Sunzaun - Vertical Solar

Big-picture validation this week: reporting on U.S. solar development is now calling out agrivoltaics as one of the fastest-growing models in the industry — nearly 700 installations, ~85,000 acres, and ~14 GW nationwide, up from a fraction of that just five years ago.

We don't need the headlines to tell us that — we're living it. This is our vertical array at UC Davis, where researchers are studying tomato yield, soil moisture, and microclimate effects alongside power generation. Same land, doing double duty.

The industry is catching up to what working farms have known for a while: land can produce food and energy at once.

Pictured: the Sunzaun installation at the UC Davis

American farmland suddenly has two suitors. Only one of them lets the farm keep farming.

pv magazine USA published a piece this week that connects the numbers: over 1,200 data centers already operate in the US, and nearly 1,800 more are planned — a pipeline that would triple capacity. The large ones want a thousand-plus acres each, and underproducing farmland is exactly what their developers are shopping for. Farming-dependent counties have noticed; some have already banned data centers outright.

Solar is the other suitor — and the terms are different. Recent farm-economy survey data shows more than half of farmers discussing solar leases were offered $1,000 per acre or more per year, often beating the net return from crops on the same ground. And unlike a sale, a lease is income the farm collects while staying a farm — the kind of predictable revenue agriculture almost never gets to count on.

But here's the detail in the article most readers will scroll past, and it's the one that matters: a handful of counties have quietly flipped the script on solar developers. One Colorado county now allows solar above 20 acres on working farmland only if the design keeps farming underneath. A Pennsylvania county restricts building on its best soils without it. Another Colorado county approved an 80 MW project only after sheep grazing and irrigation were written into the plan.

Read that again: agrivoltaics isn't just a nicer way to build solar in those counties. It's the price of admission.

We've been making this argument for years — that keeping the land visibly farming is a permitting strategy, not a design preference. These counties just turned the strategy into law. And with agrivoltaics still under 5% of US installed solar capacity, the developers who learn to design for the farm first are walking into an open lane.

The land is going to work for someone. The question every farm community is now asking: does it keep working for the farm?

If you develop, permit, or farm: is dual-use showing up as a requirement in your county yet — or is it still a bargaining chip?

Photo credit: Rutgars Agrivoltaics Program, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

Four states are paying landowners for agrivoltaic electricity. Others are cutting property taxes for it. California is doing neither.

Massachusetts and New Jersey compensate landowners directly for the power their agrivoltaic systems produce. Maryland, Nevada, and Colorado offer property tax exemptions for agrivoltaics projects. Colorado, New Jersey, and New York are funding research and demonstration projects. Oregon, Colorado, and Connecticut have stood up legislative task forces to study the space.

California — the state producing more solar power than anywhere else in the country — isn't on a single one of these lists.

Farmers here are left to figure out dual-use land economics on their own, without the compensation structures, tax relief, or research support that states with a fraction of California's solar capacity are already building. The land, the sun, and the demand are all here. The policy infrastructure isn't.

If California wants to keep its lead in solar, agrivoltaics can't be an afterthought in Sacramento.

Last week we shared research showing people accept solar when they can see the land still farming. The response told us something: everyone agrees education is the unlock. Almost nobody has a playbook for it.

So here's ours — how agrivoltaics actually gets understood in a farm community, drawn from what works in the field.

Start with who does the talking. The developer is the least trusted voice in the room. Cooperative extension agents are among the most trusted in American agriculture — and most have never been briefed on agri-PV. One field day with your county extension office outlasts any ad campaign. Better still: let a farmer who already works between panels tell the story. A peer with mud on their boots converts more skeptics in ten minutes than an engineer with slides converts in an hour.

Go where people already gather. A demo row or scale model at the county fair. Ten minutes at the farm bureau chapter meeting. An op-ed in the county weekly — 4,000 readers, and they're the same 4,000 who show up to permitting hearings. The coffee shop conversation beats the municipal hearing every time; skepticism softens as formality drops.

