Renewable Energy
RIPE supports expanding clean energy opportunities for farmers and mitigating the tension sometimes created by installing it on productive agricultural lands. Specifically, we support:
Ensuring renewable energy projects are designed in a way to benefit farmers, ranchers, and rural citizens
Incentivizing and increasing R&D for dual-use agri voltaics plan that allow for solar alongside farming, if placed on productive or unique farmland.
Expanding USDA REAP benefits to farmer-led cooperatives to allow for shared resource pooling and benefits.
Requiring developers who lease solar arrays on farmland to decommission them in a manner that protects the land for active agriculture future use.
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We believe that renewable energy has the potential to directly benefit farmers and ranchers, as well as citizens in rural America, where utility-scale projects are being built. Furthermore, citing commercial-scale renewable energy, on the farm for farm use, can be extremely beneficial (learn more about what our friends at Isbell Farms are doing).
Scaling regenerative agriculture the RIPE Way includes direct compensation for clean energy, in part because of the high cost of installation and other policies, and market mechanisms are more appropriate for rewarding it fairly. Future iterations of our work could include consideration of direct compensation for clean energy, which delivers in the range of $5,000 to $18,000 per acre in public environmental benefits, after careful analysis of how to protect productive agricultural lands and farmers’ economic opportunities, as well as best use of various programs and market mechanisms. Check out our approach for more information about the practices which we believe producers should be fairly compensated for, including clean energy.
More About Renewable Energy on Farms and Ranches
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In combination with energy conservation practices, farmers can produce their own energy to become even more self sufficient by reducing external inputs. Not only does renewable energy help the farmer save money but also combats the effects of global warming. Biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric, solar, and wind power can produce electricity for heating, lighting, and fuel for use on the farm.
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Farmers can benefit from solar energy in several ways—by leasing farmland for solar; installing a solar system on a house, barn, or other building; or through agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics is defined as agriculture, such as crop production, livestock grazing, and pollinator habitat, located underneath solar panels and/or between rows of solar panels. Solar energy offers farmers the opportunity to harvest the sun twice—the same reason land is good for farming (flat, open areas), also makes it good for solar installations. The Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) is researching the opportunities and trade-offs of agrivoltaics. This guide helps answer some questions that farmers may have about going solar and agrivoltaics.
READ MORE FROM US OFFICE OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY & RENEWABLE ENERGY
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The Department of Energy estimates we need more than 10 million acres to scale up solar energy by 2050, and AFT projects over 80 percent could be sited on agricultural lands. This growth will create opportunities, but it also threatens farmland, and the conflict between using land to grow food and using it to produce energy is already generating public backlash against renewable energy deployment overall. America needs both—renewable energy and productive, resilient farms and ranches. Smart Solar℠can be the solution.
Cultivating the Future: Renewable Energy and Agriculture
The convergence of regenerative agriculture and renewable energy holds remarkable potential. Each is proven to be ecologically- and economically-sound. They complement each other in a few different ways.
