FARMS Project

The co-location of solar and agriculture (known as agrivoltaics) has the potential to add value to a farm operation, but many unanswered questions often lead farm operations to abandon the idea of cultivating crops under large-scale solar or solar developers to abandon or rule out crop production or grazing under their projects. As a result, agrivoltaics is not yet widely used.

The Solar and Storage Industries Institute (SI2) and project partners National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), and Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) have been selected for funding through the Department of Energy Solar Energy Technology Office (SETO) Foundational Agrivoltaic Research for Megawatt Scale (FARMS) grant to execute a 2-year study of the technical and financial barriers to deploying large-scale agrivoltaic projects nationwide. 

The “Developing Resources for Deploying Agrivoltaics” Project will survey solar developers, farmers, and representatives from rural electric cooperatives to understand barriers to agrivoltaics and develop case studies of agrivoltaic projects to understand how barriers have been addressed. A set of reports tailored to specific stakeholder groups will be developed on how stakeholder-specific barriers could be addressed. The project team will also develop templates and model contracts that can help facilitate agrivoltaics deployments.