Agrivoltaics: cultivating solar energy to build a more sustainable future

By skilfully combining the agricultural and solar energy sectors, agrivoltaics offers a number of pragmatic and measurable solutions to the profound challenges:

• Firstly, it maximizes the use of arable land, reducing human pressure on land, which is a limited resource coveted by stakeholders whose needs and constraints are often conflicting. Similarly, by preserving agricultural land and supporting production, agrivoltaics indirectly contributes to food security.
• It helps diversify and increase the income for farmers, who are increasingly subject to market fluctuations, as well as crop yields destabilized by climate change.
• It protects crops from a growing number of climate-related risks by reducing evapotranspiration beneath the panels, which act as a shield against hailstones, heatwaves and frost, and lowering thermal and water stress, while bringing clear agronomic benefits to the plots covered.
• It strengthens the stability of the energy supply by encouraging local low-carbon production as close as possible to where the electricity is used.
• It paves the way for developing renewable projects that integrate and operate in symbiosis with the farming activities, while allowing several economic activities to coexist in the same area.

What exactly is agrivoltaics?

Agrivoltaics, which is sometimes abbreviated to agriPV, combines agricultural production activities and solar energy generation using solar photovoltaic panels on the same arable land. The legal definition for agrivoltaic facilities also stipulates that they must make a lasting contribution to establishing, maintaining or developing agricultural production. This new synergy means that farmers can add clean energy production to their core activities and enjoy additional revenue streams.

The solar panels create a microclimate (shade, wind, temperature, humidity, etc.) that can be beneficial to crops, which can grow while sheltered from the elements. Several types of crops can benefit from this innovative process and its wealth of advantages.