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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Not necessarily a great way to do it. Hops grow super tall, so to have solar over them, you need a tall structure. To have a tall structure that can withstand wind loads, you need pretty substantial materials. You are probably better off just using wind permeable shade cloth that you can deploy during the heat of the summer and take down during the cooler months.
Have you seen the pictures? The solar panels are fairly small, mounted on top of the poles.
This is in the Hallertau, one of the more famous hop regions. It's not some random farmer, hop is how he makes his living.
As a farmer and a solar offgridder, I agree. I build my own mounts and would not want to try to build a 20' high mount that would take 100 km/h winds, which we have seen around here. Not only are the mounts going to go down, now they're 20' in the air when they start picking up speed to the ground.
I have bifacials and while I don't have them out over crop, the grass and trees underneath them in the shade have to be dealt with all summer. I'm pretty sure crop would grow fine but then you'd have to figure out how to harvest it with panels and mounts in the way. Which would be doable, but hardly worth the trouble for the insignificant amount of crop I would gain.
I've seen people use sheep to keep the plants around panels down. There's even people who rent herds to big solar farms. That seems like as much of a win-win as I can think of.
I've thought about that. Sheep can be pretty destructive on any shrubs or trees you're wanting to keep alive though, you'd have to protect each one. Not as bad as goats, though.
That’s the problem with solar over parking lots, farmland, even roofs. It doesn’t make financial sense.
Now if you’re trying to maximize land use and productivity and don’t care about having to lay in piledriven supports or lose some parking spaces to safety radius or do suboptimal scale installations then you’re getting something.