Agrivoltaics—the practice of co-locating solar energy systems with active agricultural land—is emerging as a significant new opportunity for the solar and storage industry. Rather than competing with farmland for space, developers are finding ways to design projects that operate alongside crops or livestock, unlocking sites that were previously off the table and creating new project types for the industry to pursue.
According to Helge Biernath, Chief Executive Officer of Sunstall, agrivoltaics also changes the economics of a project. Compared to a standalone solar structure, an agrivoltaics installation can generate a stronger return on investment by supporting an additional revenue stream tied to the land’s existing agricultural use. That shift is opening the door to new business models, new financing structures, and new demand for developers, engineering procurement and construction firms, and installation crews with the expertise to design and build these dual-use systems.
As Biernath put it, harvesting solar energy is fundamentally the same act as photosynthesis — the sun is still the resource being captured. For the solar and storage workforce, agrivoltaics represents the next expansion of that same opportunity: a new site type, a new project category, and new work.
