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A few passing clouds. Low 22F. Winds WNW at 10 to 15 mph..
A few passing clouds. Low 22F. Winds WNW at 10 to 15 mph.
Updated: February 20, 2026 @ 6:40 pm
The UI SCAPES program’s newest agrivoltaic site, opened last year, features a better design for combining the experimental technology with large farm machinery.
A SCAPES team member tills the ground at the original site at Solar Farm 2.0 in 2023. Most of the planting and harvesting work there had to be done by hand.
The University of Illinois’ Sustainably Colocating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems project is exploring if agricultural crop growth can co-exist with solar-energy generation using a new research site that had its grand opening in September.
The Energy Farm, the UI SCAPES program’s newest site, sports an 88-kilowatt solar field consisting of 152 bifacial rotating panels.
The old site had five rows of crops in between solar panels. Researchers cared for the crops by hand.
Through the team’s research, they determined that kale, peppers and tomatoes fared well in the partial shade provided by solar panels.
The UI SCAPES program’s newest agrivoltaic site, opened last year, features a better design for combining the experimental technology with large farm machinery.
A SCAPES team member tills the ground at the original site at Solar Farm 2.0 in 2023. Most of the planting and harvesting work there had to be done by hand.
The University of Illinois’ Sustainably Colocating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems project is exploring if agricultural crop growth can co-exist with solar-energy generation using a new research site that had its grand opening in September.
The Energy Farm, the UI SCAPES program’s newest site, sports an 88-kilowatt solar field consisting of 152 bifacial rotating panels.
The old site had five rows of crops in between solar panels. Researchers cared for the crops by hand.
Through the team’s research, they determined that kale, peppers and tomatoes fared well in the partial shade provided by solar panels.
CHAMPAIGN — The recent rise in conversion of farmland from growing crops to harvesting sunlight has brought with it plenty of social and economic issues — and University of Illinois researchers are in the beginning stages of bridging the gap and allowing both uses to coexist on some of the most fertile land in the country.
The abundant, unimpeded sunlight on Illinois’ cropland near electric grids has caused solar companies to offer double or triple the amount of rent to set up their panels, enticing farmers with a significant raise that reduces the risk associated with crop production. But that also takes those acres out of production for crops, with many fearing they’ll never return to their original use.
UI researchers are experimenting with a compromise they call agrivoltaics, the term used to describe the combined revenue from agriculture and solar-energy generation.
The research is part of the UI’s Sustainably Colocating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems project, started in 2021 through funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
And though it was created five years ago, Director Madhu Khanna said it is just getting started.
“We’ve only just started scratching the surface in terms of understanding how agrivoltaics could be used, and currently it’s really just developed as a technological solution to ease the community opposition and the whole issue of conflict around land use,” she said.
At its roots, the project has multiple broad objectives.
“We were interested in looking at how different types of crops, grown in different regions, would perform under agrivoltaics relative to if you were to grow them alone,” she said. “Would it be economically viable? What would the impacts on yield and growing conditions be?”
Those were questions the SCAPES team asked themselves — ideas still being tested today.
SCAPES partnered with the universities of Arizona and Colorado, which have similar setups in different climates. The UI team also worked with Auburn University in Alabama, the UI-Chicago and the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
The UI team is focused on rain-fed commodity crops grown in the Midwest and specialty crops like peppers, tomatoes and kale, while the Arizona team is focused on specialty crops with irrigation, and the Colorado team is studying specialty crops in addition to grasses.
All three compiled data from the fields of each site alongside economic viability and provided their findings to farmers and solar developers.
The first concepts of agrivoltaics dates back to around 40 years ago in Germany, when physicist Adolf Goetzberger first proposed combining agriculture and solar-energy production. In the early 2000s, Europe and Japan started to explore agrivoltaics.
Studies began in the U.S. in late 2000s. Three regions spearheaded the research — the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Arizona and the National Renewable Energy Lab, now the National Lab of the Rockies.
Those labs researched the rudimentary understanding of agrivoltaics and crop growth underneath panels, combining to form the InSPIRE program, which is funded through the U.S. Department of Energy.
Through the years, more private companies and other research institutions started to test agrivoltaics. Today, the U.S. has about 60 agrivoltaic crop farms, 400 agrivoltaic grazing operations and about a dozen with cattle. Pollinator habitats with native grasses have started to breach the horizon of agrivoltaics, too.
