Sun'Agri: Bringing European Agrivoltaic Innovation to the US | EP231

In this fascinating episode of the Clean Power Hour, host Tim Montague sits down with Chuck Schwartz, head of business development at Sun'Agri, to explore the cutting-edge world of agrivoltaics. Chuck shares his journey from engineering to entrepreneurship, ultimately leading him to the forefront of solar technology in agriculture.

The conversation delves into Sun'Agri's innovative software platform, which intelligently steers solar panels to optimize both crop growth and energy production. Chuck explains how their technology can help farmers mitigate climate change challenges, such as drought and frost damage, while still generating significant solar power. He discusses the trade-offs between energy and crop production, and how their "farmer first" approach prioritizes agricultural success.

Chuck and Tim explore the economic considerations of agrivoltaics projects, including the challenges of increased capital expenditure and the potential for new value streams. They discuss the reception from solar developers and hardware manufacturers, highlighting the growing interest in agrivoltaics as a way to differentiate in the market and improve project success rates.

The episode also touches on Sun'Agri's current projects, including installations at research universities and commercial farms. Chuck shares his vision for the future of agrivoltaics, emphasizing the need for demonstration projects and changes in regulations to support farmer-owned systems and community solar initiatives.

Tune in to discover how agrivoltaics could revolutionize farming while advancing the clean energy transition, and learn about the potential for this technology to create higher value per acre than traditional farming or solar installations alone.

Social Media Handles
Chuck Schwartz
Sun'Agri

Transcript

Chuck Schwartz: 0:38

Farmers face lots of different stresses. One of the biggest stresses that is really going to be a challenge for them in the future is climate change. We're talking about utilizing this solar and this technology as a climate mitigation strategy for farmers to address things that are particularly right now, for example, in the West,

intro: 1:01

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Tim Montague: 1:29

We're here at the solar farm Summit, and my guest today is Chuck Schwartz. He is the head of business development for a company called Sun' has developed a software platform for agrivoltaics, and they are bringing a wealth of knowledge and data from the European market to the US now. So I'm very excited to talk to you, Chuck. Welcome to the show.

Chuck Schwartz: 1:52

Oh, thank you, Tim, for seeing me.

Tim Montague: 1:54

Appreciate it. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how you got connected to Sun'Agri

Chuck Schwartz: 1:59

Okay, great. So I'm an engineer by trade and an entrepreneur. Been involved in different businesses over the years. About 15 years ago, I started to focus almost exclusively on energy related issues. Ran programs for NYSERDA, New York State Energy Research Development Authority, ran a program for energy efficiency in the New York market called the Long Island green Homes program. I'm a little ADHD, so I need to kind of get involved in different things at different times. So six years ago, started to work pretty exclusively on commercial, industrial solar, mostly in the New York market, rooftop carports, some ground mount and that's kind of morphed into additional projects, more in New York State, in the upstate market, and got involved with researchers at Cornell University. They have a laboratory in the Hudson Valley, which is working on Apples and vineyards and things like that. They asked me to refind technology for agrivoltaics, for them to include in their in a research grant that they were putting together that got funded, by the way, and I got to know these folks in France from San agri who are really leaders in this, in this space, in Europe. And over time, they asked me to get involved with them for business development in the US.

Tim Montague: 3:29

So as my listeners may know, the European market is about 10 years ahead of us here in the US when it comes to agrovoltaics and in general, right? Solar technology, so I'm not surprised that you found your way to a European company. But what is the, what is the crux of Sun' offering in the US market?

Chuck Schwartz: 3:51

Okay, so what we've found is that I'll call an intelligence steering of solar panels. So typically, single axis tilt panels can can not only produce lots of solar power in kilowatt hours, but at the same time provide an environment that's actually conducive to plant growth, that can actually improve plant growth. And part of that is from shading. It's really more from what we basically are doing is we're taking a variety of different inputs. We have sensors and fields, we have weather station, we have a crop plan. We have all kinds of different information. We're churning that all together and delivering on a real time basis a tilt management plan that will tilt the panels at different directions at different times to improve both the crop growth and at the same and address heat stress, for example, address frost for example, and at the same time produce a significant amount of power.

