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EcoRadio KC
EcoRadio KC is a magazine show, including live segments, prerecorded stories, and interviews. The weekly explores our interdependence with the rest of the world, showing the connections between the ways we choose to live and the health of the whole community of life.
For Monday, October 10th, 2022, host Brent Ragsdale will speak with his guest, Amber Dunn. Amber says she’s behind a lot of tables at a lot of events. Her family lives on a 40-acre building-toward-permaculture farm. She is an industrial engineer and consults in permaculture. On our show, Brent and Amber will open with a discussion of agrivoltaics, which combines solar panels with agricultural operations.
An agrivoltaic landscape is a combination of agriculture and photovoltaic energy generation. This is a product of the rise in renewable energy adoption that has occurred over the past 30 years as the world began its shift away from fossil fuels towards renewables. First, we saw large wind turbines amid farm fields. Large scale photovoltaic systems on agricultural land followed.
A principle of permaculture is to design within the climatic, ecological, economic and social context within which our project exists. In order to demonstrate an early principle of permaculture, both the crop and the photovoltaic array work by converting nature’s solar energy into other forms of energy.
Agrivoltaic systems could contribute to regional energy internets where smaller renewable, distributed energy production systems feed into large-scale batteries and are linked into a regional grid for sharing and the energy surplus to regional needs sent to the national grid. Such a system could contribute to the creation of regional economies based on regional energy markets, preferably structured as not-for-profit social enterprise or energy co-operatives.
Agrivoltaics is part of a new technology of the Anthropocene, a solution providing basic human needs.
We at EcoRadio KC are glad to encourage awareness and protection of our world. Our goal is to assure our listeners are aware of how we can create a sustainable present for a sustainable future!
This will be a great radio hour!
We hope you can tune in!
George Carlin said “we (meaning people in general) are arrogant to think we (usually meaning they) are a threat to the planet. This planet put up with dinosaurs for 165 million years then waited another 65 million before putting up with people. Do any of you think people, humans, can last 165 million years?”
