How Solar Farms Can Restore Ecosystems with Nick de Vries

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But we could actually regenerate our soils through grazing, through animal impact, through rotational grazing. And saw this as a means to be and this is now turned into the term agrivoltaics, which is a hot topic and on a lot of people's mind. But really, rather than doing two things on the same piece of land. We saw this as an opportunity to regenerate the land, add value and create values, obviously in the electricity generation, but also add values in improving the water cycle, improving water infiltration in the soil, sequestering carbon grow, increasing the organic material that's in our soils.

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Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.

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today on the Clean Power Hour, regenerative energy.

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I'm Tim Montague, your host, welcome to the Clean Power Hour.

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Please check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify and tell a friend about the shows. The word of mouth is the best thing you can do. My guest today is Nick de Vries. He is the CTO Chief Technology Officer for silicon Ranch, a major solar developer based in Nashville, Tennessee, but working nationally. Welcome to the show, Nick.

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Hey, Tim, thanks for having me.

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I love the stuff we're going to talk about. I could talk about this stuff all day long. And I'm so intrigued though, that silicon ranch has coined this phrase regenerative energy. And we're going to we're going to geek out on that. What is that? But before we do that, Nick, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to Silicon ranch.

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Sure, I'm the Chief Technology Officer of silicon ranch, and I've been with the company, Oh, little over seven years, but had been worked like many people at Silicon Ranch, had worked with silicon ranch prior to that, at another company, at EPC, building solar power plants.

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With my time here and around Silicon Ranch, I can say that I've designed and built some of the first solar power plants that silicon ranch owns and operates, projects that are still with me 13 years later, and it's company that allows you have a long term view of the work that you're doing. Sure things need to happen on time, on budget, on schedule, but we are an independent power producer that also develops and our main goal is to provide electricity, choice, renewable energy to communities, provide them economic development and carbon solutions, and by doing so, build a business that provides a lot of different streams of value to the communities we serve.

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Yeah, we were talking in the pre show about the expression dual use, and I use multiple expressions for ultimately, what is agri solar, or agrovoltaics? And agri solar is, is a bigger house, I think, but dual use, I think of as you're you're installing solar, you're generating electricity with sunlight. That's the fundamental. But then you're also doing other things with that land. Maybe it's pollinator friendly habitat. Maybe it's grazing sheep, maybe it's raising crops. But why does silicon ranch feel so strongly about this expression regenerative energy, and what is that? Sure

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regenerative energy is our company's program that we started, launched a little over five years ago, and that it's built around regenerating the soils and the land that we own as a long term independent power producer. We actually choose to own most of the land that we've built our solar power plants on, rather than than a long term lease. And so we actually had seen where I thought we'd been pretty good.

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Our civil designs worked out the way they were supposed to, and other times where the land was in bad shape. There was times with there was erosion, invasive species on our land. Things didn't turn out per plan. And realize that there's more to land stewardship than just setting it aside and letting it be, but we could actually regenerate our soils through grazing, through animal impact, through rotational grazing, and saw this as a means to be, and this is now turned into the term agrivoltaic. Which is a hot topic and on a lot of people's mind. But really, rather than doing two things on the same piece of land, we saw this as an opportunity to regenerate the land, add value and create values, obviously in the electricity generation, but also add values in improving the water cycle, improving water infiltration in the soil, sequestering carbon grow, increasing the organic material that's in our soils. Our regenerative energy program is the combination of renewable energy and soil revitalization and soil regeneration in the same operation. Yeah,

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I love this emphasis on the soil, because our modern agricultural system, I live in rural Illinois, which is one of the best bread baskets in the United States, bar none.

