Sunzaun - Vertical Solar

Sunzaun - Vertical Solar Sunzaun is a vertical solar solution that shifts the limits of renewable energy production.

This approach offers applications that conventional systems can't realize.

In the 14-state Southwest Power Pool, wind is now the single largest source of electricity: 38.8% of generation through ...
10/22/2026

In the 14-state Southwest Power Pool, wind is now the single largest source of electricity: 38.8% of generation through July 2026, up from about a third in 2021.

Much of that wind runs on working farmland. Farmers host turbines, collect lease income, and keep planting and grazing around them. Nobody argues those acres stopped being farms.

Solar is a different story. In SPP, it's still a sliver of the mix. In MISO, the 15-state Midwest market, it's about 7%.

Same farm country. Same need for new power: generation is up 16% in SPP since 2021, and 10% in MISO.

So why has solar had a harder time earning its place on farmland?

Part of the answer is design. A conventional solar field covers the ground. A wind turbine doesn't.

Agrivoltaics closes that gap with systems built around the farm, so the land keeps producing. Vertical systems take that idea about as far as it goes: narrow rows of upright panels that leave the ground between them open for crops, grazing, and full-size equipment.

Wind already showed that energy and agriculture can share the same land. Agrivoltaics is how solar does the same.

What would it take for solar to get the same welcome in farm country that wind has? 👇

10/21/2026

Introducing "Wellness PV" for cows. 🐄☀️

Our friends at PV-Steel Group just wrapped their first summer with an agrivoltaic system, and a drone survey captured something striking:

🌡️ Open field: 50.0°C (122°F) surface temperature
🌡️ Under the solar panels: 35.7°C (96°F)

That's about 26°F cooler in the shade. And yes, they built a cow brush right into the structure.

Their takeaway is one we agree with completely: good agrivoltaics isn't about putting panels on farmland. It's about designing the system around the farm.

Their system is elevated, giving cattle a shady place to cool off. Ours are vertical, with narrow rows that keep the ground open for grazing, tractors, and crops. Different designs, same goal: the farm keeps working, and the sun pulls double duty.

What would you put under (or between) solar panels: cows, sheep, or crops? 👇

10/19/2026

DEFINING AGRIVOLTAICS

Last week, we looked at where the new USDA REAP rule draws its line: ground-mounted solar on certified cropland is out, whether or not the land keeps farming.

Other countries are drawing that line in a different place, and funding what falls on the right side of it.

Czech Republic
The Ministry of the Environment is covering up to 30% of eligible costs for agri-PV systems of 10 kWp or more on registered farmland, battery storage included. The land stays classified as agricultural, and farmers keep their agricultural subsidies. The condition: on vegetable cropland, the land has to keep producing vegetables for the full life of the system, 25 to 30 years.

South Korea
The country's first dedicated agrivoltaics law takes effect in December, with permits of up to 30 years tied to an annual farming requirement. The government has also proposed doubling 2027 funding for factory rooftop solar and agrivoltaics to KRW 1.8 trillion (about $1.3 billion).

Different countries, same principle: the test isn't how a system is mounted. It's whether the land is still being farmed.

In one sense, that's a stricter standard. Stop farming, and you lose eligibility, for decades. But it's also a more workable one. Systems designed around agriculture get a path forward instead of a blanket exclusion.

Protecting farmland and supporting solar on farms aren't opposing goals. A good definition is how you get both.

What should a U.S. definition of agrivoltaics require? 👇

USDA's new REAP rule takes effect this week. One line in it deserves a closer look from anyone who cares about agrivolta...
10/16/2026

USDA's new REAP rule takes effect this week. One line in it deserves a closer look from anyone who cares about agrivoltaics.

The rule makes ground-mounted solar on certified cropland ineligible for REAP grants.

The stated goal is to protect productive farmland. That's a goal we share. Farmland should stay farmland.

But look at what the rule actually measures: how a system is mounted, and how the land is classified. Not whether farming continues.

Under that test, a solar field that replaces a crop and a vertical system (or other types of Agrivoltaic systmes) built so tractors, livestock, and crops keep working between the rows are treated the same way.