Tim Montague: 4:52

Yeah. So I mean, there's some there's some trade offs here that are complicated, right? When plants are exposed to sunlight, they're photosynthesizing. But to do that, right, they have to open their stomata, these little openings in their leaves, to absorb CO two, which is their main building block, right? They want to suck CO two out of the atmosphere using photonic power, but at the same time, then they're breathing out, H, 2o, right. And so if they're under too much sunlight and water stress, right, then they're going to shut down their photosynthesis, and they're not going to grow as much that meanwhile, then you're putting a solar array over the plants, which really does have an optimal track. You know, any single axis tracker. Water will generally be following the sun. There are some nuances, right? If there's clouds, if there's weather. And now you're putting this all together, and the question is, how do you optimize energy and crop production, and which has greater monetary value to the agrovoltaic solar farmer?

Chuck Schwartz: 6:02

Okay, so you're raising the real questions that are the challenges, particularly in the US market. It's a little different in Europe. So first thing is, at the end of the day, we call it agricultural production offset or curtailment, the end of the day, there's only so much sun. There's almost only so much time during the day, if I'm going to be placing those panels to optimize shade, or, excuse me, to optimize sunlight coming in, say, in the morning, that is very likely a time that I'm not going to be tracking the sun very well for solar production. Now, I'll get some, don't get me wrong. I mean, we're talking about five by facial panels. We're talking about, you know, optimizer technologies for for the inverters and things that you're going to get some power, but you're not going to get as much as if you were just tracking the sun right. On average, we're seeing probably a 25% curtailment in the kWh production types

Tim Montague: 7:04

of systems, okay? And that's because it's prioritizing the growth of the crops Exactly. We're farmer first, okay? And I get that because, what's the point in growing a crop if it's not going to be a good crop, right? Like, well,

Chuck Schwartz: 7:16

more, even more important, Tim farmers face lots of different stresses. One of the biggest stresses that is really going to be a challenge for them in the future is climate change. We're talking about utilizing this solar and this technology as a climate mitigation strategy for farmers to address things that are particularly right now, for example, in the West. I mean, we're starting a project in Palisades, Colorado over peaches, okay? And, I mean, they, thank God, they have the Colorado rivers right there, so they have plenty of water. But you think they get, you know, a couple, you know, an inch, two inches of rain a year. I mean, it's really, it's significant, and they have lots of, you know, potential for sunburn on plants, things like that, yeah. So by doing this, we're able to help them mitigate this, this drought strategy, you know, this drought condition at the same time, in this case, this project we're doing with, with it's called Talbot farms, is going to be, they have a pretty big operation, so it's going to be net metering to their Okay, to their system, about a 420 kW system, okay? But you know, the same thing could work on a larger scale. Now it's not going to work on utility scale. And the reason is, I've got to raise the panels higher than traditionally. I'm going to raise them could be as much as five meters, yeah, in height, right?

Tim Montague: 8:50

So the structure gets very expensive. It

Chuck Schwartz: 8:52

adds a CapEx, yeah, to the project. Yep,

Tim Montague: 8:56

exactly. Yep. Yeah, you know, and money talks, many people come to me and say, hey, you know, I've got this great waste bang technology. And I'm like, Okay, well, why isn't anybody using it? I had several conversations yesterday with double access tracker manufacturers, and I'm like, Well, look, 96% of the market in utility solar in the US is single actions, Tracker, five foot tall. You want to you want to go 10 feet, 15 feet, you can do it, but that's a lot of steel, absolutely, but so, but are you also assisting with doing that financial analysis of what the capex is going to be exactly the return on that investment, exactly

