As the sun moves westward across the sky in Murcia, Spain, solar panels capture its rays while sheltering diverse crops, ranging from bell peppers to wine grapes and dragon fruit.
Known for its rich agricultural heritage and abundant sunshine, this southeastern region is now exploring whether farming and solar energy can coexist peacefully, rather than competing for the same soil.
“Agrivoltaics is the integration of food production with renewable energy production,” explains Silvia Tomasi, a Senior Researcher at Eurac Research. This entails installing photovoltaic panels above, in between or at the margins of agricultural production, she adds.
A 2023 study estimated that Europe has the potential to generate 25 times its current electricity demand via agrivoltaics, also known as agri-PV.
Yet solar power is fraught with its own environmental and social costs. Requiring more land than other energy sources to generate the same amount of electricity, it has sparked conflicts over land use, especially in rural areas.
“Agrivoltaics has great potential: both economic benefits and environmental ones,” Tomasi says. “But then it’s always a matter of how the technology is implemented and who really benefits.”
Governments and Big Tech turn to agrivoltaics
The idea of turning southern Europe into a solar powerhouse received a high-profile endorsement in January, when Elon Musk said sparsely populated areas of Spain and Sicily could theoretically generate enough solar power for all of Europe.
Big Tech has already caught on. In southern Italy, Amazon and Apple have signed contracts to purchase power from large-scale agrivoltaic projects with a combined capacity of over 150 megawatts – enough to meet the yearly needs of roughly 100,000 Italian households.
Europe is also funding the shift. The EU-funded AGRISOL project intends to invest €1.9 million in agrivoltaics projects, including in Italy and Spain, while Italy alone has secured €1.7 billion in state aid for the initiative.
“For now, [agrivoltaics] is just a minimal contribution,” says Angelo Gentili, national secretary of Legambiente, Italy’s largest environmental organisation. “But if it expands, it will represent a big impulse for decarbonisation goals.”
Managing the impact on crops and land
EU and national rules increasingly require agriculture to remain a meaningful part of land where solar panels are installed. In France, projects must maintain at least 90 per cent of crop production compared to locally determined reference yields. In Italy, at least 70 per cent of the area must remain dedicated to agriculture.
Experts say not just any combination of solar and agriculture should qualify. “More than a definition, what we really need is a classification,” says Pilar Flores, who coordinates an EU-funded agrivoltaics project at the Murcian Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research and Development (IMIDA). She says protecting agriculture should drive all classifications: “The key is to ensure there’s minimal loss [of arable land].”
Why use farmland rather than empty or abandoned land in the first place? Flores says the requirements are similar: relatively flat and near the grid. Unused land may also hold ecological value. “It’s not just a simple calculation of how much free land is left,” she says.
How agrivoltaics can benefit farmers
In some cases, agrivoltaics have been found to improve water-use efficiency, protect crops from extreme weather and increase the productivity of land. Solar installations can also help farmers face climate change. “Excessive rainfall and heat have heavily damaged agricultural fields, pushing farmers to abandon farmland,” says Gentili. “Agrivoltaics represent a great instrument to avoid land abandonment and profit gaps for farmers.”
Panels cast shade that can reduce evaporation, help soil retain moisture and offer relief to farmworkers and grazing animals. They can also protect crops from hail. Farmers can use the energy to power their own operations and sell any excess to the grid, or rent the space above their fields to energy producers.
But the benefits are not guaranteed, Flores warns. “All these opportunities are sometimes discussed as if they always happened, but it depends on the agrivoltaic system used and the specific characteristics of the site.” In Murcia, her team found that water-stressed peppers grew better under solar panels than well-watered ones. “You have to analyse each case and each location,” she says.
But who really benefits from agrivoltaics?
Not all farmers are convinced. To Fabrizio Garbarino, president of the Italian farmers’ union Associazione Rurale Italiana, agrivoltaics fail to address the root problems farmers face. “Agrivoltaics are taking advantage of the farming sector crisis in Italy while we should actually focus on real solutions for preventing farmland abandonment,” he says. “To me, this just sounds like a shortcut.”
Startups representing larger companies, including data centre developers, are hounding farmers for their land, he says. “Even if the energy produced is good, we’re taking away [farmers’] land to support businesses that require a lot of energy.”
Big Tech firms say agrivoltaic power-purchase agreements help them reach net-zero targets. But a PPA does not necessarily mean that the electricity from a particular solar farm physically supplies a particular company facility, and the exact carbon footprints of AI data centres remain opaque.
A 2025 study co-authored by Tomasi, based on expert interviews across four European regions, found that the benefits of agrivoltaics can favour large-scale farmers, landowners and investors over smaller farmers and local communities. It also found that excluding residents and ecosystems from decision-making can deepen existing power imbalances.
High upfront costs and grid connection queues mean large projects backed by multinationals tend to dominate the sector. A 2025 review by the Italian newspaper Today.it found that about 86 per cent of the roughly €775 million in government funds for agrivoltaic projects went to large-scale projects, including ones owned by foreign multinationals.
In September, a new agrivoltaics project financed by an Israeli company in Tuscany sparked widespread outrage and raised concerns over who gets to profit.
Tomasi says local communities must have a voice to ensure a just transition. “Big investors going into places they really don’t know anything about, with a top-down approach… and getting the economic benefits from the renewable energy generation side of agrivoltaics… shouldn’t be labelled as agrivoltaics, from my point of view.”
‘Agriculture should not be a secondary concern’
Flores says administrations can help by offering farmers funding and giving agrivoltaic systems priority access to the grid.
There is also the question of what kind of agriculture the income supports. To live up to the environmental promise, one study has noted, “the type of agriculture funded by the rental income from agrivoltaics should not be a secondary concern”. Instead, the author argues, this rent could subsidise agroecological practices or help farmers transition away from industrial farming.
Agrivoltaics has the potential to be mutually beneficial to farmers and the renewable energy sector. It can help protect farmland, support farmers facing climate change and contribute to Europe’s decarbonisation goals. But it also risks becoming a greenwashing opportunity, a crutch for unsustainable farming practices, or a way of meeting growing corporate energy demand on arable land. On its own, it is not a silver bullet. Much depends on how the systems are designed, who owns them and, ultimately, who benefits.
“The goal of agrivoltaics is to protect farmland and the entire ecosystem; that’s the philosophy,” says Flores. “We have to be able to distinguish that from other interests.”
Reporting for this story was made possible by the Magma Environmental Reporting Fellowship.