Initially, the UI team started with the utility-scale Solar Farm 2.0 that was already on campus. It featured eight 6-foot-tall panels placed 18 feet apart. The space allowed for five rows of crops to be planted between the photovoltaic cells, but not much else.
J.K. Lee, a key researcher involved in planting, said the distance between arrays did not permit access to modern farming equipment, so the land had to be tended and harvested primarily by hand.
“Cultivating the row crop in between the panels is not easy,” he said. “I think especially accommodating equipment is the biggest challenge — as you know, Midwest agriculture is not small.”
Despite this hurdle, SCAPES established a new site designed with agrivoltaics in mind last year that can accommodate conventional machinery, better simulating how farmers could adapt to the practice.
The Energy Farm sports an 88-kilowatt solar field consisting of 152 bifacial panels that rotate to continuously face the sun throughout the day.
The arrays are arranged in 160-foot-long rows that are elevated 6 feet above the ground, with 40 feet in between each row. The new farm aligns with the sites in Arizona and Colorado sites, allowing the UI team to collect data in tandem with the other locations.
Khanna said one of the challenges in agrivoltaics is specific site designs and crops used, which can diversify findings.
“Agrivoltaics can perform well with (specific) crops under (specific) conditions, but it may have some trade-offs in other locations,” she said. “So having this similarity of design and experimental methods will help us give a better sense of where it works and where it doesn’t.”
An example of give-and-take the UI researchers found involved shade exposure on its first site. The panels shade plants on either side, while the middle crops receive full sunlight.
The SCAPES program published a report on its findings from the 2023 and 2024 growing seasons involving soybeans, sorghum and specialty vegetables grown on the old location.
Researchers found that while soybeans saw a large penalty with shade, having issues with grain weight, sorghum did not share the same fate.
They determined that sorghum could be grown between the panels without significant yield losses. They also concluded that kale, peppers and tomatoes fared well in the partial shade and increased water use.
They found that the shade from the panels keeps the soil beneath them cooler, which increases the retained moisture levels, promoting crop growth.
Most importantly, they looked at the balancing act called land-equivalent ratio, where revenue from solar-energy generation can offset losses from lower crop yields.
Khanna, the program director, said this basically allows the SCAPES team to compare apples to oranges, in the form of kilowatt hours and bushels.
“That land-equivalent ratio, in most cases, was actually greater than 1, which indicates that the overall productivity of the land improves in terms of the total combined output that you could get (from) both the energy and the crop,” she said.
Part of the research involved surveying solar companies and farmers. In response to the rise in cropland being rented out for solar farms, many local governments around the country have instituted restrictions or bans on the practice.
“This often causes delays in getting solar projects approved and often has to be canceled, or they may not get the best land they’re looking for,” Khanna said. “So agrivoltaics is a way to overcome some of that opposition, and that seems to be a major motivator for solar developers.”
The researchers theorized that while the majority of farmers still prefer the conventional method of agriculture, if rental payments from solar companies are too good to refuse, agrivoltaics can be a good compromise over turning over their land completely to solar panels.
Farmers “don’t have the riskiness associated with crop production, and so even though yields might go down a little bit, (the income) is more than making up for it,” Khanna said. “So for farmers, this is likely to be an appealing option.”
Implementation brings a few challenges. Depending on the farm’s size, farmers may have to maneuver among more narrow and shorter spaces, which might cause them to shift from growing corn and soybeans to shorter crops and/or hay.
Adding agrivoltaics also comes with increased costs for proper machinery to fit in between panels.
Khanna said the technology around agrivoltaics has the potential to be very beneficial, but only under certain conditions, and the current equipment comes with high costs.
“We need to think about what kind of policy incentives would be needed to promote agrivoltaics, and those could take form as investment tax credits and things like that, which would lower the cost for developers and provide more interest and opportunity to be able to expand this,” she said.
The researchers foresee an increased demand for electricity in the future, and as the practice scales up, they hope proper equipment will become more incentivized and accessible.
“One could imagine in the future scenarios where it may be more distributed, where individual farmers are both generating electricity for themselves and for the grid and using their land for multifunctional use,” Khanna said.
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