The Case for Agrivoltaics

Today’s conversation is with Samantha Levy, senior policy manager for conservation and energy at American Farmland Trust, an agriculture and energy advocacy organization I became familiar with through covering the conflict over solar on farmland. I reached out to Levy after the organization released new recommendations for agrivoltaics policy last week – just before a large agrivoltaics project was canceled in Ohio over local opposition. I wanted to ask: are there any bright spots for the future of solar and farms commingling?

Today’s conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

So let’s start with the news – what are your recommendations on agrivoltaics?

A few years ago we came up with Smart Solar principles, modeled off of this idea of “smart growth” rather than this idea of sprawled development that makes it harder for farms to operate. It’s “smart solar.”

The four principles are: One, to prioritize siting on the built-in environment, contaminated land, and marginal farmland, because there’s this natural funneling that happens towards really good, flat, open sunny farmland – the best land for growing crops sometimes.

The second principle is to safeguard soils and water. If you are siting solar on your farmland, make sure you’re retaining the ability to farm that land ideally during the life of the project but certainly in the future. That covers stuff like design, installation practices, decommissioning plans. Making sure that if you have water rights they’re not extinguished by not using them.

The third principle is to expand the development of agrivoltaics projects, integrating production into a solar array so you’re not converting the land and are still contributing to the rural farm economy.

Finally, [fourth] is advancing farm viability and equity.

Where are you seeing positive developments? Success stories?

In terms of policy, it’s important to look at the state level. We’re not really sure how this is going to play out at the federal level just yet. But there’s quite a lot of hope: a lot of states have climate laws on the books with renewable energy targets they need to meet. At the same time, this conflict is real. It stops projects. It’s not the only issue that comes up with communities but it is one of them. [We want to] make sure that we don’t stop projects and get good projects built because we know there are benefits that come about because of them.

In Massachusetts, you have a fairly significant energy adder – an increase to the price paid to the developer for the energy they produce – from an agrivoltaics project when they meet state specifications. Or take the state of Colorado, for instance, funding research into agrivoltaics and is now moving forward with property tax credits for agrivoltaics projects. And they’re designing that policy in a very thoughtful way to incentivize innovative designs for agrivoltaics projects.

In New York we’ve worked on a lot of policy to advance this idea. NYSERDA last year put out an RFP to advance research and collect data on different agrivoltaics projects. New York also has a small mitigation fee that they impose on projects of a certain size that convert prime farmland, but there’s fee forgiveness if you’re going to integrate production into that solar array.

I’m thinking about the agrivoltaics project in Ohio, Grange Solar, that was canceled last week. Do we know yet the extent to which agrivoltaics is actually accepted by agricultural communities where solar on farmland is a concern?

No community is a monolith but we do have some data on this. SEIA [Solar Energy Industries Association] and the National Farmers Union teamed up on a survey we helped do outreach on and there were some really promising results from the farmers who responded to the survey. There could’ve been self selection, but it was promising.

Look, this is a newer idea. It takes time for these kinds of innovations to penetrate and for folks to accept them, especially in farm communities. But this survey showed two-thirds of farmers who responded were open to agrivoltaics production and solar developers who used to be quite risk adverse, used to being more cautious when it comes to agrivoltaics, are starting to be more open to the idea. Especially if this is the kind of thing communities are going to like more than a conventional ground-mounted array.

There are a lot of questions still to answer. The policymaking still really does matter.