What will happen to farmland when solar power expands?

Combining sheep with solar panels could be a recipe for renewable energy success.

Kia ora, welcome to Future Proof. Thanks for joining me! This week: mystery food rescue bags, and what’s happening with Lake Wānaka’s unlikely celeb-bird, the pūteketeke. But first: would you like some sheep with your solar power?

Image credit: Our Land and Water.

New Zealand is on the verge of a solar boom. Eight solar farms are already operational, 40 more are in various stages of development, and a whopping eight gigawatts worth are planned for commissioning by 2028.

Eight gigawatts is more than the country’s power demand on a typical winter’s day, researchers Alan Brent and Catherine Iorns point out on The Conversation. 

But solar farms require lots of flat area for panels – land that could otherwise be used for regular farming. 

Enter the Old El Paso girl: why don’t we have both?

Sheep plus solar power: A ‘major opportunity’

Combining solar arrays with crop or livestock farming is an emerging concept called agrivoltaics. 

An agrivoltaic set-up differs slightly compared to a conventional solar array. Panels are spaced further apart and lifted on higher mounts, allowing space for both farm equipment and light to reach underlying crops or pasture.

The concept is popping off globally as a way to both feed people and generate sustainable energy. In South Korea, solar panels shade broccoli. In Spain, strawberries, and in France, grape vines. The shade of the solar panels can reduce a crop’s water needs, while not impacting harvest yields, and create a more temperate microclimate that reduces both heat stress and frost damage.

But here in New Zealand, it’s the sheep + solar combo that is “a major opportunity”, say Brent and Iorns. In fact, sheep are often already brought in to clean up overgrown vegetation in conventional solar arrays, a practice called solar grazing.

Deliberately blending solar power with livestock grazing can boost profitability for sheep and beef farmers, according to a Canterbury case study. On dairy farms, agrivoltaics looks to be less lucrative.

RNZ’s Country Life podcast visited one of New Zealand’s newest forays into agrivoltaics, the Kohirā solar farm near Kaitāia, which opened in February this year. Here, 170 sheep roam under the panels, enjoying the shade and shelter they provide. “We see the sheep sitting down for longer periods than most farms, which means that they’re sort of content, they’re full,” Connor Dent told the podcast. Meanwhile, the solar panels overhead generate enough power for 7,000 homes.

‘We have enough land for all of this’

More than half of New Zealand’s land is currently used for agriculture, and a mapping exercise found that around 80% of this is rated ‘good’ or ‘fair’ for agrivoltaics. 

But does this mean we’ll see the rural landscape converted wholesale into a sea of grey panels? At the moment, it’s “first in, first served,” Iorns told the Newsable podcast. But: “If we had a better spatial plan around the country to figure out where it could best be done, we could have huge win-wins. We have enough land for all of this.”

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UK election result ‘promising’ for the climate

After a landslide victory in last week’s election, the UK’s Labour government faces a jam-packed climate agenda having made big campaign promises. New PM Keir Starmer wants the UK to be a “clean energy superpower” by decarbonising power by 2030. The Labour party also promised to reverse the rollbacks enacted by the Sunak government, including halting new offshore oil and gas licences in the North Sea. The Guardian has a list of 11 green challenges the government will need to tackle, while Carbon Brief has compiled a comprehensive, searchable table of almost 60 actions on the climate to-do list.

Wetter wets and drier dry spells: ‘The worst of both worlds’

As the climate warms, annual average rainfall isn’t predicted to change much in most of New Zealand. But on a day-to-day basis, wet days will have 10% more rainfall, and dry periods will be 10% drier, according to a new study. “We find more extreme dry spells punctuated by increasingly supercharged rainfall events,” says lead researcher Luke Harrington from the University of Waikato. You can expect more extremes year-by-year, too: more years with mega-rainfall, and also more years of extreme dry. “This research shows we can expect the worst of both worlds to happen simultaneously for many regions of Aotearoa as temperatures continue to rise,” says Dave Frame, climate scientist at the University of Canterbury.

Mystery bags ‘take a bite’ out of food waste

Rescuing a “mystery bag” of tasty food items for as little as $5 is the latest way to treat yourself for cheap – and fight climate-polluting food waste. The food rescue app Foodprint (which Future Proof has covered previously), this week launched mystery bags of 2-4 quality items that would otherwise go to waste, curated by local eateries. With many of those eateries also reporting that business is down 20% compared to this time last year, it’s also a way to support your local faves, says Foodprint founder Michal Garvey. “Using Foodprint allows [eateries] to sell more of what they make each day while introducing them to new customers.” Since launching in 2019, Foodprint has prevented more than 150 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions through food rescue.

More stories

• On Lake Wānaka, a population of pūteketeke nests on floating platforms. New Zealand Geographic editor Catherine Woulfe meets the species made famous by Bird of the Century – but the star of the show ends up being the man who has dedicated 10 years to the grebes.

• An interactive, choose-your-own-adventure guide to research-backed ideas for climate action, by a climate and sustainability scientist.

• Hawaii has banned seabed mining.

• A 6,000-strong petition calls on the government to scrap free carbon credits for major polluters, Eloise Gibson reports for RNZ.

• Rolling Stone explores how conspiracy influencers in Europe have pivoted from Covid-19 to climate change.

• The Fast-track Advisory Group, a panel of five “experts” deciding which projects will be included in the list of automatically fast-tracked projects, are essentially “cronies paid between $1200 and $1600 per day to write the law,” writes The Post’s Andrea Vance.

• How to talk to kids about climate change.

• The Kai Ika project collects fish frames and heads that once went to waste, and redistributes them to the community. Xanthe Smith explores fisheries solutions in a podcast, Catch On.

To finish this edition, a moving short video about the deforestation of Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū Banks Peninsula, an unexpected gift of Land Back, and a 10-year project to recloak the whenua with native ngahere. 

For the forests, and the people who protect them,

Ellen

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