[piano intro] - [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[intriguing music] - [Michelle] In the fight against climate change, reducing carbon emissions has long been seen as a key approach.

And what has one of the biggest carbon footprints?

Energy generation.

- We should always be looking for ways to change the way that we do energy in ways that are gonna be more beneficial for our environment and the planet as a whole.

Renewable energy and solar energy, these are potential solutions that reduce that carbon output from our power sector.

- [Michelle] When you think of solar energy production, you might think of solar arrays in a desert like this.

But North Carolina is actually a prime spot for solar.

- North Carolina's been leading the country for years in our solar generation, which is wonderful.

- Yeah, a lot of people do not realize that, for a number of years, we were the number two solar deployment state in the country, only behind California.

There was just a confluence of public policy in our state that led to the market here being very attractive for solar development.

- Solar is inexpensive, it's easy to put almost anywhere, and it makes an ideal place where agriculture can also thrive if you plan early in the design and layout phase.

[intriguing music] - What we've seen historically with solar development is that you want to find land that is in areas where the land is not expensive, land that is preferably already cleared, land that doesn't have a mountain in the middle of it.

And that has pointed a lot of solar development in North Carolina to the rural areas of the state, in the east in particular, where we have a lot of flat, agricultural land and a lot of flat, underutilized land.

- That farmland is needed to produce food, and if we remove the capability of producing food in this farmland, we have removed our ability to feed the population in the world.

So there is a conflict.

- [Michelle] That conflict could be resolved by co-locating solar energy production with farming on the same land through a practice called agrivoltaics.

- Agrivoltaics is the combination of agriculture and photovoltaic panels.

And the idea behind it is, can we use the land for dual purposes.

- [Michelle] In eastern North Carolina, EnerWealth is helping multi-generational farmers do just that.

- EnerWealth, in many ways, the name kind of embodies what our mission is all about.

We started because I realized, after spending about two decades in rural development, that solar energy investments were going to be the new source of revenue coming into rural communities, and I wanted to be sure that that investment would do more than what it had been doing.

There's the potential for broadening of the benefits economically for communities and people who have been historically disadvantaged as a part of this energy transition.

I work with smaller acreage landowners on what's called distributed-sized solar generation projects.

So these are smaller sites.

They're less than five megawatts, typically less than 30 acres.

And in this case, they're actually less than five acres.

And the reason why we build these smaller systems is, one, we're able to capture more value from the solar energy by pairing it with battery storage.

And two, because we're trying to demonstrate a way of building solar projects that is co-located alongside agricultural production, that's in harmony with the surrounding community and the neighborhood, as a model for the way that solar can be deployed across the rural South, across the country.

Part of the EnerWealth story is helping rural families, especially families with smaller acreage, minority landowners, small farmers to hold onto their land from one generation to the next.

- Ooh, this beautiful woman here.

- That's Marion Mitchell.

That's me.

- That's you with your two children?

- [Marion] My two children, Derrick and Lavonda.

- And these pictures are a little older.

- Yes, they are.

- So I wanna be very careful with 'em.

- Yeah.

This is my mother.

- Okay.

- Mary Fannie Boone.

This is our father, Bryant J. Boone, right there.

- [Ajulo] Okay, oh, and I see right there it says BJB on the trailer.

- Uh-huh, yep.

My grandfather was the one that got started because he had bought the land.

And like I say, he had, my grandfather had oodles and oodles of land, but when he died, he had four children, three boys and one girl, and he made sure each one of 'em had a farm they owned.

And so that's how this farm got here that my daddy take over, this was his farm.

And he farmed until he was disabled to do the farming again.

Then he start leasing it out, and that's how we've been going ever since.

- We know that land is a source of wealth for people.

The question is how are they able to maintain it from one generation to the next.

The two landowners that we work worked with with our pilot projects are actually African American landowners.

And the history of land retention in the African American community is actually a sad story.

Many African American landowners have lost their land, millions and millions of acres over generations, which is amounting to billions of dollars worth of wealth that's been stripped away, in one way or the other, from those landowners.

The beauty of our projects is that landowners are able to continue to cultivate their land.

