Pollinator-Friendly Solar (Ep. 10)

Innovation is crucial in the face of climate change. As human activities have a deeper, more profound impact on our environment, we need to look at ventures that can serve multiple purposes. In today’s episode, we talk about planting pollinator-friendly habitats beneath solar panels and the potential this land has to support native bees.

Zachary talked about a variety of projects and studies that are already happening in this field. Pollinator Habitat Aligned with Solar Energy (PHASE) and Innovative Solar Practices Integrated with Rural Economies and Ecosystems (InSPIRE) are just two that he’s excited about, while the AgriSolar Clearinghouse works to support the growth of co-located solar and sustainable agriculture.

And if you live in the US and would like to find out if there’s any pollinator-friendly solar in your area, check out this map. And be sure to check out Zachary’s workplace, the Solar Energy Technologies Office at the US Department of Energy. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Loss of habitat is a huge stressor for wild bees. In recent episodes, we’ve taken a closer look at how land use change is negatively affecting our pollinators. One notable positive effect is simply adding more bee -friendly habitat into the landscape, like we talked about in episode eight. Changing meadows into agricultural land is only one way humans have impacted the landscape.

Sometimes the change seems like it would be positive for the environment, like building solar arrays to generate electricity. Often though the land taken for building acres of solar panels could have belonged to bees and other pollinators. Today we’re gonna talk about the potential of using the space around solar panels with Dr.

Zachary Goff Eldridge from the Solar Energy Technologies Office at the US Department of Energy. The Solar [00:01:00] Energy Technologies Office works to advance and expand solar technology across the country. They provide solar energy resources for individuals and governments and fund research and development projects.

They also do a lot of research looking at how solar and agriculture can work and live together. Thank you Zachary, for being here. Let’s start with an easy explanation please. Can you tell us what pollinator friendly solar means? Sure. So pollinator friendly solar refers to solar energy facilities where the ground cover, whether that stuff that’s below the panels and between the panels around the panels,

has been intentionally planted, established, and maintained to support the habitats of pollinators. So how did the Solar Energy Technologies Office get involved in pollinator support, and how long have you been looking into the potential? Sure. So I think that this goes back to, for us, uh, quite a ways. So we started in about 2016, I would say.

We started, we’ve been funding a project at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, or N-REL, called [00:02:00] INSPIRE and INSPIRE studies, ways that solar energy can have sort of lower impacts on the environment when it’s being installed. And it also focused on ways to integrate agricultural activity into solar facilities.

So looking at questions about what does the solar installation do to the soil and water environment around the plant. Um, and then also kind of what can be done in and around those panels. So we refer to this usually as agrivoltaic. So the practice of doing pollinator habitat or grazing or crop production, in and around solar panels integrated with the facility.

So that project has been running at N-REL for, like I said, about nearly seven years now, I think. And we’ve funded a few other projects along the way that have also worked on this. So we made a grant in 2020 to the University of Illinois Chicago for a project called pollinator habitat aligned with solar energy or PHASE.

So they focus on making pollinator friendly habitat work on large solar facilities. And then 2023 in the middle of midst of kicking off a new round of projects focused on agriculture through our FARMS program which stands for foundational agro-tech will take research at megawatt scale. That also included quite bit of pollinator research.

I know this podcast [00:03:00] about native pollinator, not honeybees, but in particular, there’s one focused on honeybee production that’s gonna go through Iowa State University. Do you have any statistics on how many solar farms already have pollinator friendly habitats or, and or have you seen a lot of interest from people?

Yes, so we do have some statistics. So our INSPIRE project with N-REL , like I said, they’ve been going for few years, but it was just last year they actually started doing tracking of these kinds of projects. Tracking both projects, of pollinator friendly vegetation, as well as projects that have agriculture like crops or grazing

integrated. Now they’ve tracked. Last I checked, they had tracked 283 sites totally over one gigawatt of solar energy production. That covers almost 6,000 acres of land that have been placed into pollinator friendly production. I will say that tracking is purely voluntary. The team does their best to outreach and encourage solar developers and owner operators to submit their sites and submit their information to our map.

And I can share a link to that map if, if you’re, uh, listeners, be interested. The real number is almost certainly larger, right? That’s the floor, not the ceiling of how much pollinator friendly solar is out [00:04:00] there. At the same time, I would say we are are seeing a lot of interests from various different stakeholders.

So, you know, local communities are interested in, you know, if we’re gonna build this big solar farm, what kinds of benefits can we get to it from beyond energy? Obviously people who are interested in sort of the agricultural and biodiversity impacts of native habitat are very interested in these facilities as ways to

sort of improve pollinator conservation. And then I think solar developers as well are interested both as a way for them to interface better with communities and surroundings by saying like, look, we’re we’re being good stewards of the land here, as well as perhaps drawing on some of the benefit of running more complicated landscape.

