Farmers may have the solution to the EV charging chicken-or-egg problem by providing cheap electricity from solar on their farms.
Some of the best solutions to engineering problems occur when you combine two problems that solve each other. In engineering this is the concept of. The integrated solution uses the constraints of one problem to provide for the needs of the other.
Let me tell you about two seemingly disconnected problems: one with the market for EVs and the other for farmers and agrivoltaics with a few maps.– worrying about running out of juice somewhere without EV charging. In some parts of the world this is not a problem. You can see the coverage looks pretty good in the US compliments of the map from the Department of Energy. That said, an EV driver could be forgiven for having some legitimate concerns if they were driving through Montana. EV charging is a classic chicken or egg problem. If everyone had an EV there would be charging stations everywhere but would be charging station owners are reluctant to invest in the infrastructure unless they know there will be customers. That is why areas like New York city are blanked with so many green dots you can barely see Central Park, but Montana has only a few. EV Charger mapm from the the Alternative Fuels Data Center by the Department of Energy https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC2. Farmers Need Distributed Electric Loads For Their Bountiful Solar-Generated Electricity.. According to the International Energy Agency, solar is the lowest cost source of electricity in history. That means farmers can make a huge profit installing solar to offset what they would normally buy from the electric companies to operate their farms. Not surprisingly,. Here lies our second problem. The potential solar energy that can be generated on a given farm tends to be far above what the farm needs to supply their own power. Most agrivoltaic farms are major electricity exporters. When many farms do this we have a glut of cheap green solar electricity.The potential of agrivoltaic-based solar electricity production in North America far outstrips current electric demand. Based on data from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, there are over 2.8 GW of agrivoltaic sites already in the U.S. and the number is growing fast. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s, solar energy could supply as much as 40% of U.S. in only ten years. This level of solar deployment could require about. This may sound like a lot, but it is only a paltry 0.3% of the U.S. contiguous land area. Approximately 876 million acres of U.S. land, or about 39% of the total land area, are already dedicated to farming. So only the tiniest fraction of farmers would get toThe same story is true in Canda . Covering about 1% of Canada’s agricultural land with solar shielding would not only make more food but also completely eliminate the need for fossil fuels on the Canadian grid. What if more than 1% of Canadian farmers want solar on their land to increase their crop yields? Well then we have the problem again of a glut of cheap solar electricity. A map showing the agrivoltaic potential in Canada. The colors indicate the solar flux in the areas that are currently farmed. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15043228Europeans do this when the use their rooftop solar to power heat pumpssubsidizes heat pumpSometimes when you sit two problems next to each other the solution is obvious. Yes, you guessed it – the excess cheap solar electricity produced by agrivoltaic farms can also be stored by. This could provide cheap solar electricity throughout the U.S. as farms are spread all over the country . As you can see from the map farms take up a lot of the area where the EV charging station density is the lowest. There is an opportunity to include EV charging stations using that power along all the highways cutting through farm country.The Oregon research team found that to meet EV charging station demand at 86% of highway access points throughout the entire state, 12,000 acres of land would be required. They then identified 231 highway access points that could be used for agrivoltaics and found that 220 of them had less than 17 miles between them. Overall the Oregon State researchers showed that servicing rural EV charging stations with agrivoltaics next to the highway is feasible. To handle all of the charging stations and eliminate range anxiety in Oregon they would only use 3% of the total land supply to power 86% of rural highway access points throughout the state.This sounds pretty good as the marriage of agrivoltaics and EV charging works technically. The last piece of the puzzle is investing. Agrivoltaics and EV charging are growing, but the other main issue restricting even faster growth of agrivoltaics is capital costs. Agrivoltaics has a much higher capital cost per acre than farmers are accustomed to investing. Luckily,too. Thus, even though agrivoltaics is profitable it is difficult for farmers to implement large agrivoltaic systems on their own. To do that farmers need investors.Investors looking for solid returns are coming. The agrivoltaics market is experiencing significant growth. Many are projecting that growth to continue. For example,estimates that the agrivoltaics market size was $4.59 billion last year and is anticipated to reach around $13.88 billion by 2034, expanding at a CAGR of 11.70% from 2025 to 2034. This will be driven by the goals of land optimization for sustainable energy and sustainable agriculture…and we just might see a few more charging stations for everyone’s EVs.
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