Compare that with how other policymakers have drawn the line:

→ New Jersey's Dual-Use Solar Act defines dual-use by the continued, simultaneous agricultural use of the land under and around the panels.
→ South Korea's new agrivoltaics law ties permits to an annual farming requirement.

Both start from the same question: is this land still producing food?

That's the lesson for every agency, county, and state writing solar rules right now. Definitions decide outcomes. Define agrivoltaics by mounting type, and you exclude the very systems designed to keep farmland in production. Define it by continued agricultural use, and you protect farmland and farm income at the same time.

USDA is accepting public comments on the rule through November 2. If you farm, research, or build in this space, it's worth weighing in.

How would you define agrivoltaics in policy? 👇

A campus needs two things to get built: power and water.For years, the bottleneck was power: interconnection queues, gri...
10/14/2026

A campus needs two things to get built: power and water.

For years, the bottleneck was power: interconnection queues, grid capacity, multi-year waits to get energized.

Now water is catching up.

→ About 40% of existing U.S. data centers already sit in areas of high or extreme water stress
→ Data-center moratorium efforts jumped from 8 to 78 in a single year
→ New York paused hyperscale permitting statewide; Minnesota created a water permit just for data centers

A few weeks ago we shared Aquaria, a company that generates water on-site from ambient air. Our new blog takes the idea a step further.

On-site solar can help supply the power. On-site atmospheric water can help supply the water. Neither replaces the grid or the utility on its own. But stack them on the same site and you get campuses that are more self-sufficient on day one, not just faster to permit on one axis.

The next generation of development may be less about finding land with a grid connection, and more about bringing the resources to the site.

Full piece in the comments 👇

A European company just won a patent for solar strips that slide into an ordinary fence panel in place of privacy slats....
10/12/2026

A European company just won a patent for solar strips that slide into an ordinary fence panel in place of privacy slats. Its first French install is a 20-meter section totaling 3.7 kW, and it plans to sell through fence manufacturers and building-supply retailers.

That's small, and we'd say so. The interesting part is the channel it's aiming for: the places fences are already bought.

Cities have very little spare land, but a lot of perimeter. Property lines, loading yards, rail corridors, the edge of every parking lot. A fence has to exist anyway, so the panel carries a second job instead of competing for space.

We've seen that play out in a real urban setting. Bodhi Hot Yoga's Sunzaun system is the first urban vertical bifacial installation in the U.S., offsetting their high energy usage in a way they previously thought wasn't possible with the specs of their property.

The honest tradeoff: a fence-line system won't out-produce a well-tilted array on annual kWh, and it isn't meant to. It makes sense where the boundary is already there and the land is spoken for.

Different fence, same idea: put generation where the space already exists.

10/09/2026

Solar just crossed 10% of global electricity in the first half of 2026, up from 8.9% a year earlier, according to new Ember data.

The catch: generation is still piled up around midday. That's shifting the conversation from how much solar we build to when it delivers.

Batteries are one answer, and the boom is real. In California, solar plus storage covered more than a quarter of evening peak demand on an average day this year.

Orientation is another lever. Vertical bifacial panels move output toward the morning and evening by design. We'll be upfront about the tradeoff: a vertical array produces a bit less over the full year than a south-facing one. But when midday is where solar's value is eroding, timing matters as much as volume.

The next phase of solar is about fitting the shape of the grid, not just adding megawatts.

A Norwegian company just put vertical solar on rooftops, and the logic behind it is the same one we use on farmland.Over...
10/07/2026

A Norwegian company just put vertical solar on rooftops, and the logic behind it is the same one we use on farmland.

Over Easy Solar's idea is simple: instead of reworking every roof to fit a conventional tilted array, adapt the panel to the roof. Small bifacial panels are mounted vertically, arrive nearly fully assembled, and need no roof penetrations or heavy ballast. By the company's own description, their largest install is in Tromsø, Norway: 320 kWp across about 2,670 m², north of the Arctic Circle, in snow and wind that would rule out a lot of conventional systems.

