Are Agrivoltaics The Ultimate Climate Win-Win?
Crops and livestock between the panels could solve the energy and food crises at the same time.
Take a train journey through the British countryside, and you’re sure to come across a view like the one in the photo above. When fields full of solar panels — known as solar farms or solar parks—started to become common around 10–15 years ago, I used to gaze out on them with a mix of hope and excitement. They seemed to offer tangible, irrefutable evidence that the renewable energy transition was underway. But as they become more ubiquitous I get a karmic pang of guilt, as more and more productive farmland is put out of action. Food security, food price inflation, and the benefits of eating locally and seasonally, are all negatively impacted as farmland is given over to other uses, no matter how good those uses are.
But there is another way: agrivoltaics. In other words, letting livestock graze — or crops grow — between the rows of solar panels. Can we really do both? Can we have/grow our climate cake and eat it?
Amazingly, the term agrivoltaics was first coined in a 1982 paper by academics in West Germany, proposing “a configuration of a solar, e.g., photovoltaic, power plant, which allows for additional agricultural use of the land involved”. Fast forward…