It works well for farmers because this is another way to diversify their revenue streams, to diversify their income.

We do want folks to have the flexibility alongside the solar production to be able to farm, or use that land for recreational purposes, or any other purpose that the family might want to use it for, and both can be done.

We're proving this model to show that it's accessible for rural electric cooperatives to have both solar and storage, and that it serves the grid as well as their consumers.

There are 900 rural electric cooperatives across the country.

Many of them are in the southeast.

- Typically, areas that are served by electric cooperatives are gonna be very rural, very agrarian, which is the case here in northeastern North Carolina, a lot of farmland and a lot of scattered areas, particularly when it comes to the investments that have been made to provide the service.

Projects like this one really bring a lot of layers of benefit to our member owners.

So this is a solar plus battery storage installation.

It's not a micro grid that's serving a home per se, and it's powering the grid itself when the solar arrays are producing.

And the benefit of the batteries actually brings some flexibility for us as electric cooperatives.

Because we are buying power, we do not own any generation as electric cooperatives.

And so our needs during specific times of the month call for us to be able to limit our use of the electrical grid, and that's where the batteries come into play.

We're able to reduce costs by making sure that we're relieving ourselves of some more expensive cost during peak periods on the wholesale power grid.

But another layer to this is the work that we're able to do with some of our landowners who are participating in another program that we have here at Roanoke that's called the Sustainable Forestry and Land Retention Program.

These individuals now have an opportunity to bring levels of wealth creation to their families, somewhere in the range of about 30 years, 30 to 40 years, which can traverse several generations.

So we're talking about wealth creation, we're also talking about job opportunities, community and economic development, tied back to how we make maximum use of the electrical grid.

It is very important for us to make sure that everyone is able to participate.

- [Ajulo] So about how old do you think this house is?

- [Marion] I know it's every bit 100 years old.

- [Ajulo] Yeah, at least 100 years old.

- Uh-huh, yeah, it is 100 years old.

See then my little garden, my little collards.

- I see 'em.

- There's one type of salad, there's another type of salad, and there's another type of salad over there.

And this is collards, these are collards.

My mother and father, they worked very hard to keep this land and get the land started.

We're not gonna be selling this land because it stay in the generation because my mother and father started this farm.

Take care of what you already have.

- They don't make new land.

- Uh-uh, no, they sure don't.

[emotional music] - [Michelle] Further west, outside of Biscoe, the team at the Montgomery Sheep Farm has turned land that wasn't being farmed into a productive sheep and solar operation.

[Idael calls] - Come on.

[Idael calls] Come on, big bubbas.

- Development in general can really occupy a lot of what was previously farmland, and that's not necessarily true with solar farm.

This site, for example, wasn't being used for agriculture at all.

But after we finished solar, now all 200 acres are put into agriculture.

[relaxed music] We're using livestock to maintain the vegetation underneath the solar panels.

[electronic music] [electronic music continues] This is called the Montgomery Sheep Farm.

Idael has always, with his family, raised sheep and loved animals.

And he was extremely eager to have the opportunity to be the farm manager on this farm.

His wife Lucy and his children work on the farm.

We use this as kind of a research station.

- We had to kind of prove that it really made sense to raise sheep on solar farms, and we've been doing that now for several years.

This is our innovation station where we have school classes, we have farm dinners, and an educational place for people to come and stay and see how it really works.

The model is we partner with local farmers where the solar sites are and they bring their sheep.

After a while doing that, we figured we need a market for our lamb.

I grew up in Norway, and I grew up with lamb salami.

That's a pretty common thing to have on the table.

We have the lamb salami.

We have all different types of lamb cuts that's kind of hard to find other places.

We utilize the whole animal.

We do dog bones for, you know, some of the bones is really good for dogs.

And we do have also a sausage that's a garlic bratwurst, which is good.

We get a lot of positive feedback.

People enjoy coming out, see the farm, see the operation, come here, have dinner outside, meet new people, and enjoy a different type of food.

- The Montgomery Sheep Farm has a 20-megawatt AC solar panel installation.

