RetroFedAgrivoltaic azolla and solar panel synergistic combination
I have been working on creating the most realistic, cheapest, and most productive setups possible, and I think I’ve gotten close.
This combines the electricity production of solar, and the carbon capture power of azolla. The solar power helps keep the azolla safe from harsh direct sun, and the azolla pond below helps cool the panel with subtle evaporation cooling.
How does it make money? Excess electricity sale and azolla biomass which can be used as animal feed or squeezed into cakes biochar because it fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere.
This infrastructure start up cost is very simple, accessible, and easy to maintain. This would ideally be done in places that don’t experience cold winters, ideally somewhere like Southern USA. It can be done in Summer in the Northern hemisphere but only for about 4 months a year. Any type of heating or infrastructure greatly increases costs.
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This is awesome! If you don’t mind, can you give a rough idea of the financials?
It depends greatly on location and solar panels are becoming cheaper rapidly. So I have no idea. I just think from an engineering perspective this is something that could be realistically scaled up to many acres.
That’s really cool. I wonder if it could be further enriched by adding fish like some aquaponics systems. (No doubt there would already be detritivore and other invertibrate life, though). Does cooling the panels improve their efficiency?
Thank you, and yes fish could most likely be added, the immediate problem would probably be the fish eating all the azolla though. I was thinking you could ranch chickens and feed them the azolla, then sell the chickens which could be a value-added profitable time investment. The profitability comes down to how many need to be paid to manage and maintain the system. So if something like adding fish adds more value while not increasing the labor required too much, then absolutely. Cooling adds some efficiency when it’s hot, not a huge amount, but more than nothing.
If we can remove the back pillar then the design would be even simpler, and harvesting would be much easier.
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