He's often said, you know, can we do this with cattle? And the, you know, the short answer was always, no, you can't. Right? They're bigger animals. They love to rub up against things. They'll damage your your equipment. They will be proverbial bull in a china shop. Yeah. But we said, you know, why not? We were able to apply those learnings, and we built. It's not often you get to say the world's first, but the world's first PV plant, specific utility scale, specifically designed to integrate cattle grazing.

intro:
1:25

The clean energy industry is moving fast. The deals are getting bigger. The technology is evolving, and the stakes have never been higher. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, the podcast for solar, storage, and microgrid professionals who want to stay ahead of it all. Each week, your host Tim Montague, industry advisor and president of Clean Power Consulting Group, brings you unfiltered conversations with the leaders actually building the energy transition. Now, here's your host, Tim Montague.

Tim Montague:
1:59

We're here at Tennessee in Chattanooga in 2026. I'm with Matt Beasley, Chief Commercial Officer for Silicon Ranch. It's great to have Silicon Ranch back on the show, Matt.

Matt Beasley:
2:11

Well, thanks for having me. Looking forward to the discussion.

Tim Montague:
2:13

So, as we were saying in the pre-show, I had Nick Devries, your chief technical officer. I think is that is that his title? Chief

Matt Beasley:
2:20

Technology Officer. Yes, Chief

Tim Montague:
2:21

Technology Officer a few years ago, and we geeked out on agrivoltaics. So we're going to talk about agrivoltaics. Utility scale solar development is really your ballywick, though, and it and the Tennessee Valley is your home, based in Nashville, Tennessee. That's right. So, give us a high level. What is Silicon Ranch?

Matt Beasley:
2:45

So, Silicon Ranch is an independent power producer. We are a developer, owner, and operator of utility scale solar facilities and battery battery storage as well. We're based in Nashville, Tennessee, as you said. We were founded in 2011 by former Governor Phil Bredesen and two

members of his cabinet:
3:01

his Commissioner of Economic and Community Development, Matt Kisper, who is today our chairman. Governor Bredeson still on our board as our founding chairman, and then his Revenue Commissioner Reagan Farr, who's today our president and CEO, and today we are the owner and operator of one of the largest fleets of solar facilities in the United States. We own and operate close to 200 facilities in 17 states and one Canadian province, and we have generating capacity north of four and a half gigawatts.

Tim Montague:
3:33

What I love now is all coming back to me. What I love about Silicon Ranch is you are invested in the land. You have a long-term stake in maintaining well ecologically sound real estate, and you're you're a quite a unique company. There's a lot of good companies in solar, but I would venture to say that Silicon Ranch is a great company, and the business model is quite unique. Most solar developers, for example, lease their land. They want a 30-year lease, right, and then maybe an option to extend that lease, but by owning the real estate, you're really taking a long-term stake in a way that other developers are not, and I and I just really appreciate that. How do you think the owners of Silicon Ranch decided to take that approach?

Matt Beasley:
4:27

Well, thank you, Tim. I I like to talk about our story, and I tell our employees and new employees that, you know, I came from a marketing background. You and I talked about that a little bit before. And marketing for brands or companies, oftentimes there's spin required. And with our story, there's such an authenticity, and I think it really does date back to our founders. It's part of our DNA. When Governor Pederson and Matt and Reagan were in state office. What they said was, you know, from an economic and those three worked really closely together because Governor Bredeson was a serial entrepreneur and he was a businessman and he really wanted to make sure that his revenue commissioner was singing from the same song sheet as his economic and community development commissioner was. That you weren't selling companies that were coming to Tennessee, one thing, and then the revenue commissioner later would say, "Oh, we can't honor that commitment" or something like that. So they worked very closely on economic development initiatives when they were in state government for Tennessee, and they said it was one thing to recruit businesses to invest capital in Nashville or Chattanooga or where we are or Memphis or Knoxville. The hardest thing for them to do was to find companies to inject capital into rural communities, and so when they designed the business plan, and Reagan actually left state government six months early to write the business plan, and one of the things that they kept coming back to this idea, and everybody kept saying, "Well, you really just want to be a developer. You can develop projects and then sell sell them off as a portfolio.". And reinvest that capital, and that's how you build your business. And they specifically said we want to be unique. We think there's an opportunity to play an important role between utilities and companies that want access to renewable energy. And they, they, they, they, you know, we always say Governor Pederson can can look around corners. They realized that there was a space that was available for a unique business model, and and really the way I kind of capture that business model is, they wanted to be the owners and operators of every project that we develop. So we have never sold a project. Every project that we develop, and we do acquire some projects from from developers, but we are the long-term owner and operator. So that's one thing that we're saying to our commercial counterparty, be it a CNI or a utility, we're going to be standing behind the performance of this project day in and day out. But the other piece of it was we want to own the land, and that's what you just hit on right now. Far more capital intensive to do it that way. There's far fewer landowners who are willing to sell property than than lease it for for an annual check, but for us it was important to be able to own the land, and it wasn't until later that we really, I think, recognized the dual purpose and kind of the other benefits that come from land ownership. For us, it was we wanted to send a signal to the communities that we were

