In Iowa, where agriculture drives the economy, Nick Peterson has heard the argument countless times: “You’re taking up prime farmland for energy production.”
As strategic partnerships manager at Alliant Energy, Peterson understands the pushback. But he sees a different future — one where solar arrays and agriculture coexist productively on the same land.
“When you look at how we’re farming, we’re just farming a different type of energy,” explained Peterson on the With Great Power podcast. “It allows the farmer, the landowner, the opportunity to get that dual use where you can still grow something that has value and also harvest the sun.”
That vision is being realized through a first-of-its-kind research collaboration between Alliant Energy and Iowa State University. Across 10 acres, the utility has installed a 1.35-megawatt solar array combining fixed and tracking systems. They’re using it to evaluate how different high-value crops perform under standard solar installations.
One year into the four-year project, supported by a $1.8 million Department of Energy grant, the results are challenging conventional wisdom about agrivoltaics.
“What our research has shown is you can buy the suit off the rack and it fits nice,” said Peterson, meaning that “bespoke” solar designs are not necessarily needed for farming applications.
The research team is collecting granular data on both energy production and crop performance. Each array section features different vegetation, from traditional grass and clover to high-value crops like broccoli, summer squash, peppers, and grapes. Environmental sensors track microclimates under the panels.
Early results show most crops actually benefited from the partial shade that the solar array provides. Summer squash and peppers thrived under the panels, protected from intense summer heat. The team also discovered an unexpected advantage: Japanese beetles, a common pest in Iowa, avoided plants growing under and around the panels.
As the first regulated investor-owned utility to explore agrivoltaics at this scale, Alliant Energy sees the project as more than just research — it’s a path to greater social acceptance of solar development in rural communities.
The economic case is compelling. Crops grown during the research phase are being donated to local food banks and the Iowa State on-campus student pantry, but economists are analyzing market values of the combination of selling both power and crops. Peterson points out that farmers already understand the benefits of dedicating small parcels to energy production through wind leases, which can provide significant guaranteed annual income.
“That becomes a good value proposition when your commodity prices are yo-yoing up and down,” he said.
The project’s implications extend beyond Iowa. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory reports that U.S. agrivoltaic installations have doubled since 2020, now generating 10 gigawatts of power annually — approaching Europe’s 15 GW of agrivoltaic capacity.
While high-value crop farming requires more labor than traditional commodity farming, Peterson sees multiple paths forward, including opportunities for nonprofits and agricultural associations to develop new farming careers around solar installations.
The research continues, with teams from Iowa State’s agriculture and engineering schools collecting data that could help standardize agrivoltaic development. For utilities facing agricultural community resistance to solar projects, the findings could provide a valuable roadmap for turning opposition into opportunity.
For the full conversation with Nick Peterson, listen to his interview on season 4 of With Great Power.
This is partner content, brought to you by GridX. It borrows from an interview that appeared on With Great Power, a Latitude Studios partner podcast.
With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.
Transcript
Brad Langley: When most people think of Iowa, they might think corn and caucuses — not clean energy. But according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, renewables make up 55% of Iowa’s electricity mix. That’s the largest renewables share of any state in the country.
And in the Midwest, South Dakota, Kansas, and North Dakota aren’t far behind.
But not everyone is on board.
Clip: There is growing pushback in America’s heartland against solar power and its expansion. Many landowners are worried about the impact of massive solar fields on things such as property values, runoff water, dust, and noise.
Brad Langley: Many farmers, in particular, are pushing back.
Clip: We bought out here, built out here, have our life savings invested in these places, and we see it as detrimental to the character of the community. We see it as detrimental to our property values.
Brad Langley: As the strategic partnerships manager at Alliant Energy — which serves customers across Iowa and Wisconsin — Nick Peterson spends a lot of time countering this kind of resistance, especially in Iowa.
Nick Peterson: We serve 88 of the 99 counties here in Iowa, many of them being rural and many of them with agriculture being the leading industry driver or economic engine. We get a lot of negative feedback on wind, and then for solar, it’s very similar. It’s: “Hey, you’re taking up prime farmland for energy production.”
Brad Langley: But for Nick, it’s not an either-or scenario. That’s thanks to something called agrivoltaics.
Nick Peterson: Agrivoltaics is looking at how you leverage the land under solar panels for either crop growth, grazing, or even potential conservation.
Brad Langley: The practice of agrivoltaics started back in the 1980s in Europe. But in the U.S., it’s been slower to take hold — that is, until recently.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory says the acreage used for solar agrivoltaic farms in the U.S. has doubled since 2020. And those farms now generate 10 gigawatts of power every year. That’s not too far off the 15 gigawatts being generated by all the agrivoltaics across Europe.
Nick Peterson: When you look at how we’re farming, we’re just farming a different type of energy. But it allows the farmer, the landowner, the opportunity to get that dual use where you can still grow something that has value and also harvest the sun and get that energy value, and provide community and economic impact that’s going to help our states continue to thrive.
Brad Langley: In Iowa, Nick is spearheading a collaboration with Iowa State University, an Alliant customer. And the early results look promising.
