09.11 / Solar+Agri & more.
Solar+Agri
To say that I’m a renewables fan would be an understatement. I have vouched for renewables in the past - personally and professionally. And I have also vouched for places where it needs to be much more of renewables.
Think of Solar - where does its maximum benefit lie - in Germany where most time it’s cloudy or in India blessed with ample sunshine? You decide.
Now few years back India experimented with Solar on top of canals. It makes sense - panels protect river from evaporating less due to extensive heat and solar-panels give you energy. It is also far better to finding ample land and then building a solar farm! Pic below from the internet.
Checkout article on India Canal Solar.
Now naturally there is another way this solar capacity can be increased, that is Solar+Agri. I recently read a piece on the same in Bloomberg. A snippet from an article caught my eye
Solar panels work best in light winds, moderate temperatures and low humidity. Rooftops share some of these characteristics. But nothing maximizes that combination of traits quite so well as cropland. For solar developers keen to get the most from their investments, that makes farm country irresistible.
But there are obvious challenges. One is scalability and another of - which crops are suited to grow better under the shade. Though, I love simple solutions to difficult problems. In this case, no new advanced tech needed - just plain old tech in a new location. Think out of the box people!
Renewables Scale
After reading the Bloomberg article, naturally my curiosity went towards a macro picture. Will Wind energy be the winner or Solar energy in the coming decades. I stumbled upon a BCG chart from lat year.
Clearly Solar is the winner in Renewables by a large margin. Makes sense though. The technology is well developed, easy to install, and has a scalable+micro structure (meaning we can combine thousands for a large scale project and put up only one on the top of our house -works both ways).
Another important snippet from the BCG article that caught my eye.
As renewable technologies mature and development costs decline, value creation—and the scale levers needed to deliver it—will gradually shift from development toward operations and maintenance, opening up new opportunities.
As someone who has worked in the Renewables sector, I can surely tell you that ‘value-creation’ is a key element going forward for the developed markets, especially when Merchant pricing is kicking in and taking over from the regulated returns.