Show it at eye level. This is what the research actually found: acceptance forms up close, where people can see the land is still farmed. So open the gates. Farm days and site visits are the highest-converting tactic that exists — nothing argues like standing between rows with crops at your feet. Take county commissioners to a working site before the vote, not after opposition hardens. And at hearings, retire the aerial site plan — it reads as an industrial facility. Show the view from the road, from the neighbor's porch, from inside the rows.

Answer the hard questions before they're asked. Land loss. Glare. Property values. What happens in year 30. The project that volunteers its own tough questions owns the room; the one that waits to be asked looks like it's hiding something. Publish the community math while you're at it — lease income, tax base, who benefits and how.

None of this is a communications trick. It's the same principle as the technology itself: keep the farming visible, and the rest follows.

What would you add? Genuinely asking — the best tactics we've seen came from communities, not companies.

The biggest obstacle to solar in farm country isn't engineering. It's the county meeting.

We wrote last week about Virginia, where nearly two-thirds of counties had restricted or banned large-scale solar before the state's new agrivoltaics law. That pattern repeats across the country: projects don't usually die on economics. They die on opposition.

Which is why the most interesting agrivoltaics study of the past year isn't only about crops.

Researchers at Aarhus University ran a full-scale vertical agrivoltaic pilot in the Danish countryside — and measured two things at once. The agronomy first: wheat and grass-clover mixtures grew just as well between the vertical panel rows as in open fields. No yield penalty. The panels occupy only about a tenth of the field, and producing food and power together required up to a quarter less land than producing them separately.

Then the part almost nobody studies: what people think. The team put more than 100 participants into an immersive VR version of the landscape. Vertical agrivoltaics were rated significantly more positively than conventional solar parks — and the effect was strongest up close, where viewers could see the land was still being farmed. Participants read the vertical systems as more innovative and more environmentally friendly than the solar parks they're used to opposing.

Read that finding the way a developer should: social license is infrastructure. A project the neighbors can accept is a project that gets permitted, built, and left alone for 30 years. A technically perfect project the community rejects produces zero kilowatt-hours.

The panels that keep the land visibly farming aren't just an agronomic choice. They're a permitting strategy.

If you develop or permit projects in agricultural communities: what does opposition actually sound like where you work — and what has ever changed a skeptic's mind?

The agrivoltaics event we circle on the calendar every year just opened registration.

The 4th California Germany Agrivoltaics Conference lands November 12 at UC Davis — and this year's theme says everything about where this field is headed: Scaling Agrivoltaics — Technology Innovation & Farm Economics.

Notice what that agenda is really about: money. The roundtables tackle what installations actually cost, what revenue farmers can realistically expect, how lenders and insurers weigh the risk, which panel systems fit which operations, and what permitting truly requires. When a conference stops asking "does it work?" and starts asking "how do the loans get underwritten?" — that's a technology growing up.

The format is the draw. This isn't a trade show. It's farmers, researchers, developers, policymakers, and farming associations from California and Germany in one ballroom, comparing field data from pilot sites on both sides of the Atlantic. Past editions have drawn 200+ attendees and 30+ expert speakers, and the conversations in the hallways are worth the ticket alone.

And a day earlier, there's a guided field visit to see working installations and crops on the ground — approval required and spots genuinely limited, which is the practical reason to register early rather than in November.

For us, this one is personal. Our vertical system has been producing alongside research crops at UC Davis for four years — this conference happens a short walk from panels we think about every day. And bridging German engineering with California agriculture is not just the event's mission; it's ours.

November 12. UC Davis. Registration link in the comments — and if you're coming, tell us. We'd like to shake your hand there.

Your fence line could be your next revenue stream.

Every working farm has one: a perimeter fence doing exactly one job — keeping livestock in, wildlife out. Meanwhile, that same boundary sits empty for 10+ hours of daylight, year-round.

New independent research from the University of York just put hard numbers behind what vertical bifacial solar fencing could do with that space.

The findings, from a full year of monitoring across all seasons and weather conditions:

→ 26.91% more energy production in early morning hours vs. conventional tilted panels
→ 22.88% more energy production in late afternoon vs. conventional tilted panels
→ Up to 24.52% more electricity generated in winter conditions

Here's why that matters for a working farm specifically. Vertical bifacial panels don't compete with crops or grazing land for space — they run along ground you're already dedicating to fencing. No acreage sacrificed, no shading over rows, no interference with equipment access.