So during sunlight hours, we're generating 20 megawatts of power, which is, if you break that down into how much power the average home consumes on a yearly basis, that's about the same as what 3,000 homes would consume of power.

That power is transported here to this substation.

And you can think about it like water, right?

The water that's coming in these big pipes on transmission lines are looking at the substation and saying, "Hey, do we need to add more water?"

If the Montgomery Sheep Farm has generated enough power that the bucket is full, then that power will go to the next town.

We're in the center of North Carolina, in Montgomery County, and we are just on the edge of the town of Biscoe.

During daylight hours, the Montgomery Sheep Farm is basically filling up the local bucket here, so the power on that transmission line gets transmitted down line.

60% of the US population lives east of the Mississippi, so putting a bunch of solar in the desert and somehow transporting that to the east coast doesn't make a lot of sense.

We're located 60 miles from Charlotte.

We're located 60 miles from Raleigh, 40 miles from Greensboro.

So in a sense, we're in a rural part of the state, but we're certainly not in the desert in Nevada.

So whatever we generate here is very closely linked to what people in the utility industry call our load centers, the larger cities where we need a lot of power.

I think what makes the most sense is creating those jobs, manufacturing the equipment here where people live and where they use the electricity itself.

Normally you'll see the sheep kind of attracted to being underneath the panels because of the environment it creates.

In the winter, you're protected from snow, and rain, and whatnot, but in the summer you're protected from the heat.

The solar panels do two things.

One is they kind of mimic what trees do.

They create shade that lowers the temperature on different parts of the soil.

So underneath the solar panels, you have vegetation like clover and fescue that don't normally grow in North Carolina in the middle of the summer.

And you can very clearly see that line where the sun hit during the summer months and created this different type of grass.

Bermuda or crab grass are hot weather grasses.

So you've got this diversity in vegetation, which is good for their diet.

The waste of the animal is helping to fertilize the soil as well.

So before we had a solar farm and before we had sheep, there wasn't much organic matter in the soil.

But now you see how thick it is.

So that's really good to regenerate the health of the soil.

It's a really neat ecosystem in a solar farm because they have kind of the best of both worlds.

[contemplative music] - [Michelle] Sheep have become a popular option for grazing under solar panels.

But what about growing plants on the same land?

- Can we grow crops in the field, in soil?

And can we harvest the solar energy to generate electricity?

Great idea, but there is some challenges around it.

- [Michelle] Solar panels and crops in the same field compete for sunlight because the solar panels are harvesting the same light that plants need to grow.

So the challenge is designing a way that plants and panels can share.

Ricardo is part of a multinational team working to solve this challenge by splitting the sunlight between solar panels and the crops around them.

Sunlight can be broken down into different types of radiation based on wavelength, ranging from 320 nanometers all the way up to 3,000 nanometers, and a portion of those wavelengths is what we call visible light.

Visible light ranges from around 380 nanometers to 750 nanometers.

- Our eyes can detect that light.

Similar range is also for the plants to do photosynthesis.

If you deploy these panels, you're gonna be removing those essential wavelengths and the plant will actually have a big penalty in yield.

We don't wanna penalize the production of food or the production of plant growth because we already don't have enough farm land in the world to grow crops.

We wanna prioritize plant growth.

So in order to do that, we're trying to actually split the sun.

- I visited a greenhouse on NC State's campus to learn more about how the team is splitting sunlight.

Tell me about this piece of glass here.

It looks like an ordinary piece of glass, but what is unique about it?

- Yeah, so this piece of glass has optics in the middle.

It's film, and this film is what causes the reflection of absorption of specific wavelengths.

- Glass like this is often used in office buildings where architects want to reduce the heat load of sunlight coming into the building without reducing the amount of natural light.

So they use glass designed to let visible light through while reflecting radiation with a longer wavelength, like infrared light.

Ricardo and his team are hoping to use glass like this to let plants get the spectrum of light that they need to grow while harvesting the rest of the sunlight's radiation for solar energy production.

Sensors show us that the glass is blocking about half of the total light or solar radiation that is present in the greenhouse, and a slightly lower percentage of the photosynthetically-active radiation.

This is measuring what plants would use to live, grow, do their things.

