Agrivoltaics
The combined use of the same land for solar power generation and agriculture, such as crops or grazing beneath or between PV arrays.
Agrivoltaic (agri-PV) systems place modules high enough or far enough apart to keep farming under or between them. Designs include elevated structures 3–5 m above crops, vertical east-west bifacial fences with cultivation strips between rows, tracker arrays with wide spacing, and grazing sheep under conventional ground-mounts.
Performance is measured by the land equivalent ratio (LER):
An LER above 1 means the combined system produces more from the land than separate farm and solar plots would. Fraunhofer ISE pilot results at Heggelbach, Germany reported LERs of about 1.6–1.9, with crop yields reduced by roughly 0–20% in normal years but improved in the hot, dry summer of 2018 thanks to shading.
- Shade-tolerant crops (leafy vegetables, berries, potatoes, some fruit trees) and grazing do best; maize and wheat lose more yield.
- Benefits include lower soil evaporation, protection from hail and heat, and diversified farm income.
- Costs are higher than standard ground-mount PV because of taller structures and wider spacing, often 20–50% more per kWp.
Germany standardised agri-PV in DIN SPEC 91434 (2021), France regulates it under its 2023 renewables acceleration law, and Japan, Italy and South Korea offer dedicated support schemes. Agrivoltaics addresses land-use conflicts that increasingly constrain large ground-mounted solar.
Related terms
All terms →- Bifacial module
A PV module that collects light on both its front and rear faces, using a transparent back sheet or glass to harvest ground-reflected and diffuse light.
- Solar tracker
A motorised mounting structure that rotates PV modules or mirrors to follow the sun, raising the irradiance they receive over the day.
- Floating solar
PV arrays mounted on buoyant platforms on reservoirs, lakes, ponds or sheltered coastal waters instead of on land or roofs.
- Specific yield
Annual energy produced per unit of installed PV capacity, expressed in kWh/kWp per year; combines solar resource and system performance.
- Albedo
The fraction of incoming solar radiation that a surface reflects, from 0 (absorbs everything) to 1 (reflects everything).