For instance, we have some scientific research that suggests that there’s improved water management and water drainage and things like this due to deep when you have sort of deep-rooted vegetation on site that supports these pollinators rather than shallow grasses. So you mentioned you’re currently partnering with various organizations on research into different aspects associated with pollinators and solar farms.

Is there one particular project [00:05:00] you’d like to highlight? Yeah, I’d really like to, I think the one that would be most rel is most relevant here is our PHASE project. So pollinator habitat aligned with solar energy. I mentioned this I think earlier, so the University of Illinois, Chicago. It’s a really good example of how we’re kind of working to go big with pollinator habitat and, and agro-tech more generally.

So the impetus behind this is that if you look at these sites, like I said, there’s lots of sites out there that are doing pollinator habitat. That means a lot of different things to different people. Some of that is by necessity, right? In different places it means different practices and different species and different plants.

But it also is, you know, there’s not a lot of standardized information and this gets really much harder for larger sites. So when I say large site for this project, we’re talking about like 10 megawatts or larger. And for a solar energy installation, a megawatt takes up between five and eight acres of land.

So when we talking about a 10 megawatt project, we’re talking about 50 acres plus. Um, so pretty large pieces of land that are, that have to be under management. And there’s a lot of these installations rolling out across the country that we need a lot of large [00:06:00] installations like this to meet our climate goals.

That’s a huge opportunity for pollinators. If this land works for pollinators, really at scale, right? That’s potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of acres that could be made accessible to these species and that could support pollinator health. But of course the larger the piece of land, the more complicated the management becomes, the more of a very large business investment you’re asking someone to make by investing in pollinator friendly habitat.

And so there’s a real, we’ve solved before we funded this project, a real posity of information for, whether it’s developers, whether it’s communities, whether it’s regulators in, in understanding kind of how you make this work at large scale, not just as at smaller solar sites where it’s a little bit easier to be experimental or at research sites, perhaps where people are, especially studying pollinator habitat.

But really what can you do with a large site? At scale. And the PHASE project so they’re producing a lot of resources, manuals, tools, seed selection guides, things like that to help interested parties. Those resources are hopefully coming out, uh, soon and will be posted on their, their website in the months to come.

[00:07:00] That’s interesting cause you’re right, obviously larger space, larger maintenance and upkeep and things like that. Is that something that PHASE is kind of going to guide the organizations who have these large solar farms with? Yes. I think it’s about really helping people understand sort of what types of considerations they should be bringing into the picture and how to really put together a vegetation management plan.

So it’s a very multi-stage process. I mean, we’re, we’re also talking about kind of a, a major construction project, so it’s everything. How do you manage the initial design of the project to make sure that from the get-go, you’re talking about vegetation, you’re not just saying, okay, well then at the end we’ll go plant something, you know, from the beginning, like, How are you gonna install these things?

Where is different stuff gonna do? What kind of earth work or groundwork might need to be done prior? And then planning out, you know, what are different zones of the site going to support? So, you know, on a farm, on a solar farm that’s large, you have obviously the space in and under the panels, but you also have sort of buffer zones around the panels.

You have air, you have spaces in between where equipment might be moving through and you really wanna think [00:08:00] about how, what different vegetation might work in those different areas. And then in the long term, a lot of these projects, once they’re built, are then sold or transferred to another party who actually like owns and operates the, the project in the long term.

So often the entity that constructs and develops the projects, is not always the one that actually manages in the long term. So figuring how do you manage that handoff is a really big issue because you wanna make sure that you are thinking long term during construction, but also able to hand off all that knowledge and all that operational knowledge off into the next phase.

And so I think these helping, some of it is about the nuts and bolts. Like what do you plant, how do you manage it? And, and when do you mow, if at all? Or do you graze it or, or all these kinds of, on the ground questions, there’s also a lot of organizational questions, but how do you put together a plan to conduct large scale pollinator supporting operations on an active power plant?

And that requires a lot of coordination between a lot of different people, and not just on the industrial side as well, but in the community by from regulators, from permitter officials who might have to be looking through all these plans, understanding the implications. Are there any [00:09:00] drawbacks or potential dangers to native bees and other pollinators from having their kind of feeding and nesting area in these areas?

I’m kind of thinking about, you mentioned honey beehives or planting of non-native floral species. Sure. So I don’t think there are sort of direct drawbacks in the sense of, you know, you might wonder about, you know, does the energy infrastructure cause some kind of, I don’t know, electromagnetic problems or something.

I’m not really aware of any evidence that there’s any kind of issues like that that directly impact the health of insects on site. You know, I think there’s always gonna be kind of threats or, or issues in kind of that ongoing friction with, uh, respect to the site operator. So, for instance, the kinds of habitats that we can establish on solar sites might be different than the ones that we could establish sort of unbounded.

