The Department of Energy is trying to find a way for farmers to raise fruits and vegetables below solar panels

 Solar installations are expanding across the U.S.
(Solar Energy Industries Association photo)

The U.S. needs massive amounts of land to meet its renewable energy goals, but some farmers oppose the encroachment of solar farms into land intended for growing food. The Department of Energy believes "solar could provide up to 40% of the country's electricity by the year 2035. However, it's estimated roughly 5.7 million acres of land will be needed," reports Clinton Griffiths of Farm Journal. Matt O'Neal, a professor at Iowa State University and the Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture, told Griffiths: "Millions of acres may be needed for solar energy production going into the next 20 to 30 years and some of that land, not all of it, could be farmland. That worries some people, especially those farmers in the Midwest."

That's where the work of agrivoltaics comes into play. The discipline strives to show how farming and solar can co-exist. Stephanie Mercier, an agricultural policy consultant, told Griffiths, "Such research was launched in 1981 by two German scientists, Adolph Goetzberger and Armin Zastrow, who determined that constructing solar panels so they are elevated about 6' above the ground rather than being placed directly on the ground can allow for crops to be cultivated below the solar panel array."

Agrivoltaics is new to U.S. crop farmers, but the DOE is working to help them understand and deploy the practice by supporting research. Iowa State University received a $1.8 million DOE grant to test the "possibility of raising fruits and vegetables beneath those solar photovoltaic panels," Griffiths reports. O'Neal told him: "That shady environment might be conducive for some of those plants to survive, and maybe even thrive to the point where it becomes economically viable. We don’t know yet, and that’s the point of the experiment."

"Mercier has found that recent estimates indicate there are currently more than 340 agrivoltaics sites in the U.S., mainly pairing solar with pollinator habitats or small ruminant grazing, such as sheep, across more than 33,000 acres while producing a total of 4.8 gigawatts of solar energy," Griffiths reported. "Mercier adds according to a German research organization, Fraunhofer ISE, in 2022, early results from a project in the north African country of Algeria found that under an agrivoltaic installation there was an increase in yield of potatoes of roughly 16% versus the uncovered field."