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U of I moving forward on agrivoltaics farm

Development of a new farm studying the use of land for both solar energy and ag production at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is progressing.

Madhu Khanna, director of the Sustainably Co-locating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems (SCAPES) project, says the new facility is being designed with agrivoltaics research in mind.

“Our goal is to understand how these crops perform under shade, what happens to their yields, and how that’s going to impact the design of solar farms in the future,” she says.

Dennis Bowman, digital agriculture specialist with U of I Extension, tells Brownfield it’ll be focused on Midwestern agriculture.

“We can get standard farm machinery through there with tracking systems that can move the panels a little bit so they’re less in the way of the equipment,” he says.

Crops physiologist Carl Bernaccihi says it’ll offer tremendous research opportunities.

“To really understand how we can optimize the cultivars that we’re growing so that maybe we can create more efficient systems where we’re able to generate a lot of electricity with the solar panels and a lot of agricultural output from the plants themselves,” he says.

The new agrivoltaics research farm is expected to be complete in time for field trials next season.

AUDIO: Madhu Khanna – director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment at U of I