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How Vertical Solar Is Solving Land Use Conflicts in Agriculture | Agrivoltaics Revolution | EP293 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Helge Biernath: I there was a conference in Germany, in Munich at the inner solar and everybody was just asking for incentives.
• 0:56
  Helge Biernath: Give me incentives. Give me and I'm like, Guys, you should stop talking about incentives. How about the idea that if you do not do agrivoltagues, you will not have the yield of your biomass in the future period, because climate is changing, and if you still want to have the same yield, then you have to do something about it.
• 1:14
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:24
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition
• 1:40
  Tim Montague: today on the Clean Power Hour, vertical solar and agrivoltaics, two of my favorite topics. My guests today are twofold, Helge Biernath, CEO of Sunzaun, the vertical racking company, and Ian Skor, the CEO of Sandbox Solar, an EPC in northern Colorado. Welcome to the show, guys.
• 2:00
  Helge Biernath: Excited to be here. Yeah, same here.
• 2:03
  Tim Montague: I did a series on agrivoltagues last year, and it was very popular, so I'm excited to do more this year. We're also hosting a panel discussion with the two of you and a couple of other guests on July the 15th.
• 2:16
  Tim Montague: So check it that. Check that out at cleanpower our.com go to the events tab, and you'll see it there, right front and center, powering agriculture's future.
• 2:29
  Tim Montague: Agrivoltague solutions for sustainable, for a sustainable tomorrow featuring Helge professor, Professor Majdi Ian and John Langdon, who's a farmer in Oregon. But why don't we set the table a little bit? How do the two of you come to be bedfellows?
• 2:49
  Helge Biernath: Ian, you want to start or
• 2:51
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Absolutely, I mean our full history. So I started sandbox solar 10 years ago UPC in northern Colorado, covering all the way from residential, commercial, even diving into a little bit of community solar installations, passion for innovation, and saw early, back in 2018 that our panels we're creating a unique microclimate that could be beneficial for plant growth. And in northern Colorado, we have Colorado State University with a lot of innovation labs, and we're very closely tied with them in many ways. And was able to connect with a horticulture professor there, Dr Marky chansky, brought a bifacial solar panel, which was newly commercialized to the market at the time, and said, Hey, can we install agrivoltaics? And so we did that and kicked off our agrivoltaic research and development. And what
• 3:43
  Tim Montague: year was that you that you started in agrivoltaics? That
• 3:47
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): was 2018 we started our first trials cool. We brought that to the field, tested some semi transparent panels, and noticed that plants are actually growing better underneath semi transparent panels than in the open field environment. CSU is agricultural research facility,
• 4:08
  Helge Biernath: all right, and you Helge, but yeah, you asked, how did we get together? So Ian also started a software product, you know, which we found interesting to better describe or predict, you know, what is going to happen with the biomass next and below, an agrovoltague system and and so we were reaching out to them, to sandbox, and then we had the pleasure, I think, two and a half years ago, at the first solar farm Summit, to come together to get to know each other personally, and that basically, you know, started the collaboration in agrivoltagues and verticals. So coming back to my background, we are a 15 year old installation company, ground mount installation, the type of solar you have in your background. Tim and we started out of California and did projects probably 1500 by now, across the United States, from Hawaii to Massachusetts. With my European heritage. I obviously always follow what's going on in other parts of the world, especially Europe, and I was seeing that a lot of dual use scenarios are popping up from Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, everywhere. And so I thought that might be something for us also, to add a product to our service offering. And so vertical was was not really infringing on anybody's business model already, like all the wrecking and tracker companies we're working with. And so we thought, hey, there is a little niche for us. And. And so we got into that niche with a vertical.
• 5:52
  Helge Biernath: And as I said, you know, connected with Ian and sandbox, and I think we're, we're now kind of the leaders a little bit in that market, in the United States, and we're just focusing on the market here, even though we are getting a lot of requests from across the world. And I mean it, you know, from Africa to Asia. I think we're talking to a gentleman in Taiwan right now, and they're very, very interested to do vertical because some islands, they have not enough space, right, so they're constrained, and just that makes sense to them.
• 6:31
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): And most recently, Helge and I worked together to deploy a Sunzaun product at the CSU agrivoltague testing grounds that sandbox solar hosts and what a Cucu. CSU, Colorado State University, okay? CSU.
• 6:50
  Helge Biernath: Words, yes. So just to clarify that we're not a Chinese company, right? We're an American company, and zone is the German word for fence. So with my German heritage, you know, I thought, hey, let's combine things. Make it a little bit more sexy. Maybe look at Elon, what he did with his models, and that's why. So I has nothing.
