Agrivoltaics: Centre tests farming beneath elevated solar panels

The Centre is testing whether the country’s vast agricultural landscape can be tapped to produce both food and electricity through agrivoltaics—a system that grows crops beneath elevated solar panels. With pilots already in place, advisories for the use of this tech may be launched as early as next kharif season, according to officials involved in the project.HT ImageOf the almost 37 pilot studies running across the country, the benchmark Indian Agricultural Research Institute’s (IARI) study has completed its first season of crop trials, with preliminary findings suggesting that while leafy vegetables appear well suited to cultivation under solar panels, cereals such as rice and wheat may be more sensitive to shading, a senior Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) official told HT.According to another official of the agriculture ministry, “mustard showed great promise.”The research comes as the government searches for ways to rapidly expand solar power generation without triggering conflicts over land use. Solar will have to account for much of India’s future renewable energy additions, requiring annual capacity additions of roughly 35-40 GW, but acquiring large contiguous tracts of land for conventional solar parks has increasingly become a challenge.“Agrivoltaics offers the possibility of producing food and electricity from the same parcel of land,” PS Brahmanand, Project Director of the Centre of Excellence on Agrivoltaics at IARI, told HT, explaining that the objective is to generate scientific evidence that can guide large-scale deployment.The Centre of Excellence, established with support from the MNRE, the National Institute of Solar Energy and Germany’s GIZ, has so far tested growing crops, including cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, mustard and other vegetables beneath elevated solar structures. Fresh trials during the ongoing kharif season will expand the work to vegetables, paddy, and selected millets before scientists begin drawing conclusions across multiple seasons.Brahmanand says the project is intended to answer questions that have so far prevented agrivoltaics from moving beyond experimental projects in India. “Rather than identifying a handful of suitable crops, we hope to develop a crop suitability matrix for different agro-climatic zones, quantify the impact on yields, estimate water savings, evaluate additional farm income from electricity generation and design commercially viable models suited to India’s predominantly small landholdings,” he said. “ The science is more complex than simply determining whether crops can tolerate shade.”Solar panels reduce the amount of sunlight reaching crops, lowering photosynthesis and potentially reducing yields. But at the same time, they create a cooler microclimate, reducing evapotranspiration—or water lost from plants and soil—and potentially improving water-use efficiency. The balance between these competing effects varies across crops, making long-term field experiments essential before recommendations can be made, the project director said.According to him, the findings will be compounded over the next two years and the technology will be launched at a mass scale thereafter.Some crops are already expected to perform better than others. Shade-loving crops such as ginger, turmeric, coffee and tea are considered naturally better candidates, while cereals and pulses generally require greater sunlight. Brahmanand, however, stresses that even crops currently viewed as less suitable should not be ruled out until complete datasets become available.The efforts comes after a 2023 government-backed assessment of agrivoltaics, which concluded that although India had begun experimenting with the concept, most projects remained demonstrations and several critical questions needed to be answered before large-scale deployment could be considered. The study had called for more research on crop suitability, business models, farmer participation, plant designs and policy frameworks, recommendations that have since informed the establishment of dedicated research facilities such as the IARI Centre of Excellence.The report also proposed a comprehensive policy framework, including a formal national definition of agrivoltaics, integration into India’s land-use classification, dedicated deployment targets, innovation-focused tenders, financial incentives and coordinated action between the agriculture and renewable energy ministries. It argued that the technology’s success would depend as much on regulatory clarity and farmer participation as on engineering advances.India’s agricultural landscape makes such research particularly significant. The country has about 140 million hectares of agricultural land and roughly 220 million hectares of gross cropped area, making farming the country’s largest contiguous land resource. Instead of acquiring new land for solar parks, agrivoltaics seeks to generate electricity while allowing cultivation to continue on the same fields.The potential is substantial. In a Lok Sabha reply this week, the government said studies by institutions including The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) estimate India’s theoretical agrivoltaic potential at 1,192 GW to 2,129 GW.However, translating numbers to land will require significant effort. Nearly 86% of Indian farmers cultivate less than two hectares, meaning agrivoltaic systems will have to accommodate farm machinery, minimise disruptions to cultivation and generate sufficient additional income to justify investment, said Brahmanand. The Centre of Excellence is therefore also studying how solar and agricultural revenues can be combined into workable business models for smallholders.The farm economicsIndia’s crop profile will also determine where agrivoltaics is deployed first. India sees multiple crops being grown on the same land in different seasons. Rice accounts for roughly 51 million hectares, wheat 35 million hectares, soybean around 30 million hectares, while cotton and maize occupy about 11-12 million hectares each. Together, these crops account for much of India’s cultivated area, making their compatibility with agrivoltaics crucial to any large-scale rollout.Scientists, however, say deployment is unlikely to begin uniformly across all crops. Rice, India’s largest crop by area, presents practical challenges because much of it is grown under flooded conditions, making it operationally more difficult to install and manage elevated solar structures. Wheat, on the other hand, is considered easier to evaluate because it is cultivated on dry land, while shade-loving crops such as ginger, turmeric, coffee and tea could emerge as some of the earliest candidates if trials confirm favourable results. The objective, researchers say, is to prioritise crops and regions where agrivoltaics delivers the greatest combined benefit in terms of electricity generation, agricultural productivity and farmer incomes rather than attempting universal adoption from the outset.Importantly, scientists say India will not need to convert all of its farmland to meet its renewable energy ambitions. “You don’t require the entire agricultural area. A considerable share of around 15% to 20%, would be sufficient,” Brahmanand said, adding that deployment should focus on locations where both solar generation and farming can coexist without disrupting agricultural operations.Regions with high solar radiation, such as Rajasthan and Gujarat, are expected to offer an early advantage because higher electricity generation could improve project economics even if agricultural yields are relatively lower.Brahmanand says one of the Centre’s biggest objectives is to generate region-specific recommendations rather than a one-size-fits-all model. India spans 15 agro-climatic zones, ranging from the arid deserts of Rajasthan to the humid tropics of the North East and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where crops, rainfall, temperature and solar radiation differ sharply.