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And that economy is running on corn and beans. And unfortunately, our modern practices are basically mining the soil. We are removing carbon from the soil and degrading the soil. It was built up over 1000s of years into what was largely a wet prairie here in Illinois, prior to European settlement, and then we started plowing it and planting it. And then that got much heavier after World War Two, with the advent of petrochemicals, fertilizers and pesticides. And so now we're really just leaning very heavily on the soil in our farming practices. And it's a beautiful thing to think that we could take some of that farm ground out of rotation and do something else with it. That is, as you say, regenerative adding animals back to the landscape. Large ruminants is a good thing, and something that the landscape was definitely used to in many parts of the United States, again, prior to European settlement.

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That's right. And there are things that ruminants do, just walking, grazing and putting their excrement on the soil.

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That really was a rich phenomenon, and they were integral to the ecosystem, very much part of that, which we then removed largely. But so let's talk a little more about Silicon ranch. You're well known. I think just because you're a big IPP, you're developing large utility scale solar projects in many parts of the US, with an emphasis on the southeast and but I did not know that you were in the business of owning your real estate, which is quite unusual for a utility scale solar developer. I love that you're making a long term investment. Not that utility solar isn't a long term investment. It is. These are 20 to 50 year life projects, and most of the leases reflect that.

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But tell us a little more about that commitment to owning the real estate and then, how has regenerative energy evolved?

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You've been with a company for quite a while, and you've seen projects that have gone from concept to fruition, but tell us a little more about how things are going and what are you most excited about? Yes,

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you mentioned a bit about our business model, and it's our our business model to develop and build and then own all of our projects, and we everything is built around the long term model. We fully expect to sell electricity to every customer we sign up, and have done so for 13 years. Every single power purchase agreement that we've executed, we've delivered on and sell electricity, and many of them are are now over a decade old.

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So we see that the Sun and solar energy is a real economic development tool, something for counties to be proud of. We create new revenue streams in counties through tax that hadn't been there before. We're generating electricity for the utilities, for some of the customers in the counties. So we see this as a long term operation. And because of that, I'd say, back in 2018 I'd been around some of the same projects owned, the projects that I had designed and built and earlier, a few years earlier, and we had seen, like I said, how some of them just nailed it.

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Everything's working great. The land's in good shape. We mow the grass. It's working out as we had expected. And others where something's not right, the grass never really took hold. We couldn't get anything to grow, we had weeds instead. And so it having that long term view allowed us to see just the spectrum of outcomes that that occur when building multiple projects and focused in and saw the opportunity that we had needs we. Add land that was depleted and needed more organic material simply to grow the grass that's needed to hold the soils in place just to be compliant with storm water runoff requirements and and the civil design for the project. At the same time, we had purchased land in South Georgia, right along a transmission line to build a power plant and sell electricity to customers in Georgia. And our neighbor will Harris of white oak pastures approached us and said, there's ways that we could probably work together. He has an organic and regenerative cattle ranch, multi species operation, actually, and and he was concerned. He wanted to make sure that we were going to treat the land that neighbored his family's land that had been in his family for generations, and do right by it.

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And we had just good, honest conversations with him about what would be possible, and saw the opportunity that we had been struggling with organic material, soil health and growing grass. And here's a guy, our new neighbor, who builds his business around the soil, regenerating it. The stronger his soil, the healthier his soil, the more grass is grown, and then the more animals he could run on his land and more meat that he could produce. And so we signed some of our first grazing contracts with him, but then also were introduced to a number of excellent grazers in other states, where we could really build this program in multiple states, couple different regions of the of the country, and get busy regenerating our soil.

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I learned about Will's work at the solar farm summit this past summer, where I did a bunch of recording. Check out the solar farm summit if you're not familiar. It's an agrivoltaics conference based in Chicago, and he's written a lovely book, which I read, called a bold return to giving a damn one farm six generations and the future of food. And if you read that book, you will quickly understand what Nick is talking about here, because will is in the same business, I think that you're in, except he's not necessarily a solar farmer. He's a cow farmer. Primarily, he farms other animals as well, but he's concerned about the land and making sure that his grandchildren have a viable resource that he's not borrowing from future generations, which is the cliff that so much of our practices in the modern world is running off, including our agricultural system, right?

