Harvesting the Sun: Revolutionary Technology Combines Solar Power and Agriculture for a Sustainable Future

Scientific advancements are giving rise to unimaginable prospects like farmers being able to generate solar energy and crops at the same time. Not only that, farmers can attain better yields and more energy could be achieved with the two operations separately. Researchers working in techno-agriculture have discovered that by covering crops with translucent solar panel canopies, they can separate the light that fuels energy production from the light that promotes photosynthesis in plants. Our sun's many wavelengths of light have various effects on Earth's biological systems. The blue spectrum of sunlight, for instance, is what life utilizes to recognize the daytime and causes significant hormonal changes in animals and plants that change their behavior from being passive to active. On the other end, plants prefer to employ red light to convert carbon dioxide into sugars. Red light doesn't get as hot as blue light, hence plants exposed to red light spectra during growth exhibit less heat stress than those exposed to blue light. In light of this, assistant professor Majdi Abou Najm of the University of California, Davis, developed organic solar panels constructed of translucent material that absorb blue light to produce power but let the red light with its longer wavelengths pass through to the crops below. Despite having a third less yield due to decreased sunlight, the crops with filtered light only produced half as many heat-stressed or "poor" tomatoes as the uncovered plot. The final picture turns out to be quite profitable when the electricity and water savings are taken into account. Since there is no need to alternate rows of panels or deprive plants of the sun's nourishing beams, Abou Najm sees his transparent solar canopies as the logical next step in this practice.