Semi-transparent, colored cadmium telluride photovoltaic panels in agrivoltaics
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2026/10/magenta-solar-panels-may-be-agrivoltaics-cleverest-trick-yet/Most flowers in 7b don't want extreme sun. We use shade cloth frequently, so solar coverage would be fine and of course have the energy co-production. Cut flowers aren't harvested mechanically at our scale, so we wouldn't have to worry about tractor access.
Meanwhile, more and more food is produced under cover for a lot of good reasons. Polytunnels, glass houses. You might get some summer shade from solar but what about season extension at the beginning of spring/end of fall? Depending on your crop and location, that could mean 4-8 extra weeks a year. What if you do geothermal energy generation for the tunnel? Now you can grow through the winter and not need the same footprint as solar. That's more appealing to me.
Anyway, I'm forever mad at corn ethanol and we should at least replace all that with solar farms. That's probably the right place to start. But also, again, zoning...
I've done hobbyist exotic (legal!) mushroom farming for a while, at a scale that is more than I could use but not like 100x what I could use. I've thought about selling but it seems like a lot of hassle doing the marketing and business parts of it.
How do you sell? Do you have a distributor that purchases product from you or is it a farmers market type deal?
Zone 7b: −15 to −12.2 °C
Zone 7a: −17.8 to −15 °C
Zone 8a: −12.2 to −9.4 °C
Something around 2500W of solar can provide enough energy to drive an EV 12,000 miles a year.
When it comes to zoning. The state should require offices to install chargers for employees cars when the solar share of electricity generation is highest.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing about farming)
I somewhat agree - dumping pesticides and fertilizer into the ground every year and then letting it pollute rivers is low-key insanity. But then you look at just how much farmland is out there and realize some crops just can't be put indoors, probably ever.
There are lots of variables for sure, but I do wonder how much more efficient indoor growing must get to overcome outdoor growing? Land value is vastly different between regions, so does labour, crop type, etc.
p.s. Tom Scotts recent video on strawberries was amazing - special mites to fend off other bugs and UVC light sanitizing was a bit of wow for me.
Often these "solutions" introduce more problems than they solve. One example being a solar farm designed to be grazed by sheep where the panels are so low to the ground that farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.
The best solution is still to put solar panels and farmland in different places where each can be optimized without concern for the other.
There's significant evidence "add solar panels" is an optimization to at least some kinds of farmland.
> farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season
That season is typically "winter", and you wind up without much hay to cut at that point.
We could grow some crops in that 1% of land and provide reams of clean power to the world. And the more we restore land to nature, as opposed to our mono-crops and cows, the more co-benefits we reap.
As an example where I think it would work: industrial greenhouses.
But surely only certain places need to do this? for the UK, you need to make hay for the winter, assuming that your meadows flood, or are otherwise muddy. But if your in one of the more temperate areas of the southern USA, surely you don't need to do that?
The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.
I think most people want highly distributed, reliable, affordable power. That's why off-grid tech is experiencing such a boom.
I live in a 36' skoolie, so I'm nomad-indexed, but I can confirm that over the past 10 years or so, most RV-lifers have transitioned their focus from recreation / comfort to off-grid experimentation. Essentially everywhere I go in the US, if I'm camped near others, they are going to have minimum viability for boondocking. That was not the case when I started.
Especially amidst the current political instability and apparent looming collapse of the US state, one of the simplest things that most of us can do is stabilize off-grid power in our neighborhoods, and that is quietly happening all over the place.
So, the role of vertically integrated solar (both literally and metaphorically) has more to do with the grid shape that serves our stability needs, and less to do with large-scale differences in efficiency.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how the real world works.
The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how things work.
is it?
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...
The article’s biggest claim is that devoting one percent of US farmland to agrivoltaics could cover 20 percent of the country’s electricity, pointing at the Texas to Nebraska to California corridor, which is exactly where big mechanized farms are most common.