locating in:
7:09

is we're not coming in as renters, we're coming in as members and property owners and taxpayers in these communities for the long term. But I know you want to talk about agrivoltaics, so we can get into how how we came into that.

Tim Montague:
7:21

Well, and before we do, let's just put a pin in a specific project in the valley. It could be the project you're doing with Middle Tennessee Electric, but let's pick a project and walk through the life cycle and what is the how do projects get originated? It's it's really quite mysterious when you're on the outside of a of a development company. How do how are you identifying the real estate. How are you putting together the deal, the offtake, and then we can talk about agrivoltaics because that dual use piece is also quite interesting. It's complicated. You've you've even gone to the extreme of developing your own cattle voltaics racking system. But walk us through a project.

Matt Beasley:
8:11

So we often say at Silicon Ranch that we're customer-led, and and it's not site-led or market-led. And what I mean by that is, when we're developing a project, it's because our business development team, through discovery processes and understanding kind of the what the customer needs are going to be, we're developing a project specifically to meet an identified customer need, so that also influences the way we we think about the the conversation with the landowner or even engagement with the community. So we're thinking about in this case in the valley for many years it was purely TVA. How much demand is TVA going to going to have, and so we, as through membership with organizations like Tennessee, we're at the annual meeting right now. We had an ability alongside our our industry colleagues to understand what the integrated resource plan for TVA was going to be. How are they thinking about future load growth? How are they thinking about their future energy mix? And saying, is this market we want to be in? If we think there's enough demand, let's invest in a development capabilities here in the Tennessee Valley. And Tennessee Valley is not just Tennessee; it's parts of seven states. So once we identify, okay, we want to develop, let's call it a gigawatt or two gigawatts of development pipeline that eventually my business development team could hopefully convert into a power purchase agreement and ultimately an operating project.

Tim Montague:
9:38

You were talking about how you originate a portfolio, and if you could kind of fast forward into okay, here's a process.

Matt Beasley:
9:51

Yeah, so so it's a it's a multi department workflow. So once business development identifies the the customer need, we have a transmission planning group that looks on the on the transmission grid for places that they think are good locations to inject power. Then we have a real estate or a siting team that will start to try to find sites around those locations, and once they identify willing landowners, and sometimes these projects because of the scale now, you're talking about three or four or five or six adjacent landowners. You really have to. It's it's threading a needle a little bit, Tim, and finding customer need, transmission availability and access, and then willing landowners. There's that's kind of the table stakes, if you will. You've got a site, you filed an interconnection application, and that's when you have to follow through all the studies that can take a couple of years through TVA's system where you validate. The assumptions that our transmission planning team have made, and we've been very successful in converting kind of those those purchase options for for land into viable projects that ultimately we can contract with TVA for for for offtake, and and that's just again part of the puzzle because the big piece of it is the community engagement and making sure sometimes

Tim Montague:
11:12

the TVA is the off taker, but sometimes the the LPC, the local power company, is the off taker. That's

