Companies turn to agrivoltaics to differentiate their products

One aspect of agrivoltaics, the incorporation of photovoltaic generation into productive agricultural land, is to improve solar energy’s acceptance by skeptics in the community. Another, perhaps more ambitious goal, is for producers of agricultural products to make solar a positive part of their marketing to consumers.

For example, Minnesota-based honey producer Bare Honey trademarks its SolarGrown Honey products and Solar Based Beekeeping processing techniques, promoting them as sustainers of pollinators. The company works with solar energy developers to create “pollinator oases” where beehives are placed around the PV arrays.

Downstream, another firm pursuing this approach is We Are Nuts, which has a honey peanut product that features honey bees and solar array on the label. The nuts are described as using Bare Honey’s “harvested from Minnesota’s own flowering solar fields, for a fresh, local touch.”

Ultimately, advocates want to stress the idea that solar power is a net positive for the agricultural community in particular and society in general by reducing the need for polluting fossil fuels while retaining agricultural land for productive use. For these notions to take root in people’s minds – and consumer preferences – companies need verifiable facts to make their arguments.

One of the challenges in doing this is quantifying the societal benefits of renewable energy over and above typical calculations of levelized cost of energy and dollars per kWh. Supporters of carbon accounting methods and the development of renewable energy credits (RECs), carbon taxes and markets, and other policies struggle with the scientific bases for their proposals.

“This goes to the heart of an issue we’ve been trying to solve for decades,” Ben Gerber, president and CEO of CleanCounts, a non-profit validator of environmental attributes in energy, told pv magazine USA. “RECs evolved in the early 2000s to be a compliance instrument to account for renewable consumption. It was not a decarbonization instrument.”

Policy makers asserted that renewable energy was beneficial, subsequently taking the form of form of mandates for specific forms of electricity generation, primarily wind and solar. While RECs evolved as a means of accounting for compliance with policies and mandates, advocates of more extensive carbon-based metrics for measuring renewables’ quality of life benefits were dissatisfied with them.

“The carbon benefit was embedded in the REC,” Gerber said. “But you couldn’t sell a carbon offset in it. That wasn’t its purpose. You can’t ask a spoon to be a knife.”

According to Gerber, RECs were too established and valuable to dismiss entirely with billions of dollars invested in them already. At the same time, advocates of institutionalizing the positive social effects of solar need to trade on more than good feelings.

Fortunately, software has improved significantly from when CleanCounts was administering regional REC markets and certifying compliance. The company now is capable of tracking the environmental aspects of generation sources on an hourly basis through its M-RETS platform. What started as a regional system (The “M” used to stand for Midwest) is now tracking generators throughout North America.

Agrivoltaics, and pollinator-friendly designators in particular, is just one avenue for expressing solar value and engendering consumer preferences. Gerber cited the benefits of solar in underserved communities, on tribal lands, on conservation land and other beneficial deployments as having the potential to expand energy attribute certificates (EACs), of which RECs are but one element. The challenge is defining those benefits and quantifying them in a scientific way.

“We’re not going to go in and say, ‘The direct benefits of this solar installation went to a specific community of concern,’” Gerber said.

“That’s not our role. But there are groups that focus on that. And there’s data available.”

CleanCounts sees its role as verifying that RECs and EACs are sound as reported on a MWh basis as established by specific third-party marketplaces. The M-RETS platform also provides an interface between compatible marketplaces. The reason this sort of auditing and certification isn’t done universally is that there is no one standard for defining environmental attributes.

There could be, and Gerber says the industry would benefit from a standards body to establish and update EACs and to regulate criteria and means of data collection.

“What you don’t want is like 15 different data points from different models,” he said. “Because then if you’re saying this is a science -based data point and it’s 15 different metrics in every model it’s not science -based. It becomes very political.”

With a rigorous environmental attribute standard in place along with trusted methods of verification and certification, Gerber concludes, companies will have a more powerful and convincing message to bring to their customers about how solar adds value.

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