**Title**: Energy in the North - Michelle Wilber
**Date**: September 24, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Michelle Wilber

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;06;21 [Michelle Wilber] And that is why this is a research project at this point. And everybody isn't just popping up solar and agriculture all over Alaska.

00;00;06;21 - 00;00;40;28 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Michelle Wilber, a research engineer at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Michelle is leading the solar photovoltaic research side of a collaborative project with 51·çÁ÷¹ÙÍø's Institute of Agriculture and Resource Extension that's funded by the US Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office looking at how agriculture could be co-located with solar farms, known as agrivoltaics. The research teams have a test site between rows of solar panels at the 8.5MW solar farm in Houston, Alaska. and I started the conversation with Michelle by asking if agrivoltaics is a new idea.

00;00;40;28 - 00;02;15;13 [Michelle Wilber] Agrivoltaics has been being looked at for a while now many years. And the first projects I heard about were in the Southwest United States and they were taking advantage of the fact that a lot of crops don't do well in the full sun, in a very hot and sunny summer in, say, Arizona or New Mexico or wherever, you might actually try growing crops where it's almost a desert. And so the shade from the sun was really helpful between rows of panels to allow them to grow some vegetables that otherwise would have withered and overheated in the sun. So that doesn't seem to have a very direct application in Alaska, because as gardeners in Alaska know anybody who has a backyard garden, you plant that near a birch tree and get a bunch of shade, and things are not going to grow very well. We really need all the sun we can get because we're a lot cooler. And you know, our sun angles are low and some are short, and you just really want things to be soaking up the sun. So because of the potential for rays coming from that lower sun to, shade the next panel from the panel in front of it, our solar farms are built with the rows much further apart than in a place where the sun's higher overhead, and in the southern United States, or other places in the globe, obviously. And so that allows us to have more room, for many parts of the day, for there not to be shading in those rows to help out those vegetables. Almost even better, though, is then you can get tractors and things between them pretty easily, which can be really challenging in some of those tighter installations in other places.

00;02;15;13 - 00;02;29;06 [Amanda Byrd] Up until pretty recently, you had single use land use. So you had a solar farm and that was what the land was used for. You had agricultural farms and that was what the land was used for. Now you've got dual use.

00;02;29;06 - 00;03;54;08 [Michelle Wilber] It's great if the two uses don't compete unfavorably with each other. And that is why this is a research project at this point. And everybody isn't just popping up solar and agriculture all over Alaska. We have instrumentation that's looking at excess soiling or, the panels getting dirty from the farming activities to make sure that that's not going to cut production in a way that the solar developer can't handle economically. We're also looking at how do those plants grow. There is going to be a little bit more shade because you do have those panels in front of them soaking up the sun's rays. And so do things still grow as well? Some things now I mentioned that often we do want all the sun we can get, but there are some things like spinach. If anybody's grown spinach in your garden, it tends to go to seed really quickly. It stops producing big, beautiful leaves to eat and throws up a big flower stock and you're done. You're not really getting much more spinach. And that happens, quicker in full sun than in some shady or cooler conditions. So that might be a benefit for some crops. But for a lot of crops in Alaska, you really are trying to maximize sun. So are we going to see losses in the agricultural productivity when they're in between solar panels? Or are we going to see losses in the solar gain when there's crops and all the disturbance and activity of farming going on? So we are collecting the data to be able to analyze that. We don't have those results yet, but we're hoping to have some preliminary results soon.

00;03;54;08 - 00;03;58;12 [Amanda Byrd] Michelle Wilber is a research engineer at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, and I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller at ACEP. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.