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We're borrowing from future generations because we're degrading the ecosystem that provides the very wealth that that gives us a plate full of food. It's it's really short sighted, and so it's just great to run into entrepreneurs like him and yourselves who are now changing the way and proving to the world that you can do good in the world and run a profitable business. They don't have to be mutually exclusive, which is what I think a lot of capitalists think, that, sorry, we just are not going to be profitable if we try to do good by the by future generations, ultimately. And it's not without its foils, as you pointed out, like sometimes it's hard to get stuff to grow right.

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Construction is a change to the land. It can be a pretty heavy impact, and you have to be thoughtful about that. And then obviously you have to work hard to bring it back, and you might be inheriting something that's been degraded for decades or more. And so the the stat, the status of the land that you're inheriting, I'm sure what varies widely and but so anyway, just a couple things we energy professionals need to remind our friends in rural communities, and we do need to see them as friends and allies, that's right, and build bridges. And that's one of the things that I love about agrivoltaics is, I think it is a bridge that helps them understand that we also can be part of a rural agricultural economy. We're just taking farm fields and grazing fields and converting them to an industrial use. It's a both, and there is the potential for ag the both.

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And I really like that, and I'm glad you brought it up, because this has been exactly my, my experience. I'm a city kid from California, and work predominantly in rural counties, a lot of them in the southeast will Harris, very different accent than mine. We grew up differently, and you can point to all sorts of different things about us, but actually, when you get to slow down and talk with each other, we shared a lot of same concerns, had a lot of same interests, and could learn from each other, and that's really the power of agrivoltaics. It's an and it's about creating multiple values.

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It's about learning different disciplines that you didn't know about before, and combining them and creating something that's that that's greater than if kept separate. Now, not all agrivoltaics has those synergies. You could point to things that those aren't great pairings, but when you do, and I think we have that with small and moving into large ruminants, it is synergistic. There is symbiosis. And it's a beautiful thing, both on what on the land, but but who you get to work with, and the new relationships that you get to build one

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of the, one of the, I think, assumptions that people quickly make about agrivoltaics Is Tim That's not going to pencil very well.

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You're going to have to do something. You're going to have to create racking that's higher off the ground, or doing a different treatment for wire management, any myriad of things. So what is the what should our developer and asset owner, friends and others farmers understand about how you guys are doing agrivoltaics? And how do you make it make economic sense? Sure,

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it has to make economic sense. If not, it's going to be something you do once, and maybe to try it or out of the requirement, and then you're not going to want to repeat it, because you're losing money from it again as a long term owner and operator of our power plants, we're we the decisions that we make are with us for decades, and it's imperative to us at Silicon ranch that our agrivoltaics programs pencil out and work within the budgets of our programs. I think a key is that for both people to understand the importance of this, whether you're building your agrivoltaics program all within your own staff, or you're working with partners, is to recognize that the solar power plant capital into capital costs upfront are very intensive, and then have to play out and create revenues for a long time to come understand and respect that. But the key is, if you're working on both sides, both the construction and the operation is be looking at the values that agrivoltaics bring to your program with our grazing systems, these are all part of our vegetation management program costs that we have on the program, whether we do it conventionally, regeneratively or with agriculture, so making sure that the grazing program fits within Your vegetation management budgets, and be looking at ways that that different design choices that you make can can help that or hurt that. But if you can work on both sides, both the construction and the operation, you can find the right long term decisions and and make the right decisions. And agrivoltaics can work, but if you just prioritize one over the other, that short sighted thinking can lead you into bad decision making. And I don't think that all agrivoltaics is going to work out perfectly and have those great long term outcomes, but you got to look at, definitely have to look at both the construction and the operation when making those choices,

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Sure, a lot of it goes to what kind of grass you've grown. And if you've if you got a good, strong grassland prairie, beneath your solar power rays, there's a lot of food and forage there. And a lot of it's food for your flock of sheep. If you have weeds, they're not exactly palatable.

