Austrian agrivoltaics provider EWS has reported a 14% increase in winter wheat yield at its Sonnenfeld research site in Bruck an der Leitha compared with a control area without PV modules.

The company attributes the result partly to shading and changes in the microclimate beneath its tracking PV arrays.

The system uses trackers that follow the sun during normal operation. For agricultural work, farmers can move the modules into a horizontal position. During harvesting, the module rows can also be tilted away from each other by up to 70 degrees to provide clearance for agricultural machinery.

The shift to renewables and the move to improved technologies continues unabated it seems.

The cost per hectare is approximately $A1,000,000. There are 11 million hectares of wheat grown in Australia. You do the maths. We'll be growing wheat on Mars before this happens here.

But that's OK. We'll pay for it just as soon as the Snowy's finished, by picking some more money off the money-tree out the back of parliament house.

The higher yield is the best they got. Most fields found no improvement and given that they planted further apart than we do in Australia, it would probably mean a fall in yield for anyone stupid enough to do it here.

Still, as with most things to do with renewables, the aim isn't to improve the society, just to improve the chances of getting subsidised.

And that search for subsidises "continues unabated".

On the other hand, the shift to "improved technologies continues unabated" as it has for the last 12,000 years.

There's a bit of green washing and cherry picking going on here. I checked the situation out and it appears there is 14% more wheat - on the area that is being cropped. That is because the shadow of the panels helps to retain soil moisture, which in a drought is a benefit to the wheat.

There have been other experiments. A German field experiment found winter wheat yields 19% lower under agrivoltaics in 2017, but approximately 3% higher in the hot, dry summer of 2018. This was because more sun would have been helpful in the first case.

And then there is the question of how much yield you get from a whole field when you have the solar panels over the top. Turns out only about 80% of the field can be used to grow wheat, so the overall productivity of the field, even in the favourable result, decreases by about 8.8%. Not an increase at all.

When it sounds too good to be true, it generally is.

I appreciate maze's fact checking each time WTF advertises the "The shift to renewables and the move to improved technologies continues unabated it seems”.

It's unabating bulldust, and Australia is one of only a few countries falling for it anymore.

The you-beaut free trade proposal with the EU contains crippling emissions agreements attached to it that Australia should be more concerned about than WTF's advertisements for agrivoltaics in Austria, where, like the rest of Europe, farmers are far less competent and productive than Australian farmers.

It is not a done deal yet, nor should it ever be. The “legal” climate fanaticism heaped on Australia in the deal is to make it harder for efficient Australian farmers to compete with inefficient and heavily subsidised European farmers.

There is no such thing as ‘free trade’: nor are the deals enforceable. But our weak government would not be able to stand up to the European bullies and their ridiculous international “courts”.

Three cheers for Graham's checking-up, too. There is too much trust put in opinions, arcane sources, and ideological dogma.