Sunzaun - Vertical Solar

A Norwegian company just put vertical solar on rooftops, and the logic behind it is the same one we use on farmland.

Over Easy Solar's idea is simple: instead of reworking every roof to fit a conventional tilted array, adapt the panel to the roof. Small bifacial panels are mounted vertically, arrive nearly fully assembled, and need no roof penetrations or heavy ballast. By the company's own description, their largest install is in Tromsø, Norway: 320 kWp across about 2,670 m², north of the Arctic Circle, in snow and wind that would rule out a lot of conventional systems.

What we appreciated most is how plainly the coverage states the tradeoff. Vertical doesn't beat a well-tilted system in every season, and in some summer periods it produces less. What it offers is a different generation profile (more in the mornings, evenings, and winter) and power on surfaces that would otherwise get no solar at all.

That's the same reason vertical works on farms. A tilted array asks the land to change. A vertical one fits around what the land is already doing: grazing, row crops, a perimeter, a fence line.

Different surface, same principle. Stop asking which sites are "good enough" for solar, and start asking what the panel has to look like to fit them.

Credit to the Over Easy team, and to Terra50 for spotlighting them.

ai image for visualization only

"What's the ROI on agrivoltaics?" is the most common question we get from farmers and ranchers — and most of the online answers aren't built for this kind of system. Here's what the numbers actually say right now.

First, a timing reality: the 30% federal solar tax credit required construction to begin by July 4, 2026. That date has passed. If you're starting a new project today, plan your numbers without that credit — it's not coming back for new construction. First-year bonus depreciation is still available, which matters, but it's not the same as a 30% credit off the top.

On financing: USDA's REAP program can cover up to 25% of project costs as a grant, or up to 75% combined with a loan guarantee — but new REAP grant awards are currently paused while USDA finalizes updated rules. The loan-guarantee path is still open and worth pursuing now rather than waiting on the grant side to reopen.

On land value — here's where the comparison most people make is the wrong one. Traditional solar land leases run $500 to $1,000+ per acre per year, but that's for land taken entirely out of production for 20-35 years. That's not what a fence-line or dual-use vertical system does. You're not leasing your acreage away. You're keeping it in production and adding a second income stream on the perimeter that was previously generating nothing.

On selling power back to the grid: be skeptical of anyone who pitches this as a revenue stream. Net metering rules vary by state and are trending toward less favorable export rates, not more. The dependable return isn't selling power — it's not having to buy it. Offsetting your own usage is a number you can actually count on; a check from the utility for excess generation is not.

The honest bottom line: vertical bifacial systems do cost more upfront than a standard ground-mount — real estimates put that premium at 20-40% per kW. But the math isn't "solar lease income vs. row crop income." It's "what you already pay for power, held constant for 25+ years, against a system that doesn't take your land out of production to get there."

If you're evaluating sites for a data center right now, you already know the real constraint isn't compute. It's power — specifically, how long it takes to get it.

Grid interconnection queues in major US markets now stretch 3-4 years in many cases. Land near existing substations is scarce and getting more expensive. And even once you've secured a site, permitting timelines for a large-footprint facility can push a project's total timeline past 70 months from site selection to first live workload.

There's a second layer to this that doesn't show up in interconnection queue data: community pushback. Utility-scale solar buildouts and new transmission lines face their own siting and permitting battles — often the same land-use objections that slow the data centers themselves. A power source that uses acreage already inside your fence line doesn't create a second fight over a second parcel of land.

None of that changes by waiting. It changes by rethinking what "power infrastructure" means for a given site.

Vertical bifacial solar generates from both faces of the panel, which means it produces meaningful power from a footprint that would otherwise sit unused — the perimeter fence line, an access road buffer, land too narrow for a conventional array. For sites where every acre is already spoken for, that's not a marginal gain. It's power capacity that doesn't compete with your building footprint or your parking, and doesn't add months to your land-use approval.

To be direct about what this does and doesn't solve: this isn't a replacement for grid interconnection, and it won't run a GPU cluster on its own. What it offers is a supplemental, behind-the-meter generation layer — reducing demand exposure, adding resilience, and putting unused acreage to work — while the bigger power story (grid connection, substation upgrades) plays out on its own timeline.

If land-constrained power is part of what's slowing your site plan down, it's worth a conversation about what's actually possible on the acreage you already have.

Josh and Rebekah Pierce own 20 acres. Today they run sheep across nine community solar sites in northern New York, and it's what let Josh farm full time.

