduct of copper electrorefining (>1% concentration in copper anode slime, but low annual production of ~800 tons, limiting CdTe panel production to ~100GW/year short term [1]), I don't think that mining it in space is ever gonna pay off for terrestrial panel production, because if it was priced somewhat comparably to platinum group metals you could never ever justify any demand for it (panels would be much too expensive compared to alternatives, tellurium is already a relevant cost factor for them despite being cheap-ish) => and you'd obviously use all interplanetary mining/transport capability on platinum and its ilk instead.
Kinetic orbital bombardment is utterly worthless from a military perspective.
People tend to have a completely inaccurate view on this because of bad popsci, out-of-context feasibility studies from the 1950s and fiction that just leans toward the "fantasy" on that.
The reasons for this is are very simple:
1) There is no "high ground". Being in orbit does not enable you to throw things "down" for free, thats simply not how orbital dynamics work. All the impact energy you have to pay for up front, and delta-v on some orbital object is almost inevitably more expensive than the equivalent amount of explosives on the ground.
2) Anything launched from beyond earth orbit would be unusably delayed. And telegraphed.
3) The concept does not have a single selling point from a military perspective; not really faster than an ICBM, penetration is limited by newtonian physics regardless of speed and more expensive than just delivering the equivalent amount of explosives (or nuclear payload) via missile.
edit: Yes an interplanetary transport system could be weaponized. But so could the explosives currently used in mining (~tens of millions of tons per year), no one cares.
I like the idea of hybridizing the solar infrastructure to work with advanced AG systems. I watched a recent tour of a modern strawberry farm, and I was surprised that they were using wheeled robots instead of overhead tracks.
I'd love this for a home greenhouse... I live in an area where during the summer insolation is high enough that some combination of large amounts shading and airflow (wasting humidity) is needed... wavelength-selective shading seems like an interesting idea to start with, and energy recovery from it is a nice add-on.
For a larger greenhouse a mix of clear non solar and solar pv pannels optimised for different plants could be the way to go.
The polycarbonate clear pannels are actualy cheap and likely strong enough that I am considering mounting solar pv directly to them. So: scratch building a greenhouse frame, that will support all the loads, and attaching the panels, and run the wires right through the polycarb, standard solar pannels, install@40" width and that works out to 3 per 12', 12 pannels for 40', for a neat eve to eve install.
Wild, I did a science fair experiment on plant growth vs light color as a young kid! i had each plant in a different shade of upside down tumbler cup and compared the growth. N=1 for each cup, but I remember being surprised that the plants really didn’t seem to care when you filtered out certain shades.
Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels. You still need lights with magenta panels to hit 18+hrs of light a day. Once the lights are already installed, specialized panels would be hard to justify a mark-up.
> Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels.
Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants.
I was thinking this further through. What you write was indeed the next thought… and the reason we don’t grow in multistory factories is… cost! So sunlight is the OG for greenhouse growing. Cost of m2 free ground or glass do not matter when compared to building space, lights and energy.
This does lead me back to the idea that to cover greenhouses with translucent panels, you would need translucent panels to have undergone a price drop comparable only with regular panels. Which is unlikely. And then you have risks like hail risks that multiply when covering greenhouses with panels. Although that might be an upside, since greenhouses in NL are actively going towards break free glass which is pretty expensive. So perhaps there is a break free translucent solar panel upgrade route that could work out. (I am sceptical, but it is a nice idea indeed. Light is a spectrum and not all light is equal in photosyntesis.)
I think the question is, are these panels less expensive than taking normal panels, maybe with LEDs to help growth at night, and adding solar tracking to optimize solar generation, plant shading, and plant growth?
if your initial reaction is we have tons of empty land why would we ever build solar panels over a farm?
this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation. just like a hospital may want to cover their parking lot to offset costs.
at giant scale do these solar location choices optimize the absolutely best use of land for cheapest possible electricity generation? no. but at small scale it can make sense for these individual owners
https://electrek.co/2026/10/05/six-flags-has-installed-one-o...
You can farm and do industrial scale solar on the same land. It works extremely well for lamb herds, shade tolerant crops like strawberries, and greenhouses. I'm extremely interested in this area and actually starting some personal projects where I live, around agri-solar that is actually farming.
Optimization for land area in agriculture is already a catch-22 type affair: We subsidize the planting of corn to produce ethanol -- one of the most inefficient forms of solar energy 'harvesting' possible. So going directly to electrical harvesting while retaining the ability to grow high-value crops is certainly still advantageous...