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They're actually what's grows tall and shades the solar system. And you can drive in repeated mowings. You're never going to get them all with sheep. And so the key to making grazing work is actually getting a good stand of grass, nothing, ideally, too wet with long, tall wetland grass species coming up, it comes to getting your grass right. To get your grass right, you got to get your soil right.

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If your soil is degraded, you're going to get weeds. That's the only thing that want to and can grow in some of these harder, harder soil conditions, even when you aren't starting off with the greatest soil the grazing helps increase your organic material, break up some of the crust and allow good grasses to grow. You can graze just as cost effectively you as you can bow. In some cases, you can definitely mow cheaper.

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Sometimes you can graze cheaper sometimes, but usually it all comes back to the grasses that you're growing and getting that right. It comes back to the long term view. If all you're trying to do is get out of construction, get something down and go, you may not be establishing the right type of vegetation that either mowing or grazing needs to be successful long term.

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So the type of vegetation you're planting is going to vary. If you're planning to run sheep or cattle, and you're doing some work in the cattle space. I want to shine a light on that as well.

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The vast majority of agrivolta takes today in the US is sheep grazing. Certainly, we're doing some pilot scale work on growing crops under solar arrays also.

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And there's no reason that you can't grow crops. It's just the it's a question of economics, and I think personally, it makes a lot of sense to follow a path of least resistance initially, which seems to be grazing. So let's go there. But now there's gigawatts of solar in the US that's being grazed, and it is truly going mainstream, thanks to asga and other organizations, the American Solar grazing Association. Shout out to Lexi hain, who was the founding director there, and indeed, now she's at light source BP, as their head of agrivoltaics. But so what else should our developer and asset owner friends know about grazing? And then let's shine a light on your work with cattle.

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Look, it's taken off, and think because it works, like you said, maybe it's the path of least resistance. When we sat down with in the beginning, you can say it's going to work. The geometries are such that that the sheep can can live and are sheltered very well by the solar power plants and the space beneath them, the and I think it has a lot of room to grow. You announcements every couple months, every couple weeks, sometimes about new people getting into the space and committing to the to grazing practices. I think something that people need to know is that two thirds of the lamb that we eat here in the United States isn't produced in the United States. It comes from overseas.

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So there's an actual lot, a huge amount of room to grow and increase the national flock here in United States and not change anybody's eating habits. Can eat no more, no less, lamb and simply displace imports into the country. So there's a lot of room to grow with sheep, and there's it's a practice that really works out and makes good economic sense on your power plants. I It's taken off, and it's taken off because it really does work. And the land market.

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States are ready for this and ready for all the sheep and increasing flock size. That said, there's many more cattle ranches in America than sheep ranches, and it's something that a lot of people culturally identify with. Oh, if I could raise cattle in and around here, yep, I'd be very interested in doing this with you. But if you came in and asked someone to to do something that they're not used to, lot of people have stopped ranching sheep, or come in with a new crop that that people aren't comfortable with, you'll have trepidation. But Americans do ranching cattle. It is the predominant protein that we eat in America. And with that, that say that cultural appreciation of cattle, we've, I've been working, probably for five or six years on trying to find a way that we can appropriately co locate cattle ranching with solar. Obviously, the panels have to be taller.

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But back to the economics, you have to do this without hurting the cost of generating the elect solar electricity and finding the right balance. So that's been some of my work here in the past five years on what we call the cattle tracker program, to find the right balance where we can find a solution that's good for solar generation, good for the animal and good for the land.

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So if you go to Siliconranch.com click on solutions and then or roll over solutions, and then you'll see regenerative energy. And you go there, and then you'll see a link to the cattle tracker project. And clearly you're you need to jack the solar up a little higher with cattle, I presume. Is that not right?