Chuck Schwartz: 9:42

so. So the in Europe, son agri is an IPP. They're building systems. They're developing. They bringing partnerships. They're part of a large construction company, okay? They're doing it in the US. What we're looking to do is to partner with developers who are looking to differentiate themselves in agrivoltaics, and to offer this as a the

Tim Montague: 10:07

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Chuck Schwartz: 10:44

people like that's world exactly

Tim Montague: 10:48

we, we witnessed an interesting announcement yesterday. They've they're starting a new association, the solar and farming Association, Safa. They call it, yep, very familiar. I know Lucy quite which is going to be an analog to Sei a and CCSA focused on agrivoltaics. So it's a very exciting time in agrivoltaics. In the US, it's kind of starting to bubble up now. And more developers are realizing that if they can offer an agrivoltaic solution to landowners and the neighbors of landowners, the likelihood of getting the projects permitted goes up so they can get their projects permitted faster, cheaper and with a greater success rate. And this is everything to developers. So there's a lot of dead ends in development, right? 90% of projects never see the light of day, you know, because they get shut down for various reasons. It could be the interconnection costs, could be nimbyism, etc. So back to Santa agri you've got a pilot. I would call it, I guess. In Colorado, we have underway. We have

Chuck Schwartz: 11:56

five projects that are under development right now. Three of them are at research universities, okay? And then two of them are commercial. And what are those research universities? Cornell University is, you know, development stage right now, Washington State University and Southern Illinois University. Oh, great,

Tim Montague: 12:15

my backyard,

Chuck Schwartz: 12:17

I'll come visit

Tim Montague: 12:19

so, but if we could, yeah,

Chuck Schwartz: 12:22

let's come back to that economic conversation, please. Because we're we've got to look beyond the standard way of doing things. Look the standard way of doing a solar farm. And I have trouble with that terminology, by the way, the standard way of doing a solar farm is, it's a zero sum game. I'm going to lease the land as cheap as possible. I'm going to build as inexpensively as possible my own M I'm going to try to make it low as possible. I'm going to see maximum returns. Yeah, that's the traditional way of doing it, and that's part of the I think the reason you're seeing, I've seen 20, less than 20% of projects that, that's the numbers I saw from my research. But some of that, less

Tim Montague: 13:03

than 20% of projects are successfully built. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, less than 10 probably.

Chuck Schwartz: 13:09

I think my number was with interconnection. They've already input money for the interconnection. It still fell apart. And oh, and the other big number is it's like six years to Yep, to get a project done, yep. And these are, I'm not talking about 50 megawatt projects. I'm talking about community solar, three megawatt five in New York. Yeah, that's not a good return. So what we got to start doing is looking at what are the other economic inputs to the equation that have value. And the challenge is, they may not be really beneficial to the developer or the investor, but they could be really important to the farmer, things like, what? So I'll give you an example if you're familiar with viter in New York. Yeah. Okay, so Veter has these five different attributes. I forgot what they call an exhibit. One of them is an environmental attribute. So the environmental attribute is basically a rec value, a renewable energy credit value. But if I'm farming under solar, why? You know, at the same time I'm producing meaningful kilowatt hours, I'm also sequestering carbon in my plants. Why it in my rec value, my my environmental benefit, right? Go up. That would change, yeah, the kinds of numbers that we're talking about, yeah. But that also, you know, now we start getting into the what's really agrivoltaics versus not agrivoltaics conversation, which can be

Tim Montague: 14:44

tricky. Yeah, a definition is slippery slope. And I had a lengthy conversation about this, about the New Jersey market, for example, where if you want to do Greenfield solar development, you have to do dual use solar, right? You can't convert farm ground to solar farms without doing agrivoltaics. And then we and then the question I asked is, well, can you do grazing? Can you do solar grazing with cheap and get away with it? And there was a maybe. But really, what they want to see is, what is the traditional use today that will be the same traditional use tomorrow, adding solar on top. And what you're suggesting is, hey, Mr. Solar developer, Mr. Farmer, you can now do this and get more. Yield out of your crops than you were before you added solar

Chuck Schwartz: 15:43

or protect them from protect

Tim Montague: 15:46

them from climate change. And let's just write some of what those assumptions are, more heat waves, more drought can be more flooding. Also frost.