Nick Peterson: In the agrivoltaics world, what we often see when we’ve been going to conferences and meeting with others is this idea that you have to have this bespoke system. What our research has shown is, no, you can buy the suit off the rack and it works really well. It fits nice. And there’s value to that for both sides.
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid, today.
I’m Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don’t innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting-edge industry, there are lots of people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and customer-centric.
Today, my guest is Nick Peterson, strategic partnerships manager for Alliant Energy. He tells me about the multi-year research project that Alliant and Iowa State University are running to better understand the value of installing solar panels over high-value crops. We dig into the project details, look at early results, and talk about why the Department of Energy is supporting it.
But first, I asked Nick how the project came to be.
Nick Peterson: Alliant Energy, in partnership with the Iowa Utilities Commission, had just gotten a tariff that allowed us to build, own, and operate a solar facility on our customers’ land and provide a lucrative lease payment to them. We had a pretty innovative CEO at the time, now retired, John Larson, who asked me, “Hey, do you think we could farm under those panels if we did it out at Iowa State? They’re the capital of the world when it comes to agriculture education…”
Brad Langley: So what was the reaction from Iowa State?
Nick Peterson: My partner over at the university, Ray Klein, went to the faculty and asked them, “Hey, if you had 10 acres under solar panels, what would you do? And what would it look like?” In a matter of about two weeks, we had a two-page list of research questions that could be asked. We took that and really focused on what it needs to look like for the faculty and staff at Iowa State to be able to publish good research and provide extension and educational opportunities, but for Alliant Energy still to build a reliable cost-effective solar asset.
So we have both fixed arrays on our 10 acres and we have tracker panels. It gives the opportunity to really study how vegetation under the panels can grow. We use bifacial panels throughout — sun bouncing off the back and also from the top. And then one of the other big questions that the researchers posed — which I think makes our farm a little bit different than others in North America — is we designed it with the engineering department to get granular-level data that allows us to understand the microclimates under the panels and also the energy production at a granular level so that we know: is it beneficial to grow peppers, or broccoli, or squash, or strawberries? And which one is actually going to help provide more energy? That’s one thing that we learned from the Department of Energy and NREL: any kind of vegetation under panels is going to help with that cooling effect that allows the panels to uptake more energy.
Brad Langley: You and your partners actually just wrapped the first year of this four-year $1.8 million DOE grant, which is part of its FARMS grant program. So tell me about the team you assembled and what the DOE is hoping comes out of this effort.
Nick Peterson: We’ve designed it from an engineering standpoint so that we can answer questions that might be a little bit more difficult had we not come in with this theory of collaboration and really thinking about how strong our large team is. Having economists, sociologists, engineers, and horticulture and entomology professionals all in this sandbox at once trying to answer questions. The Department of Energy is very interested in our data of how our fruits and vegetables are growing and in the energy production that’s coming out of it. I think they’re also trying to understand: is this economically viable?
Can this be replicable in other areas? Really to understand the different ingredients that need to happen to even get this off the ground, you have a utility or a solar developer — in our case, we’re a utility. You have a landowner and you have a farmer. Sometimes the farmer and the landowner can be the same person, and sometimes they’re completely different. We want to be able to highlight how those three parties interact and look at the lease agreement and what the compensation is going to be — the frameworks. But we also needed a site access and data sharing agreement. And we’ve learned as we’ve interacted with other solar farms and other agrivoltaics projects that that is a key piece that often gets overlooked once the lease gets signed, but then becomes usually the go or no-go for many of the research institutions or farmers who are looking to leverage the land under the panels.
Brad Langley: So it’s on 10 acres, multiple different solar arrays. Are you guys, or is the team, growing different kinds of crops throughout the solar farm to kind of see which perform better? Are you starting to see some returns? Paint the picture for us of what this looks like.
Nick Peterson: Yeah. So we have them plotted in rows of about 66 feet, I believe. Every 17 panels, we have granular data points where we can understand the energy production. We can understand the microclimate under the panels due to all the sensors that we have in.
Every 60 feet, there’s a different vegetation type. We have grass and clover mix for pollinators, we have broccoli, summer squash, and green peppers. We picked those three vegetables as things that would be found and grown in Iowa by a horticulture farm — also things that we know Iowans will eat and know how to put on their barbecue grill in the summer.
Then we added strawberries and raspberries, looking at some different varieties of those. We did add asparagus, honeyberries, and grapes outside of the DOE grant because Iowa State had some interest — some PhD students wanted to try them out. So we’re looking at how the panels protect grapes during frost this winter. On a day like today where it’s negative 13 degrees out, we’re going to see if the grapes can survive.
We have bees on site for pollination and also honey production to give a varied income source for our farmers to look at different ways to leverage it. So far, what we saw was summer squash had a very good year. It grew really well under the panels because the panels protected it during some of the high heat, high direct sunlight opportunities of a Midwestern summer — did not stress the plants as much.
