Clean Technica | By: Steve Hanley | November 24, 2017:
Solar panels are wonderful things, but they do take up a lot of space, especially for larger, utility-scale systems.
In some densely populated countries like China and India, where loss of farmland can lead to hungry people, floating solar farms are being built to take advantage of the surface area of lakes and rivers.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute For Solar Energy Systems have conducted an experiment near Lake Constance — which borders Germany, Lichtenstein, and Switzerland — regarding another solution.
According to a Fraunhofer press release, the experiment involves 720 bi-facial solar panels covering about a third of a hectare of agricultural land (on the Demeter farm cooperative Heggelbach).
The panels are mounted high enough to allow the crops planted below to receive almost as much sunshine as they would if the panels were not there and to permit farm machinery to operate beneath them. After a year of trials, the research showed the dual use system increased the total productivity of the land by 60%.
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