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Yes, certainly depends on what your starting geometry is, but usually a torque tube is, say, five feet, sometimes between four and six feet from grade, and that's really not tall enough to prevent interactions between cattle and the solar equipment, yeah,

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because the tracker is tilting right so the lower edge of the panel on a tracker is going down to at least 36 inches right, and you don't want the cattle rubbing up against those solar panels. That would not be good for and they might be want to do that because it probably feels good. They need to scratch their back too.

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That's the number one thing people tell me about cows. Hey, Nick, are you sure you want to do that? There are cows like to scratch and sure, and some inadvertent touching and interactions between cattle and the equipment is okay. But what's important is it statistically relevant, having a couple cows around a couple solar panels and nothing. No harm was done. A good enough to unlock large projects with 1000s, millions of solar panels, hundreds, 1000s of cows. No, we have to find a way that you're going to statistically minimize the interactions between the equipment and the cattle, but doing so without creating really increased costs that can will hurt the economics of the generation plant. If you do that, don't do these two things together, but if you want to do them together, you have to find a way that the solar economics is still good and maintained, but that the cattle animal welfare is still just as good as if you were on a on a regular grass pasture.

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Yeah, certainly I can think the cattle, and this is true for the sheep too, are going to appreciate the shade, and that is non trivial, right?

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Providing the animals with shade allows them to regulate their temperatures, and is actually really good for their absolutely wellness and productivity, right? They're going to grow better if they're healthier and less stressed out

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that it's it's not just cattle nature, it's human nature too. Think of when you've been out on a long hike or been spending time outside and it gets warm, we all then seek the shade, and those benefits are something that we see and study on sheep ranching right now, as far as water intake, the weight that our our sheep put on, the shade and shelter that a solar power plant provides a herd of animals is definitely adds value and and something that is obviously also then good for cattle ranching.

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And I guess one of the things about Agra bowl takes that stands out for me is that you, first and foremost, you need to be intentional, and want to do something different and but as you'll see, if you go to this website of silicon ranches, that they've assembled a research group around this, around this practice, which involves scientists. And I'm just curious, Nick, how do you get support for this kind of an initiative? This a top down thing, or is it more bottom up?

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Or what tell us about that process? We

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formed a started forming the research team. Um, about four years ago, I think when we applied for federal research funding from the Department of Energy, they had one of their first agrivoltaic research calls and and we submitted the concept again, trying to find a way to cattle ranch under solar that was still good for the solar generation, good for the animal and good for the cow and good for the land.

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And when looking at that, I saw the need to be bringing in other expertise. I'm the CTO of a solar company. I know solar power plants very well, the cost drivers, the technology that's within the solar panels and and I have an appreciation of other things, but at the end of the day, I'm not an animal welfare specialist or I'm not an ecologist, this is an opportunity, and like we said in the introduction on agrivoltaics, to bring other people in with different backgrounds and different expertise. And when I opened up this idea and this mandate that we have to be good for the land, animal and solar that really piqued people's interests. And was introduced to Dr Keith postian at Colorado State University, also Dr Lily Edwards Calloway in their animal sciences department, and was able to talk to them about how I wanted to do this rigorously, and wanted to make sure that the different disciplines were all represented by world class researchers, and then also not just have researchers, but practitioners. I'm a practitioner of solar power plant generation and into sheep ranching. Will Harris is a practiced cattle rancher, and then other members of our staff have both do research and practice, and so combining those two things into a program has incredibly rewarding, getting to work with people that we may not have crossed paths with otherwise, and and have been able to create a really collaborative program as a result.

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Let's reiterate the value stack here. So you've got solar so you're generating electrons and selling that power to some off taker. Yeah, you've got income from grazing and raising livestock, yeah, producing animals a crop that has value in the market. Then there's the ecological value, right? You're reducing runoff, you're improving the soil ecosystem for the long term. Are there other stacks we should be thinking about here? No,

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I think you've knocked out the main three again, value from selling electricity, value from producing animal crops, and then also the ecological values. But then these all touch different things, right? You're building organic material in the soil.