• 7:11
  Tim Montague: So Elon called his product solar roof. You should have called it Sun fence or something like that, because people don't understand zon
• 7:20
  Helge Biernath: anyway, perfect, you know, because nobody understood Google either.
• 7:27
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): It's Sunzaun in a commercial agricultural setting, which is amazing. CSU has been running tractors in between the vertical solar rows. Has been able to do a full seeding a harvesting season last year, and getting a seed again between these vertical rows. And so we're getting amazing data on the interoperability these vertical solar in an agricultural setting. Now,
• 7:54
  Tim Montague: cool. Yeah, I love it. You can see in both your backgrounds, vertical solar so literally, we're talking about upright solar panels, rows of solar panels running north, south, so they're getting EAST, WEST radiation. And then just a quick aside about agrivoltague and Ian's comment about the plants were growing better under the array. Well, yes, it is stressful if for some crops to get too much sunlight, and it's a conflict for plants. They want to capture photons, but when they capture photons, they have to give off moisture. And there are always trade offs that plants have to make, and they do get sunburned, just like we do as well. So sun can be stressful, so we're learning a lot, and there's a lot yet to be learned. I do also resonate with what Helge said, keeping in touch with what's going on in Europe. I like to say we have a time machine in the solar industry. It's called Northern Europe and Asia. They're 10 years ahead of what we're doing in the United States. Generally speaking, the thing about Europe is land is super premium.
• 9:00
  Tim Montague: Relatively speaking, here in the US, we are swimming in real estate, and that is just not the case. And so they've had to dial in systems for a more constrained environment,
• 9:13
  Helge Biernath: I would, I would stop you there, Tim, you know, I live in California, right? That you've seen the numbers that were curtailing more and more energy because this nice real estate in the desert, you know.
• 9:22
  Helge Biernath: But we can't get those electrons to the load centers, you know, because we have the issue of transmission. Okay? That aside, you know, if we could locate the electron production closer to the load centers, let's take the Bay Area. Let's take la right, and would share them with agriculture and would support the farmers. I think we would be better off and we wouldn't have to curtail so much.
• 9:49
  Tim Montague: Yeah, for sure, we need to be more innovative about integrating solar into the built environment, and so let's talk a little bit about that, like, where are the applications, as you guys see it, for vertical solar, and why don't we see more of it yet?
• 10:05
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Now we're we're really exploring, of course, the agriculture side heavily. We're trying to see it in more like commercialized community solar, scale, type of operations to allow for more commodity crops. I think that's a big key planned opportunity, because there's so many commodity crops that are near, near the ideal locations where solar needs to be installed. So that's I say. I'd say our main sandbox solar's main focus on discovering vertical by facial but I think the amazing opportunity is there's so many different applications for it.
• 10:38
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Helgex, when
• 10:41
  Tim Montague: you when you say commodity crops, what are you referring to? I'm just curious, because that's different by geography, yeah.
• 10:48
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Generally that means alfalfa. Corn, lot of your grains, those types of crops that are fielded and harvested over many acres.
• 10:59
  Tim Montague: And if you were to take a traditional grain field, okay, let's say alfalfa, and integrate vertical solar into that, what percent of the land gets converted to vertical solar. Do you have a sense that's
• 11:14
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): a great question. We haven't fully estimated that, but it's, is it 10% Yeah. I mean, it's very minimal, 10, 20% more. So just for the fences, and you can harvest basically up until three feet within that solar array.
• 11:29
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Just fine, right?
• 11:31
  Tim Montague: Okay, and Helge.
• 11:31
  Tim Montague: What are the applications? What, what? I guess we should maybe also take a slight step back in like, Why do you think the United States is ready for a vertical solar solution? I mean,
• 11:47
  Helge Biernath: coming back to your initial question, right?
• 11:49
  Helge Biernath: Why don't we see more of it yet, I think because people are not aware that such a solution exists, number one, that's why we're having this conversation.
• 11:56
  Helge Biernath: That's why we started an agrivoltaics conference at UC Davis, just so that, together with academia and Ian did the same in Colorado. We get the data so to give it to the farmers right, to understand what they can do with it. And it starts, I mean, with all the different I mean, we have 600 different crops here in California, so it's kind of hard to predict, you know, where 600 Come on? Only 600 you know, where is the biggest impact? Is it strawberries? Because they're getting burned, you know? And we can reduce also evaporation.
