Here’s a concept image of what I have in mind for a climate change solution. Using bifacial solar cells in combination with azolla ponds to sequester carbon dioxide and produce excess electricity.
I often see farms that use this type already in my area. Its such an obvious and simple add on, because lots of plants actually prefer having less direct sun, especially when its super hot.
This is probably the simplest and cheapest setup.
Maybe. The point of vertical biracial panels is less need for batteries, or counterbalance generation. When you look at the system as a whole, it may be simpler and cheaper over everyone installing panels with a strong peak in the afternoon when no one is using it
Indeed, but the problem is they don’t provide shade. Vertical panels would work really well for sun loving plants though, not really for azolla unfortunately.
Awesome, yea I think that’s why this is actually feasible. You’re taking an idea that is already proven to work, and then you simply just add value by making the land more productive with very little extra investment.
I read more about azolla and direct sun, so really it would need to be shaded, and that’s fine, as long as we shade it with solar panels.
What would you use the azolla for? Animal feed? Which source of nutrients would you feed it with? Intensive harvesting of azolla would quickly deplete the nutrients in the water.
Great question. Several uses. especially if squeeze and dried, can be used as nitrogen fertilizer. Given the fact that azolla fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere.
Biochar: Organic carbon permanently locked into a solid form that remains in the soil for over 1,000 years, generating high-value Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) credits.
High-Protein Animal Feed: A cheap, highly nutritious feed supplement rich in protein and amino acids to replace land-intensive soy and alfalfa for cattle, poultry, and fish.
Organic Biofertilizer: Nitrogen-rich pellets made directly from the nitrogen-fixing fern, allowing farmers to completely bypass expensive, fossil-fuel-derived synthetic fertilizers.
I missed that azolla could fix nitrogen, knew that about duckweed but azolla is not my strength to be honest. However the question still remains, where would you get the potassium and phosphorus required to grow the azolla? All 3 of your examples involve continually harvesting azolla and not getting the nutrients back in. You could add chemical fertilizer to grow azolla into organic fertilizer but that would be kinda dumb wouldn’t it? Not to say that hasn’t been done multiple times before, looking at you alfalfa fertilizer pellets.
In a way wood is a great way to produce biochar because nearly all the nutrients in the tree are in the leaves and the branches. When harvesting wood we only take the trunk. This means we can grow wood generation after generation and we don’t have to use fertilizer. The same is not true for something like azolla. A good setup to make it cyclical would be to put the azolla right next to the animal farm whose animals are fed the azolla. And use the manure to grow azolla. However then I wonder if the hygienic quality is acceptable.
You need to learn about the growth rate of azolla to understand why it’s superior, the cycle rate is insanely fast, it grows rapidly. Yes potassium and phosphorous would need to be introduced, it would be inexpensive.
Introduced from where? That’s my whole question. Apparently you don’t know but phosphorus is a finite resource which will run out in the next 100-300 years. It’s just as fossil as fossil fuel. Any solution that uses mined phosphorus is not sustainable.
You need to learn about mass balances.
What do I need to learn about it?
I think azolla has been floated (hah!) as a scalable way to quickly fix atmospheric carbon. Maybe fish aquaculture for nutrient restoration?
You can feed the azolla waste water from a fish farm for sure. But then what do you feed the fish? The nutrients always have to come from somewhere and they have to end up somewhere. If you’re simply dumping azolla in a mine somewhere as carbon storage that then turns into a huge waste of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. It’s a very nutrient dense plant.
Yes you’re effectively sucking out nitrogen and carbon directly from the atmosphere and turning it into a solid. Furthermore, if you squeeze out all the water you get extremely dense cakes. You can use the energy generated from the solar panels to mechanically squeeze the azolla, use the squeezed out water back into the system.
Happy cake day, and yes, both. Carbon sequestration and animal feed.
Work well in snowy climates because the reflection off the snow will cause the panels to heat up sooner and melt off snow quicker to get to full production.
I have 25kW of them but I use them for direct south-facing production, not EW. The bathtub curve of EW doesn’t produce the most power, it just matches the higher output periods to the higher demand periods if you don’t have batteries.
The biggest benefit of having them vertical with the bathtub curve is horizontal space usage. You can grow plants that love strong sun in between the rows with much more space and they’ll get mid day sun.
Has anyone pair this powerlines for big equipment like combines or harvester?
