The Energetic Rise of Agrivoltaics

The amount of electricity generated from solar sources in the United States has increased more than eightfold in the past decade, yet that progress has come at a cost: Those acres upon acres of solar panels that have sprouted up across the countryside often occupy space that was once productive farmland. To address that conundrum, clean-energy advocates are partnering with farmers to cultivate a new hybrid land-use model known as agrivoltaics.

The concept, first introduced by two West German physicists in 1981, describes efforts to create farming, grazing, and pollinator-friendly spaces amid solar panel installations. In recent years it's been gaining traction in the United States, which now hosts more than 300 agrivoltaics projects ranging in size from the five acres of spinach, sage, strawberries, and solar panels that occupy Jack's Solar Garden near Longmont, Colo., to a sprawling 2,000-acre sheep pasture in Virginia.

Many environmental advocates, like Duncan Gilchrist of The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, see agrivoltaics as a prudent path to meeting clean-energy goals while minimizing damage to vital ecosystems. In an article for The Nature Conservancy magazine, he cites estimates suggesting that installing sufficient solar panels and wind turbines to meet a U.S. goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 would require annexing more than 250,000 square miles of land - about the combined size of Colorado and Montana. A hybrid approach, such as agrivoltaics, he argues, offers a sensible alternative.

"[Agrivoltaics isn't] about cheap electricity; it's about creating a sustainable and harmonious system."

Developers are only beginning to consider viable business models, as terrain and crop choices all effect installation decisions. But Gilchrist argues that some current assumptions governing energy economics are likely to be overturned in the process.

"Agrivoltaics challenges the traditional mindset of purely focusing on cost and energy production," he writes. "Instead, it considers broader values like conservation, agriculture, and community well-being. So it's not just about cheap electricity; it's about creating a sustainable and harmonious system."