• 12:30
  Helge Biernath: Yes, it's not like a completely shaded system from the top, but it can also provide you shade, let's say in the afternoon, right? So I think we still need to establish more models, which the software colleagues, like Ian's company and some others are working on, to give you the kind of the first idea, what does it also mean for water? How much water can we save? Because everybody is just looking at the electrons today. I mean, that's also one of the challenges. If you take the vertical product and you argue with an EPC who is doing, you know, fixed tilt and tracker all day long, they will look at the production and the efficiency, and say that's not the same, you know, and you're trying to compare apples to pears, not going to work. So you need to have a fresh mindset and and forget about that, and look at, you know, your constraints, and what you can do with it. I'm always talking about, let's think about the electrons I need on site, for the farmers, for electrification, for automation.
• 13:31
  Helge Biernath: We're going to see more robots out there. You see it in Europe.
• 13:35
  Helge Biernath: You see it here. I mean, from the monarch tractor, tractors to other things. You can enable the farmers now with new things, right? I mean cold storage or other pumping, if that's helpful. So I think we need to look at the different applications in a new era of farming as well. Because, I mean, they can bring those robots back all the way five miles to the barn to now charge it up. No, it has to be out there. It has to be out there.
• 14:07
  Helge Biernath: And we need the electrons there, so that, I think, with together, with supporting the biomass, and not only I, there was a conference in Germany, Munich at the inner solar and everybody was just asking for incentives.
• 14:19
  Helge Biernath: Give me incentives. Give me and I'm like, Guys, you should stop talking about incentives. How about the idea that if you do not do agrivoltague, you will not have the yield of your biomass in the future period, because climate is changing, and if you still want to have the same yield, then you have to do something about it. I was just reading again that the Europeans sometimes they use it as a hail protection for orchards, apples, pears, you know. Now you think hail, we got these trackers, and they're all getting damaged by hail, yeah. But, I mean, you can use different glass for that, right? And then it can be a protection of your orchard. So think outside the box. Think about also a secondary or tertiary use. Think about, you know, you could add, easily here, a shading system. You could easily add an irrigation system. So Ian and I were still open to, Hey, what is your challenge, and how can we innovate engineer and make it a fit, you know, for your specific situation, your crop, your region, your
• 15:24
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): project. Now I'll add to that too. Helge hit on a very important point and question I think gets asked often of vertical solar specifically is how much does it produce? And I think we all know it kind of makes the double peak curve now, but we want to know what was that specific yield, and so we've started to uncover that a little bit. We have some production from our two vertical sites, and we modeled the forecasted energy to the real time yield. Yield, and we can model these projects within about a 5% error. So we found a way to model the production of these within 5% error using SAM modeling.
• 15:24
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): So
• 16:01
  Tim Montague: So tell us about the specific yield relative to fixed tilt or tracker.
• 16:06
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Yeah, right now we've found about a 20% decrease in yields from a single axis tracker, and I think it's like 10% from a fixed system, fixed South facing and with partners in Europe and China that are also doing vertical solar there's apparently ways to increase that yields where it's comparable to the tracker. So to uncover those methods to get that yield that
• 16:37
  Tim Montague: 20% is that for rows going north, south or east west,
• 16:43
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): vertical rows going north, south, panels facing east, west,
• 16:46
  Tim Montague: yeah. What are we going to say? Helge,
• 16:48
  Helge Biernath: yeah. Two things a latitude makes a difference, right? If I have snow, I don't have snow loads here, I have clean panels all day long, which is a problem in California and desert states. And don't forget, I mean, I get the solar power in the winter, and then we have also a different curve because of the nice albedo of the snow.
• 17:07
  Helge Biernath: So I think that's one of the ideas Ian is going after. And so I think, and if we have saturated markets, as we know, we're getting more money for the electrons in the afternoon, right? We just talked about curtailing things. So I think we we need to consider that as well for the for the vertical solar and for the cost economics on it,
• 17:35
  Tim Montague: okay? And then we do have markets like New Jersey that require you to do agrivoltaics If you want to do Greenfield solar. Now, right for small utility or utility now you New Jersey is pretty unique because it is so small and it is an agricultural state, you know, I just think that vertical solar is a fantastic solution for that. Are you guys doing any projects in states that are requiring agrivoltagues?
• 18:03
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Currently, sandbox solar is developing and constructing various types of agrivoltaic solutions, specifically in Colorado in this moment, however, spade does do consulting. So we have helped a lot of developers out and other EPCs across the country to figure out how to deploy agrivoltaics within their state.