- And do photosynthesis.

We wanna maximize the amount of light that reaches the plant, so we wanna reduce the amount of light that is reflected or absorbed by the optics.

Do remove some because of the inefficiencies, so that's an improvement that we can do through research.

But then you can see that you still have a lot of light going through.

- Still a lot of light that in, if this was in the field and sun was coming through, a lot of light could still get to the plants underneath it.

- Correct.

- [Michelle] A third sensor tells us what part of the sunlight spectrum the glass is reflecting, - [Ricardo] And this is actually what's inside the greenhouse now.

You can see it's a pretty balanced spectrum.

But now if we move that sensor and it's right on the glass, you're gonna see how that spectrum changes.

- [Michelle] This sensor shows us that the wavelengths of light reflected by the glass are mostly useless to plants, but could be harvested for solar energy production.

- You can see how we actually remove some of those wavelengths that are closer to the infrared.

- And the plants really don't need that additional piece of the light spectrum.

It's just really making them hot and thirsty.

- It's making them transpire, exactly, making them hot and thirsty.

[jaunty piano music] - To use this glass in combination with solar panels, some changes have to be made to the traditional setup.

What is it gonna look like when it's in the field as you start to develop it?

How will this be set up with a solar panel to actually gather electricity and also let light through to the plants?

- Yeah, so the basic idea is you have your solar panel that is oriented, you know, instead of having the cell on top and harvesting, they're oriented this way.

And then you have, so can you stand your hand?

This is your solar panel, oriented.

It's not like this, it's like this.

And then you have this glass on a 45-degree angle, right?

So the sun, the visible radiation is gonna go through, and then the infrared is gonna bounce on a 45-degree angle, because this is a 45, and capture by the photovoltaic cell.

And you have a mirror image, or the same thing on the other side.

- Okay, so from both sides we have, our panel is straight up and down instead up at an angle, but we're bouncing light and hitting both of those sides of the panel.

- Both sides.

- Very cool.

For Ricardo and his collaborators, the goal is for solar installed alongside agriculture to have minimal impact on the farmland's productivity.

- The number one priority of this research is to minimize the yield penalty, maximize plant growth, but still be able to collect enough energy to make the technology feasible for growers.

So we don't wanna eliminate the revenue stream of the crop, but we wanna add an additional revenue stream by creating energy.

- [Michelle] To test how much impact new solar panel designs might have on crops, they use mathematical models with known information about how a lettuce or tomato plant reacts to things like less light to predict the crop's yield in different scenarios.

Shade-loving crops like lettuce only need a few more days in the field to have the same yield.

But for sun-loving crops like tomatoes, the penalty is much higher, up to 25% to 30% reduction in yield.

So there's still room for improvement.

- So there's still a lot of research for this to be something tangible, but at least we have that small piece of evidence that we were looking for.

Where we wanna prevent the farm from becoming real estate, we wanna prevent the farm from becoming only a solar farm, so we wanna preserve our farmland in North Carolina.

If this will allow farmers to keep the land farming with additional revenue income, that's already a win.

If we can preserve 10 acres from switching, that's already a win.

[relaxed music] - The nice thing about clean energy is that everybody wants it.

It's kind of a mom and apple pie discussion.

But the reality is this is a state that, historically, had very dirty power, and it has gotten a lot cleaner.

And that is partially because of solar, partially because we do a lot of nuclear in this state, partially 'cause we're looking at new resources like offshore wind that we can bring to the table.

The great thing about solar energy and a lot of these related technologies is that they're different than building a big central station power plant where there's, it's a project, and the costs escalate and things.

Renewable energy, it's pretty much like the old Henry Ford thing, the more you build, the cheaper it gets.

And so we have the opportunity to actually make electricity less expensive, and make our environment much cleaner, and help to fight climate change by doing more of these technologies.

And North Carolina is well situated to be a real contributor to that, nationally, and even internationally.

We have a requirement for the state to get to 100% decarbonized power by 2050 in House Bill 951.

And so we really have a requirement to figure out how to do more solar energy in this state that comes from state law, and there is a lot of opportunity to do that here.

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