Made in the Shade: Growing Lettuce Under Solar

PGE-Funded “Lettuce Shine” Solar Project Helps Oregon Farm Battle Climate Change

Sherwood, Oregon, April 16, 2024 - A pioneering research project will allow Our Table Cooperative Farm, a leading advocate for sustainable farming practices, to counter the challenges of growing heat-sensitive crops like lettuce during Oregon’s increasingly hot summers by growing them under elevated, moving solar panels. The project will supply nearly all of the farm’s energy needs, as well as provide backup power to keep its farm store and food storage running during natural disasters.

The project is a collaborative effort of Our Table Farm, the Oregon Clean Power Cooperative, and Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences. It is largely funded by a generous grant from Portland General Electric’s Renewable Development Fund (RDF). It will use unique pole-mounted solar panels from Ashland, Oregon-based Stracker Solar, and battery storage from Sol-Ark. Dynalectric Oregon, an electrical contractor based in Portland, will install the components.

Lettuce Shine will include six Strackers with 168 solar panels above Our Table’s fields for a total of 75,600 Watts (75.6 kW) of solar power. Stracker‘s innovative design keeps the solar panels pointed directly at the sun all day, maximizing electrical generation while providing moving shade to cool crops underneath. The 20-foot high towers keep the solar panels a minimum of 14 feet above the ground so that farming can occur underneath without interruption.

Stracker’s dual-axis solar power system generates 50-70% more solar power than same-sized fixed systems, along with a 45-65% lower carbon footprint per unit of energy produced. The heart of the Stracker tracking system is the proprietary DriveCore/Control system, which utilizes a sophisticated, GPS-based algorithm to track the precise location of the sun every minute of the year.

The project was inspired by the nearby Solar Harvest community solar project, a collaborative effort between the Oregon Clean Power Co-op and Oregon State University, where OSU agricultural scientists have successfully grown tomatoes, melons, and other crops between rows of standard-height solar panels. OSU’s Prof. Chad Higgins, the lead researcher at Solar Harvest, will be using Lettuce Shine to study whether Stracker’s elevated shade can help boost the production of lettuce and other heat-sensitive crops.

"People like to eat salad year-round,” said Narendra Varma, founder of Our Table Cooperative Farm, “but Oregon summers are getting hotter and hotter, making it almost impossible to grow lettuce here without shade. We are grateful to PGE’s Renewable Development Fund for its generous grant, which will allow us to tackle this climate change challenge and enable OSU to provide the scientific research that we and other farmers can use.”

Our Table provides food to thousands of people in the local area, and Lettuce Shine will include batteries from Sol-Ark, to allow the farm to keep food flowing during a natural disaster. Sol-Ark’s new L3 Series LimitLess Lithium™ Battery Energy Storage System will ensure the farm store and refrigerated food storage continue operating even during a major grid outage.

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