Matt Beasley:
11:19

right. That changed our view of the market completely, and that happened in 2020 during COVID for the first time in its then 87 year history. The TVA board approved what was called flexibility generation program, whereby local power companies there's 153 of them in the valley could purchase 5% of their load from third parties through power purchase agreements. Historically, since the TVA was created in 1933, all the local power companies had to buy 100% of their power through TVA, as a generation and transmission utility. And now it created overnight a new market that, once you kind of tallied up the 5% among all the 153 local power companies, that was a 2.8 gigawatt opportunity that materialized out of out of nowhere, and the first iteration of that program required the projects to be within the service territory of the LPC. So, if you're going to be with Maryville Electric in East Tennessee or Bolivar Electric in West Tennessee, you had to find a site that could match their 5% within their service territory. But what that did was it created this what's the word I'm looking for a system whereby the largest local power companies, the Nashville Electric, the Knoxville Utilities, the Middle Tennessee Electric, you heard from a lot of these guys today, they had their 5% was a big number, but they also had the least amount of available land. So there was a version 2.0 that allowed projects that were interconnected anywhere on the transmission system of TVA to support that as well. And the last thing they did was they allowed aggregation. So we've got a couple of projects that we're doing through the flexibility program where we've actually contracted with in one case, 10 LPCs, and in another case, we have 19 different LPCs on one project, and that allows those small projects, those smaller LPCs, to get economies of scale and a better price than they might otherwise be able to if they were just doing it in their small service area. So you're

Tim Montague:
13:30

building Largely 100 megawatt plus projects, but the LPC might be buying 10 megawatts

Matt Beasley:
13:38

or less.

Tim Montague:
13:39

Yeah,

Matt Beasley:
13:39

yeah, yeah. But they're getting at the price that they would if they were buying 100.

Tim Montague:
13:43

Okay,

Matt Beasley:
13:44

and that's and that's an advantage for them.

Tim Montague:
13:47

TVA launched Generation Flexibility in June 2020. Version 2.0 opened the door wider. Local power companies can now buy from utility-scale projects anywhere on TVA's transmission system, and several utilities can share one project. The first utility-scale deal under 2.0 was Silicon Ranch's 110 megawatt Copeland Solar Farm, contracted with Middle Tennessee Electric in 2024, and then dual use. When did dual use come onto the scene for Silicon Ranch? Has that been on the table since day one, or

Matt Beasley:
14:21

not since day one? When we first got into the business, we even though we we knew it was important to own our land and to be property owners in the communities where we located, we still viewed our vegetation through the lens of a utility, and in fact, our founders they called TVA and they called the Department of Transportation and said, "Who manages your rights of way? What what kind of seed mix are you planting, and how are you managing it?" And it really was you view your vegetation as as a liability, as a cost center, something you have to abate because that was the whole thing was we we want our vegetation to stay low so it doesn't shade our panels, but we want to do it as cost effectively as possible. We saw which

Tim Montague:
15:00

traditionally meant mowing, right?

Matt Beasley:
15:02

Mowing and spraying. So you're spraying it as much as you as you can with growth inhibitor, and you're mowing it as few times as you as you have to. But it was it was still you're talking about five or six mos a year, and you're spraying, and the growth inhibitor. After a few years of that, you realize it's working too well, and we were starting to encounter erosion problems. And right around that time, we were thinking there's got to be a better way. We got a call from one of our neighbors. We had optioned a big piece of property and announced a project with the electric co-ops in Georgia, and this was down in Southwest Georgia, and our co-op counterparty called us and said,"You've got one of your neighbors who wants to meet with you." And this was in 2017, so you know local opposition or land use concerns was not a thing. But because we knew we were going to be neighbors with this guy for 40 years. Reagan, our CEO, and I hopped in a car. There's no easy way to get to Southwest Georgia. We drove seven hours through three white knuckle storms. I took a couple of wrong turns, but we got there for Sunday supper. Don't call it dinner; it's Sunday supper. And this guy was loaded for bear. He was concerned about having us as a neighbor and spraying herbicides and pesticides and creating erosion that was going to have a impact on his land, and the guy's name was Will Harris with White Hope Pastures. He's he's become quite quite a famous learner at the time. Like we we were he was on a couple of YouTube videos, but he wasn't what he is today in terms of national recognition. I think Joe Rogan being on it twice within the last year has really elevated his profile. But he's still the same person as he was back then. And we sat down next to him, and he was concerned because he had had a life cycle analysis done. This ranch has been in his family since 1866. He's the fourth generation. The fifth generation work on it, and the sixth generation live on it. But for the last 25 years, now it's 30 years. He's been doing regenerative agriculture practices. He rejected kind of the his his father's way of, as he calls it, the industrialization, commoditization, and centralization of agriculture. And with multi-species adaptive managed grazing, even accounting for all the methane emissions that are you know concerning climate change, he's net carbon negative. So he sequesters and stores more carbon in the soil by how he manages his livestock than ever emitted through his operations. And so we spent Reagan and actually spent two days riding all over his farm. He brought in various consultants to explain kind of more. I had never heard of regenerative agriculture. He gave us Alan Savory's book from the Savory Institute. We came back. What we did was we left there with a handshake deal between neighbors and said, "Why don't you manage our land for us? If you can do it for the same price that we would pay a conventional contractor to mow

