A group of innovators crowded around the Hive on the evening of Sept. 17 to learn about sustainable farming in Southern California. The big idea on the agenda? Agrivoltaics. But this isn’t a science-fictional group of mad scientists plotting to take over the world — it’s a scene right here in Claremont.
The Hive and Innovate Claremont (inClaremont), a grassroots organization supporting local entrepreneurship, co-sponsored the evening. Titled “Agrivoltaics: Farming Food and Energy and Together,” the event centered on agrivoltaics pioneer Rose Olivas, who presented her research to a crowd of 7C students and Claremont community members.
As one of the agrivoltaics principal investigators at the Robert Redford Conservancy, Olivas works on studying the effects of solar panel shading on crops at a farm site shared between Pitzer College and Cal Poly Pomona.
Agrivoltaics is the dual use of land for solar energy and agriculture. Rows of solar panels are interspersed with rows of crops, providing benefits like heat mitigation, water conservation, soil health and labor safety. After a brief history of agrivoltaics and global examples of its implementation, Olivas explained how this niche can both spark job growth, and increase renewable energy sources, right here in California.
“With the fight against global warming and to mitigate climate change comes another solution, which is the agrivoltaics system,” Olivas said. “It gives me hope.”
The numbers are promising: from 2012 to 2019, a surge in agrivoltaic development in Japan increased renewable energy supply by 76%. Amidst rising energy costs and sweltering heat in Southern California and globally, agrivoltaic systems represent a new frontier of opportunity.
Olivas described how some manufacturers are creating new types of solar panels made specifically for greenhouses with flexible, retractable and translucent panels. The technology has even made its way into cattle pastures, with creative solutions like installing brushes on panel infrastructure to keep cows happy while generating renewable power.
However, California has been slow to adopt agrivoltaics, largely owing to a lack of statewide support and an arduous permitting process. Paired with roadblocks like cost and adapting solar panels to existing farming practices, transitioning farms to agrivoltaic systems is no easy task, even in the California sun.
Olivas expressed hope that her presentation would inspire the crowd of innovators to create new jobs in fields from engineering to design.
“There’s no urban planning in Los Angeles County that surrounds agrivoltaics,” she said. “It is needed.”
For Olivas, agrivoltaics demonstrates that no matter how strong an idea is on its own, collaboration is the only way to turn it into reality. As a multifaceted area for creativity and innovation available for students across all 7Cs, the Hive is the perfect venue for this type of collaboration.
Trevor Grant, the assistant director of creative facilities at the Hive, explained that the Hive is more than a quirky space for events and fundamentally aims to make innovation accessible for everyone.
“What we’re trying to really help students understand is that innovation and entrepreneurship isn’t necessarily just for those in Silicon Valley,” Grant said.
Making innovation accessible beyond Silicon Valley is precisely the vision of inClaremont. Molly Schmid, a consultant who spends her free time co-leading the organization, has worked at startups in Toronto and Silicon Valley, but believes that Claremont’s mix of students and a growing business community makes the city special.
“The thing that keeps coming up about what makes Claremont unique [is that] there are some pretty talented students who are right in our midst, who are trying to figure out what their next step is,” Schmid said. “And we want to show them what fun this can be.”
Thursday’s talk is part of an event series hosted by inClaremont meant to build bridges between students and local innovators. The audience was evenly split between students and members from the Claremont community, and inspiration brimmed in every corner.
Tessa Tsai HM ’29, whose interest in environmental design led her to attend past Hive events, left on Thursday with a newfound curiosity about the technical aspects of agrivoltaics. She had mixed views on the entrepreneurial approach to combating climate change.
“It’s not a direction that I’m completely sold on, personally, but it’s still interesting to see how people are implementing [the approach] in spaces like these,” Tsai said. “[It’s] knowledge for myself to take into other spaces and see where it can fit in there.”
Jewelle Gomez, an international student advisor at Keck Graduate Institute, noted that this event captured her interest because of the way it connected to both the local community and her background in business.
She was especially interested in the dual-use aspect of agrivoltaics.
“My interest was how you can use the land for multiple things at once,” Gomez said. “It’s just something that I never really thought about. ”
“My interest was how you can use the land for multiple things at once,” Gomez said. “It’s just something that I never really thought about.”
You don’t need to be in Silicon Valley to turn big ideas like agrivoltaics into reality. The secret sauce for innovation is collaboration and community, and there is plenty of that buzzing around right here at the Hive.