What we appreciated most is how plainly the coverage states the tradeoff. Vertical doesn't beat a well-tilted system in every season, and in some summer periods it produces less. What it offers is a different generation profile (more in the mornings, evenings, and winter) and power on surfaces that would otherwise get no solar at all.

That's the same reason vertical works on farms. A tilted array asks the land to change. A vertical one fits around what the land is already doing: grazing, row crops, a perimeter, a fence line.

Different surface, same principle. Stop asking which sites are "good enough" for solar, and start asking what the panel has to look like to fit them.

Credit to the Over Easy team, and to Terra50 for spotlighting them.

ai image for visualization only

"What's the ROI on agrivoltaics?" is the most common question we get from farmers and ranchers — and most of the online ...
10/02/2026

"What's the ROI on agrivoltaics?" is the most common question we get from farmers and ranchers — and most of the online answers aren't built for this kind of system. Here's what the numbers actually say right now.

First, a timing reality: the 30% federal solar tax credit required construction to begin by July 4, 2026. That date has passed. If you're starting a new project today, plan your numbers without that credit — it's not coming back for new construction. First-year bonus depreciation is still available, which matters, but it's not the same as a 30% credit off the top.

On financing: USDA's REAP program can cover up to 25% of project costs as a grant, or up to 75% combined with a loan guarantee — but new REAP grant awards are currently paused while USDA finalizes updated rules. The loan-guarantee path is still open and worth pursuing now rather than waiting on the grant side to reopen.

On land value — here's where the comparison most people make is the wrong one. Traditional solar land leases run $500 to $1,000+ per acre per year, but that's for land taken entirely out of production for 20-35 years. That's not what a fence-line or dual-use vertical system does. You're not leasing your acreage away. You're keeping it in production and adding a second income stream on the perimeter that was previously generating nothing.

On selling power back to the grid: be skeptical of anyone who pitches this as a revenue stream. Net metering rules vary by state and are trending toward less favorable export rates, not more. The dependable return isn't selling power — it's not having to buy it. Offsetting your own usage is a number you can actually count on; a check from the utility for excess generation is not.

The honest bottom line: vertical bifacial systems do cost more upfront than a standard ground-mount — real estimates put that premium at 20-40% per kW. But the math isn't "solar lease income vs. row crop income." It's "what you already pay for power, held constant for 25+ years, against a system that doesn't take your land out of production to get there."

If you're evaluating sites for a data center right now, you already know the real constraint isn't compute. It's power —...
09/30/2026

If you're evaluating sites for a data center right now, you already know the real constraint isn't compute. It's power — specifically, how long it takes to get it.

Grid interconnection queues in major US markets now stretch 3-4 years in many cases. Land near existing substations is scarce and getting more expensive. And even once you've secured a site, permitting timelines for a large-footprint facility can push a project's total timeline past 70 months from site selection to first live workload.

There's a second layer to this that doesn't show up in interconnection queue data: community pushback. Utility-scale solar buildouts and new transmission lines face their own siting and permitting battles — often the same land-use objections that slow the data centers themselves. A power source that uses acreage already inside your fence line doesn't create a second fight over a second parcel of land.

None of that changes by waiting. It changes by rethinking what "power infrastructure" means for a given site.

Vertical bifacial solar generates from both faces of the panel, which means it produces meaningful power from a footprint that would otherwise sit unused — the perimeter fence line, an access road buffer, land too narrow for a conventional array. For sites where every acre is already spoken for, that's not a marginal gain. It's power capacity that doesn't compete with your building footprint or your parking, and doesn't add months to your land-use approval.

To be direct about what this does and doesn't solve: this isn't a replacement for grid interconnection, and it won't run a GPU cluster on its own. What it offers is a supplemental, behind-the-meter generation layer — reducing demand exposure, adding resilience, and putting unused acreage to work — while the bigger power story (grid connection, substation upgrades) plays out on its own timeline.

If land-constrained power is part of what's slowing your site plan down, it's worth a conversation about what's actually possible on the acreage you already have.

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