Chuck Schwartz: 16:02

New York lost half its its Apple crop two years ago because of a late season frost. It was okay. You had a warm January, tree started budding. Oh, and then come April, late April, early May, Cold Snap, right? You know, they had already started fruiting some of the trees, yeah? And they just, it totally wiped out a big portion of the Okay,

Tim Montague: 16:26

and so, and you think that you might be able to control frost damage with we

Chuck Schwartz: 16:29

totally, we, again, we've shown it. And the panels would be placed in a horizontal position, right? And would act as a heat reflector, yeah? And look, it's not going to be a dramatic increase in temperature, but two degrees, three degrees Celsius is probably enough to address that. It's not that much different than the other mitigation strategies that runners are doing to deal with crop I mean, they're blowing air with those big, giant fans, and they're spraying down with water. This is just, you know, another way, and it's part of a larger, yeah, larger system, yeah,

Tim Montague: 17:04

I know in in in wine country, in California, they use big fans to to mitigate the risk of frost. Yeah, absolutely. But So back to this peach farm though, in Colorado. Tell us a little bit about the considerations. And is the farmer going to own the system?

Chuck Schwartz: 17:26

They've received a grant from USDA, a Rural Energy for America grant, yeah,

Tim Montague: 17:31

yeah. I mean, these, these, these incentives are very important, right? When you have a nascent industry, which, which I would certainly call agrivoltaics and nascent industry. You need incentives to get farmers to take that step, or developers, for that matter, right, right? It's both end. So what is the reception that you're getting from developers? Right? Because you're wanting to plug your software into existing hardware systems, exactly, and it's an upgrade right to that system, because it's going to today. It's a tracker tomorrow. It's a smart tracker, or an intelligent tracker that's designed with crop growing in mind, yes, and but what is the reception that you're getting

Chuck Schwartz: 18:22

depends on who you're talking to, to be quite honest, there's, well, first of all, just in terms of the tracker technologies. Our goal is to be hardware agnostic. You know, the end of the day, hooking into the control systems for different trackers is not a major technology lift. You know, it's really that all of these systems have some type of mechanism for us to make a data interface to their control system. Sure, and it's going to vary based on the different manufacturer. Okay, terms of developers, there are some developers, you name two of them, that believe that agrol ticks is going to be important part of their offering and their differentiation in the marketplace. And also, I think they're doing the right thing, yeah, and we're looking to build relationships and channel partnerships with folks like that that are looking to do it at the same time I'm looking, I believe that farmer owned systems have a place in smart I'm a great believer in distributed energy resources. You know, look, I worked in New York City for years doing rooftop, okay? It's all just, it's all D, you know, distributed energy, yeah, and why not? You know, we've got to change some rules. Though, a lot of counties, for example, in the northeast, have rules that say, if you produce power on your farm, you can only produce up to 110% of your own use. Well, that means they can't do community solar. That means that they can't do virtual net metering. That's a lot of things that doesn't make sense. So those kinds of jurisdictional rules have to change.

Tim Montague: 20:09

In my with regards to net metering, it's only going the other direction. Net metering is being devalued across exactly I know, I know. So we're going through that in Illinois. Obviously the California market went through that last year and it crushed the residential solar market. I think the market was 70% reduced that some numbers I saw too this year versus last right because of nem 3.0 Yeah. A big Delta. All right. Well, what else should we know about Sun'Agri and who is your primary audience? Who are you trying to spark dialog with?