Peppers grew really well; broccoli probably not the ideal plant. Almost everything grew better under panel than in direct sunlight, outside of the broccoli. That was a very positive thing for us to showcase that the panels actually provided some benefits to the production of the horticulture crops that we grew.
One of the things that was not expected was we saw the Japanese beetle, which is fairly common in Iowa — we found that it stayed away from plants that were under and around the panels. It ate the plants that were in direct sunlight. We still have to do some further investigation with the entomologists on why and how that happened, but that was one of the interesting things we learned in the first growing year.
Brad Langley: Super cool. So as a marketer, my mind goes to — are there fruits and vegetables? Are they sold to the public and are they marketed as, “Hey, these are agrivoltaic fruits and vegetables?” How are you guys getting these into people’s hands and stomachs? And are you kind of playing up this innovative approach to make them seem more interesting?
Nick Peterson: Yeah, great question. With the farming practices all being funded by the Department of Energy for the first four years, we cannot sell any of the things that are grown. So Iowa State, once they do the evaluations and the marketability of the products and getting all the data from the harvests, it’s actually being donated to the food banks in Story County as well as the on-campus student pantry to provide fresh fruit and vegetables to students.
But what we are doing is the economists are looking at the values and the prices and the harvests and being able to support them — provide a quantifiable “Hey, if this went to market, here’s what could be sold. Here’s the value of the products.”
Brad Langley: So what’s the big picture potential for agrivoltaics either for Alliant or more broadly for clean energy generation? Like how repeatable is this? Does all the sensors and stuff increase the cost of these arrays? Kind of walk me through where you see agrivoltaics heading based on some of the findings you guys have seen as part of this pilot.
Nick Peterson: We are, as I know it, the only regulated investor-owned utility in the country exploring this. I think it becomes another avenue to get that social acceptance around solar development in the U.S. This has shown us that you don’t have to have a bespoke system — that you can put in what is considered industry standard here in the upper Midwest, and that you can do farming practices in and around the panels that can provide additional income to landowners or tenant farmers.
From our perspective, we see the high-value cropping systems being the best way to do it right now because you don’t have to really change the construction practices that we do here at Alliant Energy, and we think that there are avenues to continue to replicate this.
The sensors and things that you asked about — those things we’re doing from a research standpoint at Iowa State don’t necessarily need to be on any future projects to the same level that we have there. Again, we’re trying to create an academic environment for those faculty to be able to publish really quality research.
I think the big thing is the scalability. Fruits and vegetable farming does take a little bit more labor than commodity cropping, so that’s one thing that we’re going to continue to look at ways it can have opportunity. I think there’s also opportunity in the sense of, if a landowner is not interested in farming the land but there’s interest to put in solar and yet farming practices could still be available, there’s an opportunity for a nonprofit or an ag association to come in and provide new ag careers or supplemental incomes for families who want to do horticulture cropping systems.
And then there are other opportunities like grazing sheep, which has been shown to be very successful across the United States. So I think there are different ways the agrivoltaic opportunities can be deployed. We’ve just found a niche here at Iowa State with the high-value cropping systems.
Brad Langley: Now, renewable energy development can be contentious. What pushback have you seen in terms of renewables generally or the solar farm in particular? And how do you address those?
Nick Peterson: One thing that comes up often is somebody will say, “Hey, you know, I had X solar developer reach out to me and offer me a certain dollar an acre for my farmland, but I get a yield at this level for corn and soybeans — why would I ever think about doing that?” I get that question a lot when I’m out at the Iowa State Fair promoting this project. We had a lot of those questions, and I simply go back and say, “Well, it’s your choice on what you want to do with your land. If it makes economic sense to say yes, why not do it?”
There’s an opportunity in certain areas where there’s some soil that’s not as ideal for corn or soybeans, or you need diversification and you want to take some land out of commodity production and you want to diversify and add fruits and vegetables.
When we bring farmers on site, they can see that and they can see the value that it brings. Similar to the value that taking two to four acres out of production for a wind turbine brings — farmers see the value in that because they can make those lease payments annually. Those payments can be twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars.
“Hey, I’m going to make a guaranteed income over these maybe four or five acres” — that becomes a good value proposition when your commodity prices are yo-yoing up and down.
This just becomes one more mechanism that Iowans and folks across this country, as they look into different land use purposes, could be an option that helps our communities thrive.
Brad Langley: We call this show “With Great Power,” which is a nod to the energy industry. And it’s also a famous Spider-Man quote: “With great power comes great responsibility.” So Nick, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Nick Peterson: Ooh. I think I bring the superpower of valuing relationships or valuing people and being able to help everybody interpret the same shared vision that’s going to drive long-term success — economic and community impact. I know that that’s kind of a wild superpower.
It’s not, you know, I can’t see the future. I can’t fly. But I think I can harmonize pretty darn well and coalesce some of the smartest people in the world to do things that are greater than any one of us could do by ourselves.
Brad Langley: Well, Nick, thank you very much for coming on the show and walking us through this very innovative project. I really appreciate your time.
Nick Peterson: Thank you so much.
Brad Langley: Nick Peterson is the strategic partnerships manager for Alliant Energy.
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