Sheep and solar panels make great field fellows

Dubbed ‘agrivoltaics’, “there are many benefits to co-locating solar panels and agriculture on the same plot of land. You may reduce the overall potential that either could have on its own, but you still get a better total outcome. It can also be a very good financial diversification for the farmer”, said the University’s Tyler Swanson.

Swanson has made a study focusing on how laws covering land use in the US can discourage such combined activities, but on the way he found that, while it can be difficult to find crops that thrive under solar panels, grazing animals, particularly sheep, are good field-fellows for solar panels.

“The sheep don’t really care about hanging wires or poles [and] as far as I know there’s never been an issue where the sheep have caused structural damage to the solar panels,” said Swanson. “They mostly just go around, eat the grass, sleep and lay under the panels during the day when it’s hot outside. They save the solar developer money, because there is no longer a need to hire a mowing company to trim the vegetation.”

If you want the legal side, the study is published as ‘Emerging agrivoltaic regulatory systems: A review of solar grazing‘ in the Chicago-Kent Journal of Environmental and Energy Law.