Tim Montague:
17:50

it,

Matt Beasley:
17:50

yeah, and you do it with your livestock. That'd be great, and that taught us so much. We we got back and we said there's got to be a better way. And so we said to Will, we ended up hiring one of the consultants he introduced us to. We stood up and we did a couple of pilot projects elsewhere doing this. And we said we got to do this everywhere we can. This is such a better way for the for the land, but also we realized it's you know again this is long before we're having the land use debates we're having today. We just realized it was the right thing to do, and that over time, from an operational expense perspective, we would we could at least match it, but potentially improve on an operational expense. That was even before we realized from an agricultural production and an agribusiness point of view, this is an opportunity for us to to also benefit in another revenue stream from the land. The

Tim Montague:
18:42

neighbor Matt is talking about is Will Harris of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. His family has run a ranch there since 1866, and moved to regenerative practices in 1995. In January 2020, White Oak and Silicon Ranch announced a partnership to graze sheep across nearly 2,400 acres of solar farms in Southwest Georgia. Silicon Ranch calls this model regenerative energy. The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by SDE Sinclair Designs and Engineering, fixed tilt and carport racking, design, engineering, permitting, and manufacturing all under one roof in Michigan. No outside vendors, no waiting in someone else's queue, just fast turnaround and steel that ships when you need it. Ask Ag Energy Co in Illinois or Sunrise Solar in the Mid-Atlantic; they'll tell you what it's like to work with the Sinclair team. SDE everything in-house. Visit Sinclair designs.com. So, if you were to do a side by side today, Greenfield traditional solar where you're mowing and spraying for vegetation control, versus regenerative ag, dual use, whether it's sheep or cattle or whatever. How does that pencil for the asset owner?

Matt Beasley:
20:06

Yeah. So well, there's there's a couple of different ways we do it. The first thing that when we contracted with Will to manage our project next to his ranch, we we very quickly realized there's not a Will Harris in every county where we're operating. So it's not that easy to say, ah, I want that guy to to manage my land, and if he can do it for less than a mowing contractor, I'm going to contract with him to to do it. Today we have 14 different farming families in six different states who are our partners who use their livestock to manage our our land, and they can do that more cost effectively than than mowing. It takes a little time because a lot of the partners that we're working with, they don't. Have that big a flock to to do it, but what I've really loved seeing Tim is like there's a project in Kentucky where one of our neighbors down the road he had a hobby farm of sheep. Okay, it wasn't his full time job. His sons were working in the factory, and over the last five or six years, he's quadrupled the size of his flock. His boys have left the factory jobs and have joined their father in the field working in a family farming business, and that's amazing. But that takes time, but over time, that also helps decrease your operational expense. Now, a big piece of what we've also done is we've realized if we were going to do this everywhere, we were going to have to build the capability in house as well, and that's where we built a team of of farmers and ranchers. We've got a sheep geneticist on our team. We have we bought our own flock of sheep in 2022. We we purchased about 400 ewes, and today we've grown that flock to over 5,000 sheep that our company owns. That we've got a couple of dozen people at various sites who help us use that livestock to manage our land, and so over time, not only is it operationally more efficient in terms of the cost savings vis-a-vis what we would be paying for a mowing contractor to mow it five or six times, if you can reduce it down to one or none per year, and at the end of the at the end of the year, you've got livestock that you can actually sell and market. That's where the economics really start to to to make a lot of sense.