Their solar grazing contracts pay for vegetation management, and the sheep get shade, shelter from weather, and a grazing season that can stretch from April into November. That means less hay to buy and a buffer against high input costs, so they aren't leaning on operating loans to cover the bills. In Rebekah's words, the land isn't out of production, and often it's more productive because farmers get access to acreage they'd never otherwise have.

Sheep grazing is the most mature form of dual-use solar in the U.S. today, and this is why it works: solar can be income for the farmer rather than a competitor for the land.

It's also the same principle behind vertical agrivoltaics. Panels stand upright, the rows between them stay open, and the land keeps producing.

Farmers aren't asking whether solar and agriculture can coexist. They're already doing it.

The 4th California–Germany Agrivoltaics Conference is just over a month out.

On November 12, farmers, developers, researchers, and policymakers from both sides of the Atlantic will spend a full day at UC Davis — where our panels are already in the ground — on what's actually working in agrivoltaics, and what still needs solving: installation costs, realistic revenue numbers, how lenders and insurers are pricing risk, and what permitting really requires.

If scaling agrivoltaics is part of your 2027 planning, this is the room to be in. If you haven't registered yet, now's the time — link below.

A federal court just ordered the EPA to release $7 billion in Solar for All funding it had tried to cancel — and it's a reminder of how much durable policy tailwind still exists behind residential and community solar.

The program, created under the Inflation Reduction Act, was designed to reach more than 900,000 households, save families an estimated $350 million a year on electricity bills, and support 200,000 jobs in the process. It was terminated by the EPA in August 2025, then challenged in court by a coalition that included attorneys general from 23 states, labor groups, and solar businesses. The ruling this month found that the cancellation was unlawful — Congress funded and authorized the program, and the agency didn't have the authority to unilaterally end it.

For an industry that's had to absorb a lot of policy whiplash over the past few years, this matters beyond the dollar figure. It's a signal that solar funding commitments made through legislation carry real legal weight, even when administrations change. That's the kind of durability that matters for long-horizon decisions — whether that's a utility weighing a multi-year interconnection plan, a landowner considering what to do with underused acreage, or a developer sizing a project around expected incentive timelines.

It doesn't change what we do day to day. But it's one more data point supporting the same thesis we've been building on: distributed, resilient solar infrastructure is a long-term bet, not a policy-cycle bet.

We came across an array recently that breaks every rule of "optimal" solar siting — and it's still doing real work.

The panels face each other rather than the sun. The tracking system that was supposed to orient them stopped working years ago, so they're locked in a fixed position that no engineer would design from scratch. And yet the owner still pulls in roughly 70% of peak performance — enough to fully offset his utility bill.

The context is what makes this interesting. Part of his field went fallow, not because the land stopped being productive, but because groundwater restrictions made it unworkable. It's a pattern showing up more and more across California ag: land sidelined by water access, not by soil or sun. He can't export the power he generates — but he doesn't need to. It's already covering his own usage, on infrastructure nobody is actively maintaining.

That's the part worth sitting with. Even a non-ideal, non-optimized, quietly self-managed system still proves the core thesis behind decentralized solar: power generated close to where it's used has value that outlasts perfect conditions, warranties, and even the company that installed it. Solar doesn't have to be pretty or textbook to keep working.

We didn't design this system, and it isn't ours — but it's a real-world argument for a way of thinking about solar we believe in: put generation where the constraint actually is (water, grid access, cost) rather than assuming one orientation fits every acre.

A new study just put tilted vs. vertical solar to the test — same site, same capacity, one full year. 📊

Tilted came out ahead on raw yield: +35% more energy per kWp. ☀️

But vertical didn't cost more to get there — 0% increase in cost per kWh, plus more even output through the day and crops that barely noticed the difference underneath. 🌱

The winner isn't as clear as you thought.

A new study out of Jordan just gave vertical agrivoltaics its most complete real-world test yet — a full operational year, side-by-side, same capacity, same site.

The honest number first: the tilted array produced about 35% more energy per kWp annually than the vertical east-west system. (Which is no surprise to us) If you stopped reading there, vertical would look like the compromise.

Here's what the rest of the data shows. That extra yield from the tilted system came at a cost — literally. Its land-use efficiency required elevated structures that pushed its levelized cost of electricity up roughly 88% compared to a standard ground-mount. The vertical system delivered its output without that cost increase at all.

The vertical array also held its own in the ways that matter for coexistence: more uniform generation through the day, stronger early-morning and late-afternoon output, lower soiling losses, and light conditions that barely touched what the crops underneath needed. The tilted system's under-panel strip, by contrast, could only support low-light crops.

Lower annual yield isn't the whole story. Cost per kilowatt-hour and what the land can still do underneath it are the parts worth reading to the end for.