• 18:21
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): So we have worked on some projects outside of state.
• 18:26
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and we have talked about spade on the show, but you should probably give us a refresher. What is, what is spade?
• 18:33
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Yeah.
• 18:33
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): So spade boiled down to models any kind of PV solution in anywhere in any climate, anywhere in the world. And we can model the irradiance underneath the solar panels, on the solar panels, of course, and we can model the energy production. We can see what the potential yield is of crops or forage underneath the panels.
• 18:55
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): And we're working to advance that solution to really understand the full micro climate that occurs underneath the panels, so we can use that solution to design optimal designs for avoltaics anywhere in the world.
• 19:10
  Helge Biernath: Yeah, very coming back to New Jersey, back to New Jersey. So we have supplied our system for the Rutgers installation, you know, and so. So one of the ideas behind that is, obviously, to train the new agricultural engineers and scientists you know, to understand, okay, look, this is how it works. You can choose from trackers to fix till to vertical, see what fits the best for your operation. And no, we have not seen yet anything.
• 19:40
  Helge Biernath: But to me, no surprise, because it has to, you know, it has to start working. And then projects need to be identified and then planned, and then we're getting to the point. So we're a little bit, you said it behind in in adapting, but I think we're going to be fast, you know, as soon as we fully understand what it is with EMS, you know, spade and other tools, and then we're gonna hit it. Because if those big boys farmers, especially when they understand, you know, what the benefits are for them, the driscolls of the world, and then they're going to deploy
• 20:21
  Tim Montague: the Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over eight gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable Inverter. Brand and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and Balance of System Requirements, go to Chint Power Systems com, or call 855-584-7168, to find out more. Yeah. I mean, it's so early days, and we have lots of runway, and we need more good information. I'm super grateful for spade. I use helioscope And now celesca As a design platform. And I'm curious, Ian, how do traditional tools that we use in CNI solar and community solar hold up in terms of modeling something like vertical solar. Do they even cut the mustard at all?
• 21:39
  Helge Biernath: I can respond to that quickly, Ian, because I just heard some data from yesterday, and we're going to talk, by the way, at the solar farm summit about that topic.
• 21:48
  Helge Biernath: Ian, me and some other folks.
• 21:48
  Helge Biernath: But if you compare it, and we have an installation in the Central Valley, the systems cannot give you 90 degrees, and they have still issues with faciality, no, so we're seeing basically, I think, eight to 10% better production than design with,
• 22:14
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): yeah, those other tools can model vertical solar production.
• 22:16
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): However, we've been able to uncover a process that we believe we can integrate with spade to obtain a production accuracy of 5% for vertical solar so we're working on that now.
• 22:32
  Tim Montague: Yeah, so I mean, one of the value propositions that I love about agrivoltaics, for example, when you think about vegetation management and grazing, you know, in in large swaths now of the Midwest and the Southwest and the Northeast, running sheep on solar farms has become economical because mowing is expensive, it's also polluting technology, and so we welcome integration of of grazing sheep onto solar farms.
• 23:53
  Tim Montague: And this is a win win, right?
• 23:53
  Tim Montague: It's a win for the grazers there. They need forage, and the solar farm asset owners want to reduce their own M costs. And then it's also good for farm communities, because they don't want to see farmland being used for non farmland uses. And so if you can integrate ag and farm and solar farming, that's just good for everyone. So maybe you guys can talk a little bit about that, that really is the future, right, of integration of clean energy and agriculture.
• 24:31
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Absolutely, yeah, finding that symbiosis is key. I mean, that's the essence of agrivoltaics. Is the food, energy, water Nexus. And it just makes so much sense to integrate it all. Then there's going to be a net benefit to doing it,
• 24:46
  Tim Montague: because money talks right like it has to be economical for farmers to grab onto it. That's why they grow corn and beans here in the Midwest, because there are significant subsidies for them to do so. We're not eating most of those corn and beans. A lot of it's going to biofuels, unfortunately, which is grossly inefficient by a factor of 10 compared to farming photons directly. But what were you going to say? Helge?