Tim Montague:
23:14

Yeah, and so just at a high level, though, do you think there's a 10% delta agrivoltaics versus traditional, or 20% delta in terms of the O and M, can you say?

Matt Beasley:
23:28

I probably ill-equipped to answer that. I know it's it's it's it's more. I don't want to put a percentage on it, but it's more cost-effective, even before you start realizing that delta will grow as you've got livestock that you can sell into into the meat market at the end of each year as well. I mean, because what we're doing is we're growing the flock every year. Yeah, you continue that vertical

Tim Montague:
23:54

integration in a way by by owning animals also.

Matt Beasley:
23:59

That's right.

Tim Montague:
23:59

Not just paying someone else to graze the land.

Matt Beasley:
24:02

That's right.

Tim Montague:
24:04

You're not gaining a long-term benefit necessarily. Yeah, we.

Matt Beasley:
24:07

I mean, we. We're currently exploring our own meat brand, where we will actually be both wholesale and retail being able to sell lamb products into into the. Yeah, I've heard of solar

Tim Montague:
24:21

sheep and solar honey. I don't know. Is anyone selling solar beef yet?

Matt Beasley:
24:26

Well, we that's always been kind of the the proverbial holy grail for us, and it really was Will Harris who said, you know, and part of what makes Will's Ranch so special is multi-species, and you know his his core business is he's a cattleman, but he's got 14 or 20 different species, all playing a role in how he manages his land, and they're all potential revenue streams for him. He's often said, you know, can we do this with cattle? And the you know the short answer was always, no, you can't. Right? They're bigger animals. They love to rub up against things, they'll damage your your equipment. They will be proverbial bull in a china shop. Yeah, but we said, you know, why not, right? And that's where you you've met Nick, our chief technology officer. He and Will literally said, well, why don't we look into it? So in 2020, we applied for with a few different research partners, and and were awarded a grant from the Department of Energy to investigate it. We spent four years investigating. We did mock-ups at Will's Ranch, where we put literally a small array, and we we tested. And part of our research partners were from Colorado State. We had soil scientists from there, but also animal animal welfare specialists, and the whole mantra was, we want it to be good for the animal, good for the land, and good for the solar. It had to be good for all three, or else it just wouldn't work. And

Tim Montague:
25:54

good for your bottom line. And and which in part is good for the solar, right? So so

Matt Beasley:
26:01

we we we were able to apply those learnings, and we built. It's not often you get to say the world's first, but the world's first PV plant, specific utility scale, specifically designed to integrate cattle grazing. You met Brad Gibson from Middle Tennessee Electric. They're our customer off off taker on that project. It's in Christiana, Tennessee. It's four and a half megawatts, and what it does is Nick actually was the primary principal investigator for the research, and we actually were awarded two different patents by the U.S. Patent Office to accommodate this design, and it's both from the from the methodology. But also the the design because the simple answer of how do you integrate cattle with PV is well you raise the panels so high that they can't they can't interface with them

Tim Montague:
26:54

yeah

Matt Beasley:
26:54

but that's so much additional steel that capex increase would make the economics not good for the solar so you had to find a different way and so what Nick and and our team worked on was developing a software which enables us to basically isolate. Because again, it's adaptive managed grazing we're doing. We're not just opening the gates and letting the animals roam. We put them in paddocks because that's what we learn from Will. You can you can concentrate animal impact, so we let them graze and we do the same thing with our sheep. Let them graze in one paddock at a time. They graze it down. They move off, and that allows the the earth to recover. And that's part of that animal impact is also how you get that carbon into the soil. So we knew cattle are only going to be in one specific paddock at a time, so you can you can isolate those rows, and instead of maybe the the modules going 60 degrees to 60 degrees, where that edge is getting to where you're interfacing with the animal, maybe it's going 30 degrees or 20 degrees, where that edge is not so far far down, and you know there there's more to it than just that, but for a simple English major like me, that's how that's how I explain it.

Tim Montague:
28:07

Here's why cattle are hard: a cow can weigh more than half a ton. Trackers tilt panels close to vertical, and raising a whole array high enough for cattle takes a lot more steel. Silicon Ranch built cattle tracker to solve this. Software puts the rose in the active paddock into a grazing mode, with a shallower tilt. The rest of the site keeps generating. The system went live at Christiana in April 2026.