Chuck Schwartz: 20:52

I will my My goal right now is to build a few very key demonstration projects. Yeah, look, at the end of the day, this is about farmers being able to look at these systems and understand them and say, this makes sense for me, for my own operations, they own it, whether it's owned by a developer and they're a tenant farm or, you know, there's a lot of different potential models, yeah, for that. So my goal is to get a number of these geographically situated down the next two years.

Tim Montague: 21:25

Have you talked to the University of Illinois, because they have that solar farm two project? Yeah, I'm going to be talking to them. I was introduced. I mean, it's traditional trackers. To my knowledge. They may have one elevated segment, you know, portion with a taller tracker. I'm not sure of all those details, but look,

Chuck Schwartz: 21:43

at the end of the day, the height is based on two things. It's based on what you're growing underneath. Yeah. I mean, if you're growing blueberries, right? You don't need 15 feet. Yeah. The other, of course, is the farm equipment, right? And I believe that we're seeing, over time, we're going to see smaller equipment. The other thing too that we're going to see is, I think that a lot of this fits into the regenerative agriculture, organics, type of marketplace, which are a lot of times, are smaller farms. They're not going to have big, giant equipment. A lot of cases, they're going to be using Troy builds and using

Tim Montague: 22:22

what they're

Chuck Schwartz: 22:24

not going to have clouds. They're going to have other types of smaller driven equipment, okay, and so they're not going to need That's that same height, yeah.

Tim Montague: 22:38

Okay. And what is the reception that you're getting from the hardware manufacturer? Hardware manufacturers?

Chuck Schwartz: 22:44

Ridge, you're saying the tracker Yeah,

Tim Montague: 22:46

the tracker manufacturers,

Chuck Schwartz: 22:48

if we were talking about last year, I went to re, sure, re plus, yeah. And I specifically went to try to start this dialog, and they looked at me like I was crazy. But now, look, I mean, we're gonna who's right there next tracker. Yeah, they're, they're getting it. They understand there's a place in this market. Look, it's not going to be the same place as giant utility scale, but there's a place in this market for them to make good money, yeah. And so

Tim Montague: 23:20

they're, well, I hate to break it to you, but next tracker only wants to sell 50 megawatt projects and up

Chuck Schwartz: 23:27

I my conversations with them, is that they've reconsidered that, okay? And they're looking at this, this market, as an add on market. It's not going to be the same dollars, but it's going to be significant dollars. Yeah, yeah. I

Tim Montague: 23:42

think it'll be more than niche players. I mean, we see there's half a dozen tracker manufacturers here. Last year, there was only one and and names that I was not familiar with. So, yeah, it is a and, you know, they're, they're, they're coming from Europe, they're coming from the Middle East. Those places where agrivoltaics has has already gotten a toehold, Asia is another place, although I don't know. Oh yeah, we had a Korean there's a Korean, Korean tracker maker.

Chuck Schwartz: 24:14

They have a single axis also, yeah, both. Yep, yep.

Tim Montague: 24:18

All right, anything else you'd like us to know? Chuck, no,

Chuck Schwartz: 24:21

just that, you know, what, what I see is we're going to see an evolution in this, in this marketplace, and for sure, it's going to be different portions of it with different you know, and we need to kind of segregate the types of systems that we do, and if we're going to incentivize as an example. So, yeah, you know, is it really the same if I put in vertical systems, it's it's great we're going to continue to farm in between. But is it benefiting the plant growth, right? You know. So those are the kinds of kinds of things that I think we have to watch. And I think we also really need to look at the economics of these solar projects over agriculture, and look for other monetary areas. Because the end of the day, the value of that, forgetting the value of the electrons, forgetting the value of the crops. Put it all together, the value per acre from a production standpoint, with solar and farming, is significantly higher than one or the other alone.

Tim Montague: 25:30

I wholeheartedly agree. Great. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and a review on our. Or Spotify and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners. I want to thank Chuck Schwartz with Sun'Agri for being here today.

Chuck Schwartz: 25:46

Thank you so much. Tim, great seeing you. Let's grow solar. You.