← The Register · Study 04
Agri-PV: Results Beyond Solar
What happens to the farmer, the crop and the land under the panels?
The question from practice
Agrivoltaics is evaluated as an energy intervention: megawatts added, income earned from the lease or the generation. The farmer’s question is different. What happened to the crop, the soil, the water, the labour and the livelihood under the panels? Where land is scarce and holdings small, an intervention that trades away cultivation for generation is not a transition; it is a substitution.
Research objective
To measure crop performance under photovoltaic systems on working farms: yield and quality by crop and season, water-use efficiency and irrigation demand under partial shade, soil health, returns to labour, and total returns compared with cultivation alone and generation alone. Also to establish what happens to the farmer’s livelihood and the land’s productive use over the cycle.
What each partner brings
IWMI brings depth on the water–energy–food nexus, measurement protocols and international comparability. TriQuest brings working farms rather than research stations, farmer cooperation over full seasons, and the livelihood reading that agronomic data alone will not yield.
TriQuest linkage
Crop and configuration guidance for agrivoltaic sites, and protocols for farmer agreements.
On-farm agrivoltaic evidence from Indian rain-fed conditions, where the literature is dominated by station trials and temperate geographies.
Land-use, tenancy and benefit-sharing norms for agrivoltaic policy, and the crop-shade evidence base that any land-use rule requires.
Academic and policy space
This study changes the unit of assessment from the megawatt to the farm. For MNRE, state energy and agriculture departments and developers, it answers whether agrivoltaics can be built without costing the farmer the farm.