• 25:14
  Helge Biernath: Yeah, we still need to keep in mind that conditions are changing. And take Fresno they had last year, all of a sudden, 100 days above 100 degrees. Wow. So that's kind of, you know, the Central Valley, and they're producing a lot right of different crops. So I think we just need to also give the farmers tools, you know, to to not surviving. But yes, they have to survive with their product, right, and with the yields. Because, I mean, yes, you can argue it's all about it has to be penciling in two, three years. But if you don't have a crop anymore in two, three years, you're going to be done anyway. So you need to change something. And we had the last hydro tech conference at UC Davis. We're talking about shades as a value proposition you can sell. How crazy is that?
• 26:12
  Helge Biernath: Right? But, I mean, it's about the workers, right? Because who's picking or in the future, maybe robots, if that's possible, and but also about the produce. So I think we also need to look at from that perspective. And then if you have a steady income from the electrons, either self consumption, which is obviously always better, you know, or that you have your battery bank and your winery. And finally, you don't have to worry about, you know, the grid being gone.
• 26:42
  Helge Biernath: Right? And you have your produce there, and it's also the cold storage is not working anymore because you don't have a generator, or you don't have a battery bank. I think, you know, if you talk to some of the wineries here, they're like, I think you know, we want to be just our micro grid, because we've seen it too many times.
• 26:58
  Helge Biernath: You know that the grid goes down, forced by fires, for example, or by, hey, we're just shutting it off the grid. I don't know if you guys see that in the Midwest, but if we're in California, where we know about that, we have it. You know, if you're sitting here for three days without a power the problem for your produce. I
• 27:20
  Tim Montague: didn't quite understand the question, though, if we have that problem being grid outages,
• 27:25
  Helge Biernath: yeah. I mean, yes. And the need for for micro grades and for the farmers also to be independent, you know, in that regard, besides the self consumption, yeah, it's
• 27:38
  Tim Montague: not a huge problem. It's not a big, as big a problem here as it is in Texas, for example, but it is a problem. And yeah, the future is community scale, micro grids.
• 27:49
  Tim Montague: I'm a huge fan of the clean coalition and Craig Lewis's work.
• 27:52
  Helge Biernath: There was Michigan, not the state I heard, you know, last week, who had the most outages? Was it not
• 27:58
  Tim Montague: Michigan? Could be, could be, there is a, there's like a sea in the Midwest that is rife with outages. I'm I'm in the middle of that where in we don't have a lot of outages here in Illinois, but Michigan is in an area that does have more outage for sure.
• 28:14
  Helge Biernath: Just my point is we can support the farmers with that right to have their own power combined with their product,
• 28:23
  Tim Montague: absolutely. Well, what else should we talk a little bit about the event on July 15, what we're going to do with that,
• 28:30
  Helge Biernath: sure. I mean, the beauty is, we have John Langdon, who is promoting solar and farming. I mean, his slogan is, solar saves farms, which is kind of cool. And he's going to talk about what that means to the farmers. How can they adapt?
• 28:46
  Helge Biernath: How can they incorporate that?
• 28:46
  Helge Biernath: And then we have Professor Marsh D from UC Davis, who with us started that conference at UC Davis about agrivoltaics Two and a half years ago. And he's also going to have a little test yard with trackers and fixed tilt and vertical, which is about to be built to test different crops, you know, under different conditions. So I think we have a little bit of different perspectives. Obviously, this is not the whole country as we know. We got Arizona and we got, you know, New Jersey, and we got Minnesota and and we got en, you know, so I think everybody has to, has to find their solution for their climate and their projects, and we're gonna talk about it.
• 29:35
  Tim Montague: I'm, yeah, I'm, it's a little overwhelming, to be honest. There are so many applications. I'm just looking at the description on our panel discussion right, and you've got wind breaks for crops, reducing water evaporation, generating clean energy for electrification of the operation, obviously, it's already somewhat electrified. It's going to get even more electrified as we move to electric tractors that need the ability to charge remotely so many applications. And I'm curious, though, when you guys think about this landscape of agrivoltaics, what is the relative role you think that vertical solar is going to play in that bigger landscape?
• 30:28
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): I think vertical solar one of the more flexible and I think ultimately applicable opportunities, just because it does save on land space, it can be placed in a lot of configurations, a lot of operations can be interoperable with the vertical solar. There's just so many opportunities specifically with vertical solar that I think allows it to make Nim to be nimble and a lot of different scenarios and maximize various climate opportunities. I mean, like Helge said, if you're in the north and get a lot of snow, you don't get a lot of snow soiling. So there's heavy opportunities to leverage vertical solar there, but also with commodity crops, if you're able to truly interoperate without too much maintenance in between, between vertical rows of solar, you know that makes it a lot more scalable. So those are two small examples where it can be really nimble and applicable to many different climates and opportunities that make it exciting,
• 31:30
  Tim Montague: yeah, when you think about the vast amount of acreage, you know, something like 40% of our real real estate is used for for creating food for livestock, right? Mm. It's a huge amount of our land mass goes to creating food for livestock. If we integrated vertical solar into just 10% of that land, that's probably all the power we need, right? That's that's entirely a green grid.
