Jill Fitzsimmons Will Help to Assess Impact of Dual-use Solar-agriculture Installations

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technology Office announced recently that a team led by extension professor Dwayne Breger at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been selected for a three-year, $1.8 million award to study the effects of co-locating solar energy panels and agriculture operations at up to eight different farms across the Commonwealth.

The work will be in partnership with landowners, state agencies, solar developers, and a non-profit farmland organization. As part of the team, Jill Fitzsimmons, assistant research professor of resource economics, will measure changes in economic welfare from dual-use solar to answer such questions as costs and benefits to society from dual-use solar, and whatpolicymakers and solar developers need to be thinking about when they consider the true costs of implementing dual use.

Her research will evaluate three factors – effects of dual-use systems on farm profitability, agricultural economies and public welfare in Massachusetts and nationally. Fitzsimmons will collect farm costs and revenue data from on-site dual-use solar panel trials to estimate trade-offs between agricultural yields and energy production, compared to production costs and revenue changes from dual-use. One goal is to identify whether and how installing dual-use solar panels affects the farm business.

Fitzsimmons will also estimate different farm-sector impacts of increased dual-use solar, asking how the state, regional and national agricultural sectors be affected by shifting agricultural land into dual-use agricultural and energy production. Finally, she will conduct a national choice experiment to estimate public acceptance of dual-use solar.

“This is a really exciting project,” Fitzsimmons says. “Massachusetts is on the cutting edge of dual-use solar implementation. We have an opportunity to answer real, practical, immediate questions that agricultural producers and the solar industry need today, and at the same time extend our findings to think about how innovations in the Commonwealth can apply to the nation.”