So for instance, we want to find things that are shade tolerant. If we’re gonna plant them in and around panels, we want to find plants that don’t grow too high because we don’t want, obviously, we don’t wanna be shading the panels and, and, and affecting energy production too negatively. [00:10:00] So some of those things as we’re thinking through, I mean, these are kind of novel environments to some degree.

I mean, you may be able to find analogs in nature, but there’s something kind of novel about them. So there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, I think, on understanding exactly, what the timeline is like for establishing these environments and then what, who shows up? You know, like what kinds of insects and pollinators actually make their homes on these sites?

I think there’s some really promising early research results, but there’s still a long ways to go. So, and I think that we’ve heard stories, at least about issues in terms of, as the site lifetime extends issues with, you know, is the habitat that’s been established being maintained properly. Again, like I said, these are complicated operations and you know, if you hire a new company to come in and do your site vegetation management, do they know about what’s planted on site?

Do they know how to manage it? You know, do you hire someone who says, okay, yeah, I should be spraying herbicide here, and then they, they don’t realize that actually that’s not how this site is being managed. I think, you know, depending on the goals, of the site owner and operator and local communities, you may see things like non-natives or honeybee hives used on the site.

And so then that is about competing use cases [00:11:00] and trying to understand like why are people planting pollinator friendly solar on the site. You know, this doesn’t really happen automatically, right? I mean, if you look at sort of what the default activity is on a solar field, it’s to put down, you know, turf grass or something that sort of is very tame, let’s say, and the industry knows how to deal with it.

When people do this, they do it on purpose. And it’s important to think, to think back, and this is I think part of what our PHASE project’s really trying to draw people’s attention to. You wanna start those negotiations very early. So what do you wanna do with this site? Do you want to produce honey on a site? We believe that can be done, but of course then it may come at a cost.

You may be saying, okay, well then we’re prioritizing honey bees versus we’re prioritizing native pollinators or native bees. Uh, similarly non-native floral species. That may be a question of. Do you go into this with a clear understanding of like, we want to support a native landscape and that means we’re gonna plant these things?

Or are you looking at this and saying, actually, because of seed costs or because I need these things compatible, you know, these compatibility issues in terms of height, in terms of shade tolerance, I’m gonna pick these other species, and then that those [00:12:00] may not be native species. And that becomes a question of what values are driving,

the vegetation management decisions and who’s in the room for that? Is it our local conservation groups in the room, or is the local community or is the state pushing for particular kinds of practices? So we’ve seen, I believe it’s eight states have produced some kind of pollinator scorecard, for instance, that can be used to evaluate the pollinator friendliness of a site.

Those are usually those, and in some states those are related to kind of incentive programs or, or other kinds of benefits. So ultimately these questions about what you’re gonna plant and and manage here really come back to who’s making those vegetation management decisions and, and what kind of values and partners is driving them.

What excites you about the potential? I just think that, you know, really the scale of the potential is pretty amazing. So when you look at what we’re talking about building in solar energy and, and we were thinking about how much solar energy in some sense needs to get built to really address our climate goals, which I believe are some of the biggest, are the biggest threats to, to bio diversity that we have.[00:13:00]

We’re talking about as much as a terawatt of solar energy put out by 2035, so it’s a thousand gigawatts. That would be over 5 million acres of land occupied by solar energy. Uh, it’s a always a little bit of a interesting interplay because as a percentage of the total energy of the US it’s not that much like there’s, there’s much more than that available, but it is a huge scale.

And the thing that’s so interesting to me about this is that when we talk about building all that infrastructure out, And sometimes we don’t need the ground for solar energy. We need the space five feet above the ground to catch light. And then beneath that, there’s just such a wealth of opportunity, I think.

And so for me, you know, I work on a lot of different kinds of agro-tech work. So whether that’s native pollinators or crop growth or grazing, I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to rethink how we’re managing landscapes and to really bring in that, really start using that natural capital of these landscapes for

great benefit to, obviously to pollinators, but then also to communities, to farmers, people who want to see this land used to . Its, its sort of best and highest use. I think we have a huge [00:14:00] opportunity here to produce clean energy at the same time as we’re supporting the natural world to the benefit of everyone.

And so I, I really am excited about this opportunity and really think that there’s a lot of good that can be done here. So much to unpack here, but the overall feeling I got from Zachary is that when solar developers and managers working with local communities and conservation groups, considerately plan to plant and maintain pollinator friendly habitats the potential could be massive. Zachary mentioned a lot of different projects and resources, so be sure to visit the show notes to get more details on PHASE and INSPRIRE just to name two. Thanks so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. It would mean a lot to the show and the bees, if you could leave a review and more importantly, tell a friend. If you need more, bee fun.

Don’t forget to visit the website, the bees knees dot website. Until next time, keep buzzing.[00:15:00]