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You're running off less water and keeping it more on your own property. The production side touches other businesses around the ranch, right and both in terms of what you buy, in inputs, but also then in in meat, producing the energy generation. Obviously, you're producing solar electricity and selling it, but you're also contributing to the local economy through taxes and through the new jobs. A regular solar power plant only employs so many people that to operate within the requirements and the regulations. But by stacking values we're we're hiring many more people per acre than we would ordinarily, and in many cases, many more people than acre than the previous land use.

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Yeah, I think this is really important for rural landowners to understand that we're opening up some streams of revenues, streams of revenue for the local community that are not there when you're just cropping or grazing the land, and so it is, and rural America is in a bit of a crisis. The next generation is struggling to stay interested in staying on the land, and they're going to the cities. And this is a a cycle which ultimately is causing labor poverty in these communities, right? There aren't enough local people to run these operations. So I think it's great that solar can be part of the solution for rural communities in multiple ways.

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And there is a growing drum beat, and I'd like us to close on this Nick in the last few minutes we have together, there's a growing drum beat of nimbyism, of pushback from various and sundry forces against wind and solar and battery projects in the US. And so we have to work very hard and take this very seriously to a.

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To improve the odds of getting projects developed, we can't make the energy transition fast enough if we're going to if we're going to have a lot of friction on the ground. So what is your experience though, at Silicon ranch when it comes to getting projects permitted,

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every project has to get permitted. Every project is cited in a community where people should have natural concerns about about a new project, just as I want to have a say about what goes on in my county and the types of development that is approved here, so should every American in whichever county that they live in. It is very important to not just brush off people's concerns as well. That's silly, or that's just not the science of it. Or don't you see the we're trying to do something good here, but truly listen. And it's by truly listening that you start thinking of some of these solutions actually address the people's concerns, actually try to come up with programs to employ people and come up with programs that reflect the cultural values within a community. That's what we've tried to do with agrivoltaics.

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It's important to know that it's not the only thing to to connect with the community different places value different things, have different questions, but by listening to them and truly looking for to find ways to address them, I think that you're actually going to be able to build the different multiple different types of value that a solar power plant can create. I this is what has led us to our agrivoltaics program, but also is what leads us to build with domestic product, to make sure that for every dollar that we're spending, we're contributing to the US economy, creating jobs and factories for communities that that that have them.

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There's multiple different ways that you can listen to the communities act on it and deliver a more valuable Pro project that someone then might be, might be proud to proud to approve.

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And I should mention that you're the host of a podcast, silicon ranch radio, so check that out. Awesome.

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That's right at Silicon ranch com. I listened to your interview with Dan sugar of next tracker. Fascinating experience Dan has had with many decades now in the industry. So check that out. And I assume you'll be at the solar farm summit next summer, in 2025 I know that's on the calendar, but how else can our listeners find you online?

00:37:43.789 --> 00:37:47.030
Nick, I'm

00:37:47.090 --> 00:38:07.039
pretty active on LinkedIn, and I appreciate you mentioning our podcast. I get an interview out about once a month. I frequently attend some of the solar conferences, solar farm Summit, and I'll be speaking at the University of Illinois here in a couple weeks.

00:38:02.809 --> 00:38:09.050
But find me on LinkedIn and take a listen to our podcast. I appreciate that

00:38:09.500 --> 00:38:21.507
wonderful you can check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com as I say, please give us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify.

00:38:17.286 --> 00:38:39.483
Reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. I love hearing from my listeners, and with that, I'll say thank you, Nick de Vries for coming on the show today, Chief Technology Officer with silicon ranch. I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage. Take care. Nick. Bye. Bye. Thanks.

00:38:39.556 --> 00:39:06.264
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How Solar Farms Can Restore Ecosystems with Nick de Vries | EP252

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