• 31:53
  Tim Montague: And obviously it's going to be a combination of rooftop, ground mount, floatable takes, etc.
• 32:03
  Tim Montague: This is just one more tool in our box, and and it's an important tool. And I guess I'm still curious about the economics. Can either of you speak to that? Like, if I'm if I'm a solar developer doing five to 10 megawatt projects using trackers or fixed tilt solutions. And I'm really keen to get on this agrivoltaics bandwagon. What are the incentives for me to go? You know what? We're going to start doing vertical solar in some of these projects?
• 32:38
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Yeah, I think one is, what we're trying to tackle is, what's the production, what's the predicted bankable modeling. I think that's the first key step into having comfortability and knowing that it's going to work in certain environments. And so we're starting to uncover that with only a 5% error. So like I said, we're seeing 20% reduction yield based off of single access trackers, but we have some theories on using more high by facial panels, higher by facial holiday panels to be deployed in certain
• 33:13
  Tim Montague: crop yield is higher, right? So you're not, you're not losing as much of the crop as you would. And that's the thing is, the is the solar developer somehow incentivized to to benefit from that agricultural use. I mean, I get it on the on the vegetation control and grazing, but when it comes to cash cropping or commodity cropping, it's even earlier days. But clearly there is an opportunity there where you're you're still producing a a good, healthy crop and then augmenting the income from the land with a with electricity to consume.
• 33:49
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): Here comes our new hypothesis, our new experiences as we developed community solar projects. It's a pretty timely and cost intensive aspect to deal with the erosion or stormwater control of the water that the HJ requires.
• 34:07
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): However, with the vertical solar, we're hypothesizing that many of those costs and timelines and deadlines to create retention ponds or divert that water is minimized or mitigated using vertical solar, because you're not impacting the actual flow of water on the land that you're developing that truly is impermeable and maintains the status quo. So we feel, if that's studied more, that that those significant soft costs or civil costs can be significantly reduced for a lot of developers.
• 34:43
  Tim Montague: Yeah, anything to make a developer's life easier is good thing, for sure. And I think the biggest thing, though, is helping agricultural communities embrace the energy transition and not be fighting these projects,
• 34:57
  Helge Biernath: which I had an interesting encounter when we we set up our first display at our storage location in Visalia. We started maybe two hours to start put the modules up, and the farmer stops and looks at it and like, what are you guys doing there? And we're like, this is vertical solar. And he's like, Ah, this is great, you know, because I don't need to take my trees out anymore. So I can put that next to the trees, almond trees, right? And I'm going to be fine before I had to take out trees, you know, to do fixed tilt or whatever. So sometimes it's pretty easy to explain. It very easy. I mean, yes, the yield is going to be a little bit different, right? If I have trees behind it, obviously there's a shading, but just as a little takeaway, it's just different in that regard.
• 35:51
  Tim Montague: All right. Well, in our last minute together, is there anything else you guys wanted to let our listeners know before we wrap this up,
• 35:59
  Helge Biernath: join us on the 15th of July, 2025, at 9am PST, for more, I think that's going to be awesome. And if you have the chance to come to Chicago to the solar farm Summit, highly recommend that. I think that's the best conference to learn about agrivoltaguex in the United States. And then finally, on the fifth of November, we have UC Davis agrivoltague's conference with some friends from Germany who are going to talk about what the Europeans see and how they're tackling that agrivoltaics revolution.
• 36:33
  Tim Montague: Yeah, check out clean cleanpowerhour.com go to the events tab. You'll see a thumbnail right there at the top with our July 15 event. And then go to soulfarmsummit.com. For that event, which is August 4 to seven in Chicago. Ian, yeah,
• 36:48
  Ian Skor (Sandbox Solar): thanks for having me on here. If anyone has any questions on vertical, solar, agrivoltaics In general, feel free to reach out to myself, or, hell again, we're we'd be happy to learn more about your project or opinion or research ambitions to further voltaics as a whole.
• 37:06
  Tim Montague: All right, with that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage and agrivoltaics.
• 37:07
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague. Have a wonderful day, gentlemen. Thank you. You.