And because the panels face east-west instead of flat to the sky, they produce two peaks instead of one — a profile that lines up well with on-farm energy use patterns (early morning equipment starts, evening operations) rather than a single midday spike that mostly exports back to the grid.

The same physics that make this work on a quarter-mile of perimeter fencing apply at residential scale too — a backyard fence line generating power instead of just marking a property boundary. But the economics get most interesting where fence lines run longest: working farms, where "dual use" isn't a buzzword, it's a second income line on infrastructure you were installing anyway.

The most important thing in these photos is what the cows are doing: nothing unusual.

These are Ideal, Queen, Fizzle, Blossom, Misty, and Flurry — the Angus and Hereford brood cows grazing among vertical bifacial panels at the Rutgers Animal Farm in New Brunswick.

Researchers at the Rutgers Agrivoltaics Program are tracking their behavior with cameras that snap a photo every five minutes, measuring where the herd grazes, where it rests, and whether the panels change forage growth or quality.

Early observation: the cows treat the array like any other part of the pasture. They graze along it. They rest in its shade. The grass keeps growing between the rows.

That's the point of vertical solar. The panels stand like a fence, the land keeps working, and the same acre now produces forage, beef cattle, research data, and clean energy — all feeding into New Jersey's Dual-Use Solar Energy Pilot Program.

No trade-off between farming and generation. Just both.

Photo credit: Rutgars Agrivoltaics Program, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

Cover the car parks. Then keep going.

There's a post circulating with two photos side by side. Solar over a parking lot, solar over farmland. The argument is that we should be building the first and not the second.

The instinct is right. Parking lots are dead surface, and there is a lot of it.

But the post offers two options when there are three, and the third is the reason this doesn't have to be a fight.

Start with why the car parks aren't already covered. It isn't that nobody thought of it. Canopy structures run roughly two to three times the per-watt cost of ground-level racking, because you are paying for elevated steel, foundations, and structural engineering before you buy a single module. Add two to six months of structural permitting for wind, snow, and seismic loads.

France tested the ceiling on this. A 2023 law requires every parking lot over 50,000 square feet to cover half its area with solar. Projected national yield: 6.75 to 11.25 gigawatts, at a cost of 8.7 to 14.6 billion dollars.

For scale, there were 956 gigawatts of solar sitting in U.S. interconnection queues at the end of 2024.

Every large parking lot in an entire country, mandated by law, gets you a rounding error against the queue. Canopies are worth building. They are not the answer by themselves, and no serious accounting says otherwise.

Which brings us back to the farmland photo, and what it leaves out.

Solar on farmland does not have to mean taking farmland out of production. Vertical bifacial rows stand upright with open ground between them. Tractors pass through. Livestock graze. The rotation continues. The land does two jobs instead of choosing one.

This is not a fringe position anymore. When the U.S. Department of Energy built its 2024 commercial PV cost benchmark, the representative system it modeled was a 3 MW agrivoltaic array designed for land that also grazes sheep. That is the reference case now.

So yes, cover the car parks. Also stop assuming a solar field and a working field are different fields.

(photo is our UC Davis site with tomatoes between rows)

The Netherlands is proposing stricter rules for solar projects near airports following concerns about glare and aviation safety. It's a reminder that as solar expands into more complex environments, thoughtful design matters just as much as deployment speed.

The conversation shouldn't be *whether* solar belongs near airports. It should be *how* it's designed.

Every site comes with unique operational requirements, and airports are among the most demanding. That's why glare analysis, careful engineering, and collaboration with aviation stakeholders need to be part of the process from the very beginning—not an afterthought.

The Sunzaun vertical bifacial solar can be a strong option for certain airport environments—but every site is different. That's why each project should be evaluated on its own merits, with factors like glare, operational requirements, site layout, and stakeholder input considered from the outset. Thoughtful engineering and site-specific analysis are what enable renewable energy and aviation safety to coexist.

As regulations continue to evolve around the world, solutions that prioritize both energy production and operational safety will become increasingly important.

How do you see airport solar evolving over the next decade?