Sectors of the agriculture industry are exploring new ways of placing solar panels on farms as renewable energy becomes more accessible and appealing.
Incorporating solar into agricultural land is known as "agrivoltaics" and has been studied before with sheep grazing systems.
At West Gippsland's Lardner Park, Melbourne-based company Greenwood Solutions has installed a floating 50-kilowatt solar panel to demonstrate floating voltaics in farm dams.
General manager Tom Johnson said Gippsland was an ideal area as it had high rainfall and plenty of farm dams.
"We're putting this in here to give a demonstration on how you can use your water space instead of your land space, which may be more profitable for running cattle or cropping," Mr Johnson said.
"You're getting evaporation benefits, as you're not getting as much sunlight hitting the water.
"And you're also creating a more efficient solar system as the water is cooling down the panels."
Mr Johnson said the cost of the floating panels could be up to three times more expensive than a rooftop solar system.
"It's really more of a marine construction project," he said.
"However, if you've got small dams, you can cover the entire dam in panels and you can run tethers up the bank and hold it in place without getting in the water.
"Wastewater treatment lagoons would also be ideal for this system as they don't have a lot of land or roof space to offer."
Ian Southall from Gippsland Climate Change Network said solar power had already found a place in the region and he expected it would only grow more popular as the cost came down and technology improved.
"It's always been problematic for larger solar for larger agriculture industries, but now the cost for a solar system has come down dramatically over the past 10 years," he said.
"If you drive around Gippsland and look at the all the dairy sheds, it's really starting to take over.
"It's also allowing them to not have as many outages, which Gippsland is pretty famous for.
Solar orchard
In Victoria's Goulburn Valley, researchers are exploring the potential benefits of using solar panels in commercial orchards to shade fruit.
Agriculture Victoria's Smart Farm in Tatura is running an agrivoltaic project where pear trees are grown under solar panels.
The $500,000 project is the only solar orchard in Australia and has been running for two seasons.
Lead researcher Ian Goodwin said the project aimed to address the issue of sunburn from excessive radiation.
"It's really important as a fresh market pear that the quality meets consumer satisfaction, one of those is that it needs to be attractive," Dr Goodwin said.
"But one of the problems is sunburn, which is the same case for apples as well."
Dr Goodwin said the results had been mixed due to unforeseeable weather events.
"We had a bad hail event in December 2022 where any orchard that didn't have nets above it got destroyed," he said.
"But it did show the panels can partly protect the fruit from hail, however, the results were what we call confounding.
"During the previous season, we found there was no sunburn under the panels compared to the control.
"However, we did find a slight reduction in fruit size and colour development."
Dr Goodwin said the project had generated some interest from local growers, however, the infrastructure was still too costly.
"They are hesitant at the moment because of the cost of setting up the supporting structure," he said.
"The engineering behind holding these panels up is pretty extensive and therefore expensive.
"There's a lot of interest overseas, but the big solar companies in Australia haven't shown any interest in doing anything with solar in an orchard."
As the project continued and solar technology improved, Dr Goodwin saw the potential for the future use of solar in orchards.
"We would recommend that all orchards have netting above the trees not only to protect against hail but also radiation," he said.
"So the question becomes how do you design solar into that netting system?
"As the technology gets cheaper and lighter, you could easily be integrating them into netting so that the nets were basically solar panels."