They run large equipment (combines, sprayer booms, center pivot irrigation systems[1], etc). To keep that working under panels you need tall posts, wide spans, and a layout that matches the equipment paths, which would push structural cost significantly above a ground installation. All maintenance would require a boom truck, not just a ground crew. And center pivots in particular (very common) need an entire circle cleared for the system to pivot, meaning a multi-acre span with no posts for the pivot to hit, which is simply infeasible.
That’s before accounting for pesticide spray and dust on the PVs, or the logistical burden of running PV crews through a working farm.
It’s also worth noting that the study itself was broccoli, which is hand harvested and about the best case crop for this. Even so, the broccoli took 25 extra days to mature. On a farm running multiple rotations a season that lost time has a real cost, separate from the structural costs.
This innovation has a lot more promise on smaller plots. Co-ops, market gardens, specialty crops, and the like that don’t rely on large equipment. I’d be surprised to ever see it on a large farm.
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
Also: Many plants don't want/need full sun. In fact, they adapt by varying production of a chemical called zeaxanthin throughout the day to manage the amount of energy they take in.
Partially shading crops with bifacial panels (which are semi-translucent) can be beneficial to the crops as well as producing energy.
https://farmbuy.com/1595-florina-road-katherine-nt-0850-4368...
1% of panel cost according to Gemini.
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.
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2025/04/new-study-compa...
> The department has raised its corn production forecast by 234 million bushels to 16 billion bushels.
https://bioenergytimes.com/usda-raises-2026-27-us-corn-use-f...
About a third! Way more than I thought. I wonder how much of that would have to be covered in panels to get the same energy.
It is well known fact, that US do that so 20% of its population wouldn't die from starvation over the next 30 years with significant probability.
So while broccoli yields may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere where it might normally be too sunny. 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.
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...
Re-greening at a profit?
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.
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.
There are some small organic farms using a system of chained paper pots and frames to quickly fill them with soil and sow with seeds, then once they're sprouted you use a hand pulled machine that spreads the chain out while directly placing each plant into the soil automatically.
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...
>Vegetable farms and solar farms both need lots of sunlight and open space. But how do we divide our limited lands between these two priorities?
We are in no way limited by farmland space. Farmland utilization has been dropping since WWI thanks to the invention of artificial fertilizer, and even without artificial fertilizer at current population levels we would have never ran out of farmland although there would be a lot more of it. All across the midwest you will find tracks of land that use to be farmland, but is now either overgrown with trees, grass, or shrubs and completely unutilized for any human purposes. And our main limitation to growing even more food if we wanted a bunch extra for some reason would be fertilizer production/energy, not land space.
This is great science and knowledge, but I don't expect anything useful coming from it for farming on earth. There is no shortage of dirt that the sun shines on now or anytime soon, and no matter how efficient your panels, plants, or extra lights are, the sun is free and a greenhouse is way cheaper than anything else you could possibly build.
Meanwhile, when planning and streamlining infrastructure for cities and large urban centres some do look to guidelines such as minimising transportation (food into cities, refuse out, etc) and transmission line costs.
Food production has water, sunlight, fertiliser etc. requirements, energy generation (solar, wind, coal, oil, gas) similarly has geolocation (sunlight for solar, temperature differentials for wind, mine / port access for solid fuels, pipelines and tanks for gas) requirements.
Urban planners also look to stability of supplies and robustness of systems (if X fails, what do we fall back on).
These are the manner of things that can put dual use demands on various parts of the ring about large urban areas.
Let the people build.
1. Development Miracle Substance
2. Try to replicate the properties without Cadmium, Mercury, Arsenic, and Lead
3. Figure out how to scale production
4. Congratulations you're selling the material, but 6 months ago another team had a break through, so the loop resets.
Image: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.xcrp.2026.103555/asset/c8...
Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
Datacenters in space are for Elon & his stock price, nothing more. Meanwhile we are not prioritizing things like this nearly enough. Solar on earth is what needs to be rolled out in a massive way, for our current energy needs and for datacenters.
Remember spacex is a public company and you can short the company at any time if you believe what you're saying. Why not profit off it?
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