To put some numbers: ~40% of the corn grown in the US (approx. 5.4 billion bushels out of roughly 14.9 billion bushels total production) goes toward ethanol production
Sure, but given that a 100 acre corn farm in Ohio would make about $80k in revenue and if you're lucky about $40k in profit
A 100 acre solar plant in Ohio would make well about $1m-$1.5m in revenue
Why would you increase the cost and complexity to try to increase your revenue from $1-1.5m to a massive $1-1.5m?
Or you could just lease the land to a solar operator for about $100k a year, with no expenses
It's a solution looking for a problem.
One thing the article doesn't mention is that some plants prefer a little shade.
So while broccoli yeilds may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere. So leafy vegetables like spinach might be doing equivalently fine under the magenta shades in New Jersey, but might actually be even better in Texas.
They certainly do mention this:
> Broccoli cultivated under them grew more slowly, requiring an additional 25 days for harvest, but produced roughly the same yield. Meanwhile, these magenta sunscreens improved the microclimate below, reducing the “vapor pressure deficit”—a measure of when plants need to halt photosynthesis to avoid excessive water loss. This may have improved the plants’ efficiency in converting sunlight into plant biomass, which increased by 2.8- to 4.5-fold compared to unshaded plants.
> The shaded plants’ levels of macronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus were either higher than or similar to unshaded plants, while levels of some micronutrients such as iron, copper, and zinc were slightly lower.
Are there realistic ways of harvesting vegetables at scale that are underneath mounted solar panels, with all their supports?
Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
I'm just imagining that you are going to need a lot of vertical clearance for tractors, and support posts will have to be widely spaced enough that the horizontal beams supporting the panels will have to be quite strong, and that at some point this is less solar panels in a field, and more like constructing a building with solar panels on its roof.
> Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?
It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.
Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.
Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.
I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.
You can see there are already huge examples of this in Australia with sheep grazing under panels and it's just barely starting in New York state with a cornell pilot. In my opinion it's the future of electricity in agricultural areas.
I find the physics of wavelength-dependent materials properties oddly satisfying. You can do clever things like this, extracting energy from different parts of the spectrum by combining materials and conversion processes. You can beam waste heat back to space through the atmosphere’s “infrared window”. You can explain global warming from first principles. Fascinating stuff!
Wait we could reflect back infrared heat into space and still collect solar energy as electricity - so doing two jobs at once in, say, a desert.
Re-greening at a profit?
Careful engineering can help here.
Reflect back shortwave IR sunlight below the bandgap of the solar panels.
Make the solar panels "black" at longer IR wavelengths corresponding to the temperature of the panels and to IR windows in the atmosphere, to maximize emission of heat back into space.
I'm current taking composite construction certification courses because modern manufacturing provides for customizing the material for very specific uses. Low volume production with very specific mechanical and physical properties.
I feel the same way about how fiber optics can create bandwidth by just slicing up the spectrum for different channels of data (my rudimentary understanding anyway). I like how even after all this time we find new and clever ways to work with light.
Even more wild than spectrum slicing is polarisation encoding multiple data streams on the same wavelength.
And then doing amplification on that light without converting it back to electrical signals.
Wavelength-division multiplexing[1]... it's what they use with fiber-to-the-home to get bidirectional signals with a single strand of fiber. Or the big-boy version is DWDM which ISPs use to stuff dozens of customers on a single strand.
You might also be interested in https://phys.org/news/2026-11-air-holes-silicon-wafers-flat....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexi...
There are countless square miles of vacant land in the USA that are unsuitable for farming and ideal for solar. This might be useful in areas where vacant land is actually scarce.
The US is huge. The problem is efficiency of transmission. But maybe we just install 2x the solar to overcome that? When energy is so low cost we can afford to be a bit less efficient.
I feel like starting with parking lots might be better than filling "empty" land though?
It really does seem like a no brainer. They should already be close to other infrastructure and they provide shade for parked cars which reduces the energy spent cooling the cars when people drive away. Even if you make very safe assumptions about the total area of parking lots in the US and their sun exposure, the amount of energy they could generate from solar panels on average rivals the current solar output.
Where i am in the eu, car parks are where its at. Apart from on dirty great field which is being filled with panels for some reason.
CdTe panels are limited by availability of tellurium. Maybe we'll mine that in space one day; much of the Earth's Te was lost as volatile H2Te. The abundance of Te in carbonaceous chondrites is about 1000x that in the Earth's crust.