Matt Beasley:
28:36

There's still a modest capex increase versus kind of your conventional plant, but over time we think that'll that'll that'll decrease even further, and and are already looking at larger projects where we can replicate what we've already learned at Christiana for other projects. And and to your earlier point, you know that that herd of cattle that are grazing at at Christiana, you know the original herd belonged to our colleague Lauren Shallenberger, who actually runs our agribusiness for what we call Regenerative Energy. But eventually, he helped us find a good genetic flock that we purchased as a company, and that we're planning on following suit, much like we've done with sheep, is growing our herd of cattle and being able to populate additional sites. We're still very much into the into the sheep business. We think that's a great market for us to continue to develop. But cattle is certainly an exciting future as well.

Tim Montague:
29:31

Sheep are the most common livestock on U.S. solar sites, and the lamb market behind them runs on imports. In 2025, the U.S. imported about 303 million pounds of lamb. Australia supplied 75 percent. New Zealand supplied 24 percent. Imports make up roughly 70 percent of total U.S. lamb and mutton supply.

Matt Beasley:
29:53

What we believe is, you don't even have to grow the sheep market in the United States for it to be. It's a it's a multi billion dollar market, even though it's much much smaller than than beef, but 75% of that is imports from Australia, New Zealand. So if we can just displace lamb that we're importing from the other side of the planet with domestically grown lamb here from made here in the U.S., there's a plenty of there's plenty of market space there to be be taken.

Tim Montague:
30:24

Cool. Yeah. Well, in our last few minutes, what else should we talk about with regards to Silicon Ranch and the TVA?

Matt Beasley:
30:34

So I think one of the things that we've been focused on is continuing to build upon kind of our legacy here in the Tennessee Valley, but again, as I said earlier, we're also in 17 states, coast to coast, and and and continuing to develop projects to meet customer needs. And so, you know, the TVA and the local power companies, the the Flex program that we talked about, we're we're very invested in in in this region, but but certainly other regions. Yeah. So those 17

Tim Montague:
31:07

states. What are the characteristics? Okay. The TVA touches on parts of nine states, I think. But what are the characteristics of some of those states outside of the Tennessee Valley that are interesting to Silicon Ranch? Yeah.

Matt Beasley:
31:23

So again, for us, it's it's all about where are the customers, and so one of the utility segments that that we've been doing a lot of business with are electric co-ops. So you've got that kind of the public power model that TVA is, and all the local power companies are either. Municipal utilities or or or co-ops, and then you've got investor-owned utilities like Duke or Dominion or Southern Company, and we do a lot of business with with kind of all of them. But we've we've really built a lot of relationships among the co-ops across the country as well. So we do a lot of business in Georgia, for example, below the Tennessee Valley with with the Georgia co-ops there. Georgia has been actually one of our our biggest markets to date, but we also do a lot of business. I know you and I talked about CNI customer base as well, and so obviously the hyperscalers, the work that we do with them. There's a lot of demand across the country, and one of the things that we're proud of is because we've become a real reliable, reliable counterparty of building the projects that we've contracted, even through the pandemic and supply chain constraints. Being able to do what we say we were going to do has really helped us build a strong relationship with a lot of those those types of customers as well, which has really driven us to other markets that we weren't in before. But again, based on what we wanted to be able to do was be able to provide the power to our customer set when they need it. And so that's we went through that whole process in other markets that I described it that we do here in the valley as well. All

Tim Montague:
33:03

right. Well, thank you so much, Matt Beasley, Chief Commercial Officer with Silicon Ranch, for coming on the show. Check out all of our content at CleanPowerHour.com. Tell a friend about the show. Do it today. It's the best thing you can do to help others find this content. And with that, Matt, how can our listeners find you?

Matt Beasley:
33:21

So we're at SiliconRanch.com, and we're on all the social media platforms. And I really appreciate the opportunity to tell more of our story today.

Tim Montague:
33:30

All right. Well, thank you so much. Thank you.

Matt Beasley:
33:32

Take care.

Tim Montague:
33:33

I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage.