Italy

Agrivoltaics: Much More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Within the sector, there is now widespread awareness that an agrivoltaic system is far more than the simple sum of two productions sharing the same space. Agrivoltaics means creating a synergy that arises from the structural integration of electricity generation and agricultural production — in other words, creating a shared production system.

Industry studies, including “Agrivoltaics Creates Shared Value for the Territory – Analysis of the Positive Externalities of Agrivoltaic Development in Italy”, commissioned by AIAS and carried out by Althesys, highlight the numerous positive externalities generated by integrating photovoltaics and agriculture into a shared production system.

The Benefits and Positive Externalities of Agrivoltaics

The benefits generated by agrivoltaics can be grouped into four main areas:

• Agricultural sector

• Economic system

• Energy system

• Environment and landscape

Let us examine them in detail.

Benefits for the Agricultural Sector

In an agrivoltaic system, the presence of photovoltaic panels increases shading and reduces evapotranspiration. This decreases irrigation needs (and therefore costs) and contributes to the creation of beneficial microclimates for crops. These conditions can be leveraged to replace existing crops with others of higher added value, increasing both product quality and revenue per hectare.

In addition, under certain contractual arrangements, farmers have the opportunity to access additional income derived from energy sales or land surface rights — income that is therefore not subject to the same variability as agricultural income.

Furthermore, photovoltaic structures provide protection from external weather events, reducing risks for agricultural activities.

Benefits for the Economic System

On abandoned or marginal agricultural land, agrivoltaics offers an opportunity for recovery or enhanced valorization, thereby counteracting land abandonment and promoting the virtuous use of soil — an increasingly scarce resource in Italy.

To this initial consideration, the following can be added:

• Investments in machinery and technologies for the agricultural sector

• Added value generated by suppliers of renewable energy technologies and services, with positive impacts both on local and national supply chains and on employment. Indeed, managing an agrivoltaic plant requires a wide range of interdisciplinary skills and professionals capable of integrating them.

All this produces effects that go beyond the directly involved sectors, such as the technology industry, generating benefits for the entire national economic system. Examples include environmental benefits resulting from avoided emissions and increased biodiversity.

Benefits for the Energy System

From an energy perspective, agrivoltaic systems contribute primarily to decarbonization goals and energy security. They encourage the search for increasingly effective synergies between photovoltaics and agriculture and counter the misleading narrative that these two sectors compete for land use — a narrative that often slows down the development potential of renewable energy.

Moreover, by encouraging self-consumption, agrivoltaics gives agricultural businesses the opportunity to become significantly more energy-efficient in various ways: from using electricity generated by PV systems to power irrigation systems, to contributing to the electrification of agricultural machinery, and supporting the distribution of flexible energy nodes in rural areas that can enhance grid flexibility.

Benefits for the Environment and Landscape

The presence of photovoltaic structures in cultivated fields facilitates the application of techniques and solutions aligned with precision agriculture — for example, through the possibility of closely monitoring crops and collecting useful field data. This leads to more sustainable agriculture that conserves local resources and reduces the use of chemical agents.

All of this translates into:

• Water savings

• Increased biodiversity

• Opportunities to recover abandoned agricultural land

• Opportunities to recover and preserve specific agricultural productions, such as heritage crops

• Minimization of land consumption

• Reduction of harmful and climate-altering emissions

For all these reasons, the sustainability of the agriculture of the future is deeply linked to the opportunities offered by agrivoltaics. In a landscape threatened by climate change and its consequences, agrivoltaics offers the agricultural sector the opportunity not only to preserve itself, but also to grow sustainably by adopting an approach that is highly conservative toward resources, especially water resources.

The Shared Value of Agrivoltaics

The positive externalities of agrivoltaics described above are not always immediately and directly quantifiable. Nevertheless, AIAS has calculated that, particularly in the case of elevated agrivoltaics, these externalities are capable of more than compensating for the higher electricity generation costs of an agrivoltaic plant compared to a conventional ground-mounted photovoltaic system.

This has led the association to advocate for the development of an “integrated” LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy), which would take into account not only the energy-related LCOE but also the value generated by the system’s positive impacts, including those for which no monetary value is currently recognized.

As we have seen, this value is a shared value: it concerns not only the entities that develop and manage an agrivoltaic system, but also generates positive impacts distributed across numerous areas of the socio-economic system in which the project is embedded — including the agricultural sector, the energy system, local communities, and the landscape.

The value of agrivoltaics is shared because it goes beyond the boundaries of a traditional business plan and affects multiple sectors and stakeholders, first and foremost at the local level, but not exclusively so. All this while remaining Italy’s second lowest-cost renewable energy source.

Supporting the development of agrivoltaics therefore means supporting the ecological transition and the resilience of agricultural systems — in other words: building the future.