Solar Plus: How Solar-Integrated Agriculture Could Reduce Barriers to Large-Scale Solar Deployment

The United States could see 300 gigawatts of large-scale solar deployment in the next decade, with 150–200 gigawatts concentrated mainly in the Midwest where existing land use is often tied to agriculture. The significant land use and siting barriers to this large-scale solar deployment are daunting and warrant re-thinking the role of solar in agricultural economies. By moving toward beneficial solar-integrated agriculture or co-location of solar and agriculture—vs. solar as a single-use development—we can capture the benefits of both while reducing potential conflict.

Here are three takeaways:

• Existing niche markets in solar-integrated agriculture add value to solar development and demonstrate the stacked co-benefit potential of solar development.
• We need a greater understanding of how solar fits into agricultural business models to achieve solar-integrated agriculture deployment on a large scale.
• Communities need to realize that solar is not a land consumptive industrial use, while the solar industry needs to be creative in finding ways for solar development to create valuable co-benefits for agricultural communities.

Solar as single-use development sets the stage for conflict with agriculture

Regulators, planners, and communities typically view large-scale solar as a consumptive land use, where solar deployment “uses up” the land where it is located. Media stories about how much land solar power uses are increasingly common, and land use regulators at the local and state level face decisions about the opportunity cost associated with how much land (agricultural land, forest land, or industrial land) is used by solar development proposals.

The primary perceived conflict is between agricultural uses and solar uses—the tradeoff between the agricultural economic base of the nation, states, and communities and the growing solar industry.

Re-thinking solar development to find opportunities for co-benefits

Solar development opportunities for co-located land uses or solar project designs that create valuable co-benefits are relatively easy to capture. In most cases, solar development can have a relatively light footprint on the landscape.

Integrating solar with pollinator habitat has been successfully deployed at market scale in the Midwest and across the nation. For example, Minnesota was an early leader in transforming expectations of solar development to include pollinator habitat co-benefits and recognizing the potential economic contribution of beneficial habitat design to agriculture.

Research and pilot projects explore solar-integrated agriculture practices and benefits

When solar is sited and designed as a single-use form of development (maximizing electric energy generation), communities have to choose between protecting their agricultural base and creating clean energy. If solar is sited and designed as solar-integrated agriculture, the community retains some or all of its agricultural base while also entering the new and burgeoning clean energy market.

Solar co-located with agricultural production, or agrivoltaics, is a focus of national research and demonstration, attempting to mitigate the perceived conflict between solar development and prime farmland or agricultural practices. The research and pilot projects test the proposition that solar development can retain or possibly even enhance agricultural opportunities or production rather than offsetting production.

For example, crops can be grown under solar panels, particularly if the panels are elevated. A number of promising results show that the partial shade of a solar panel actually increases the production efficiency for some specialty crops, particularly in hotter and drier conditions. Modifying solar racking systems to accommodate agricultural production and planting and harvesting practice changes around the solar equipment has been successfully demonstrated in pilot projects with the right combination of crop and racking design, although the economics of such arrangements are not currently competitive for market deployment.

Some existing applications of agrivoltaics have gone beyond pilot projects and demonstrate market-driven agriculture in conjunction with solar. Examples of market successes include:

• Apiaries: Production of honey from bee colonies co-located with solar pollinator habitat.
• Animal agriculture: Co-located solar on grazing ground for animal agriculture (usually sheep), or sheep grazing as a service provided to solar farm owners for value-added maintenance of habitat-friendly ground cover.

Getting to scale: Moving from niche to large-scale agribusiness markets

Niche markets in solar-integrated agriculture (honey production, small scale vegetable farming, sheep as vegetation management) add important value to solar development and demonstrate the stacked co-benefit potential of solar development.

This agrivoltaics model adds diversity to farm income that is otherwise dependent on international commodity markets. The multiple co-benefits provided by these small market applications are part of the solar-integrated agriculture portfolio.

However, agrivoltaics still face significant barriers to deploy at scale. Deploying 150–200 GW of solar would affect something over 1.5 million acres of land. Most of these niche markets can only mitigate for a fraction of the lost agricultural production in a full solar deployment scenario:

• The Midwest has less than 2 million acres in vegetable production, which clearly does not offer sufficient opportunity for reaching scale.
• Solar grazing is more scalable but is typically geographically limited to lands with poorer soils and limited to animals that can graze without damaging the solar equipment (primarily sheep). The current market for sheep and lambs is currently too small to do more than contribute a portion of co-location potential, particularly with existing animal agriculture operations in the Midwest.

These strategies can, through co-location, mitigate for reducing agricultural production for small sites, or diversify a larger agricultural operation. The dilemma, however, remains: How to integrate agrivoltaics with existing larger-scale agricultural business models and markets?

Framing the opportunities

We need a better understanding of how solar fits into agricultural business models to achieve solar-integrated agriculture deployment, particularly in places such as the Midwest where soils tend to be highly productive resources growing commodity crops, and animal agriculture markets focus on dairy, pork, beef, and poultry.

Determining the viability of solar-integrated agriculture requires engagement with those involved in the agricultural economy:

• Agricultural producers that are being asked to modify their business practices.
• Landowners who may or may not also be agricultural producers.
• Crop consultants and agricultural support industries that provide services and equipment to producers.
• Agricultural industry and trade organizations that look out for the individual long-term interests of different types of agriculture.

The Great Plains Institute is working with agricultural interests, the solar industry, energy regulators, energy and agricultural NGOs, and state agencies to identify barriers to scaled deployment of solar-integrated agriculture.

We identified potential barriers to solar-integrated agriculture and examples of use cases where agrivoltaics fit into agricultural business models at different scales and with varying economic potential.

• Small-scale deployment (100–300 kilowatts) behind the meter at agricultural operations, where niche agrivoltaic applications provide income and agricultural diversity to individual farm operations. Scale can be reached, for instance, through aggregating carbon or renewable energy credits along a supply chain of individual producers.
• Mid-scale deployment (1–10 megawatts) where community-scale solar is integrated into individual farm operations, but as shared solar or wholesale production that uses grazing or pollinator habitat with adjacent pollinator-dependent crops, and can be sited on marginal or fragmented lands to minimize displacement of agricultural production.
• Large-scale deployment (50–200 megawatts) across multiple farm operations where the solar integration is primarily economic, but includes carbon sequestration benefits of ground cover designed to improve soil health and fix carbon. Solar integration provides substantial income diversity to multiple agricultural producers, agrivoltaics diversify agricultural production, and the scale of the solar+pollinator ground cover enables certification of carbon sequestration for use in national carbon markets.

GPI is working with our partners to frame solar-integrated agriculture use cases and identify barriers and opportunities to deployment in the agricultural business model in the Midwest and nationally.

Achieving our solar deployment goals requires understanding how solar-integrated agriculture can work in the context of agricultural practices and economics and the business model that drives agricultural production.

With potentially 300 GW of solar to deploy nationally and 150 – 200 in the Midwest, we need to move away from the land consumption mindset about solar deployment and think about creating a mix of uses, co-located or integrated, to capture the many co-benefits of solar development.

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