Given that it's about as abundant as platinum (which trades at ~$50000/kg), tellurium is pretty cheap right now (~120$/kg, about 10 times the price of copper).
Since it's an almost free byproduct of copper electrorefining (>1% concentration in copper anode slime, but low annual production of ~800 tons, limiting CdTe panel production to ~100GW/year short term [1]), I don't think that mining it in space is ever gonna pay off for terrestrial panel production, because if it was priced somewhat comparably to platinum group metals you could never ever justify any demand for it (panels would be much too expensive compared to alternatives, tellurium is already a relevant cost factor for them despite being cheap-ish) => and you'd obviously use all interplanetary mining/transport capability on platinum and its ilk instead.
[1]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/10/global-cadmium-tellur...
On top of that, there are 53% more atoms in a kg of Tl than there are atoms in a kg of Pt!
There's the minor issue in that the technology to bring all that metal back home is also a weapon of mass destruction :-/
If it gets separated at the asteroid the mass brought back is small. Total world production of Te is about 1000 tons/year.
Kinetic orbital bombardment is utterly worthless from a military perspective.
People tend to have a completely inaccurate view on this because of bad popsci, out-of-context feasibility studies from the 1950s and fiction that just leans toward the "fantasy" on that.
The reasons for this is are very simple:
1) There is no "high ground". Being in orbit does not enable you to throw things "down" for free, thats simply not how orbital dynamics work. All the impact energy you have to pay for up front, and delta-v on some orbital object is almost inevitably more expensive than the equivalent amount of explosives on the ground.
2) Anything launched from beyond earth orbit would be unusably delayed. And telegraphed.
3) The concept does not have a single selling point from a military perspective; not really faster than an ICBM, penetration is limited by newtonian physics regardless of speed and more expensive than just delivering the equivalent amount of explosives (or nuclear payload) via missile.
edit: Yes an interplanetary transport system could be weaponized. But so could the explosives currently used in mining (~tens of millions of tons per year), no one cares.
I imagine a time long long ago, early humans debating the proliferation of fire.
I like the idea of hybridizing the solar infrastructure to work with advanced AG systems. I watched a recent tour of a modern strawberry farm, and I was surprised that they were using wheeled robots instead of overhead tracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TumxO2glmPQ
I'd love this for a home greenhouse... I live in an area where during the summer insolation is high enough that some combination of large amounts shading and airflow (wasting humidity) is needed... wavelength-selective shading seems like an interesting idea to start with, and energy recovery from it is a nice add-on.
For a larger greenhouse a mix of clear non solar and solar pv pannels optimised for different plants could be the way to go. The polycarbonate clear pannels are actualy cheap and likely strong enough that I am considering mounting solar pv directly to them. So: scratch building a greenhouse frame, that will support all the loads, and attaching the panels, and run the wires right through the polycarb, standard solar pannels, install@40" width and that works out to 3 per 12', 12 pannels for 40', for a neat eve to eve install.
Wild, I did a science fair experiment on plant growth vs light color as a young kid! i had each plant in a different shade of upside down tumbler cup and compared the growth. N=1 for each cup, but I remember being surprised that the plants really didn’t seem to care when you filtered out certain shades.
I especially like how this could reduce the need for irrigation in dryer climates.
Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels. You still need lights with magenta panels to hit 18+hrs of light a day. Once the lights are already installed, specialized panels would be hard to justify a mark-up.
> Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels.
Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants.
This is the classic out of depth HN take
I was thinking this further through. What you write was indeed the next thought… and the reason we don’t grow in multistory factories is… cost! So sunlight is the OG for greenhouse growing. Cost of m2 free ground or glass do not matter when compared to building space, lights and energy.
This does lead me back to the idea that to cover greenhouses with translucent panels, you would need translucent panels to have undergone a price drop comparable only with regular panels. Which is unlikely. And then you have risks like hail risks that multiply when covering greenhouses with panels. Although that might be an upside, since greenhouses in NL are actively going towards break free glass which is pretty expensive. So perhaps there is a break free translucent solar panel upgrade route that could work out. (I am sceptical, but it is a nice idea indeed. Light is a spectrum and not all light is equal in photosyntesis.)
Aren't there toxic substances used in the panels?
Yes but it's sealed between panes of glass:
Image: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.xcrp.2026.103555/asset/c8...
Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
I think the question is, are these panels less expensive than taking normal panels, maybe with LEDs to help growth at night, and adding solar tracking to optimize solar generation, plant shading, and plant growth?
Answered in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428018