All Solar, No Agriculture: The Myth and Reality of Agrivoltaics

Generating power above the panels, cultivating crops below – a single plot of land yields two streams of income. Agrivoltaics is claimed to deliver multiple benefits simultaneously: clean electricity, efficient land use, agricultural modernisation, and rural development – often hailed as a win–win technological innovation capable of tackling food, energy, and climate challenges all at once.

According to academic research, agrivoltaics in China has grown exponentially over the past decade and a half: from just two grid-connected projects in 2011 to over 400 proposed or grid-connected projects scattered across the country by 2021, with installed capacity exceeding 40 GW.

● After orchards and arable land in a county in central Shandong were requisitioned for agrivoltaic development, some of the land has since been abandoned, overgrown with weeds. Photo: Foodthink reader

But when the lens zooms in on the land, one finds that most projects are solar-only with no agriculture in sight – the plots shaded by PV panels are often abandoned or yield far below their potential.

Take an agrivoltaic project in a county in western Shandong: the company built 460 solar greenhouses on more than 1,000 mu of arable land, reliably generating 60 million kWh of electricity fed into the grid each year. Yet only a handful of the greenhouses have been leased to villagers for poultry-keeping or storage; the rest sit idle.

Such agrivoltaic projects – branded as green development yet amounting to land dispossession – are far from isolated cases in China. Why have these agrivoltaic projects failed to deliver the multiple benefits they originally promised? In agrivoltaics cloaked in the language of green development, is agriculture truly being supported or undermined?

I. Agrivoltaics: When Surplus Capacity Meets the Green Transition

After 2013, agrivoltaics began spreading at scale across China’s central and eastern regions. The driving force was not rural communities’ or agriculture’s demand for new energy, but the need to absorb surplus domestic PV manufacturing capacity.

Since the 2000s, clean-energy policies and subsidies in Western countries had fuelled a boom in China’s PV manufacturing industry. Before 2011, 95% of PV modules were exported overseas. By 2011, China’s output accounted for nearly 80% of the world’s total – an undisputed global leader in absolute terms.

Before long, the United States and Europe launched anti-dumping and countervailing duties investigations against Chinese solar products, imposing steep anti-dumping duties and countervailing duties. To find a new outlet for PV manufacturing capacity, the Chinese government rolled out a succession of policies – tax reductions, simplified project approvals, and investment subsidies – to encourage domestic solar PV plant construction. PV companies seized the opportunity and embarked on a fresh round of land-grabbing.

● Smog over the North China Plain shifted the political wind towards a green energy transition. Local governments’ push for industrial upgrading dovetailed neatly with the need to offload surplus PV capacity. Photo: smog in Chaoyang District, Beijing, December 2011. Image © Greenpeace / Wang Yikun

Solar power generation requires abundant sunlight and large stretches of flat land. In theory, the sparsely populated, sun-drenched west of China is an ideal site for solar development, but constrained by grid-absorption and transmission barriers, early solar projects in the western regions struggled to take off. According to a Greenpeace report, in the first half of 2016, solar curtailment in China was concentrated in the five northwestern provinces, with Xinjiang and Gansu recording curtailment rates of 33% and 32% respectively.

Policy then turned to encouraging distributed solar PV projects in the land-scarce central and eastern regions. Companies, therefore, had to find ways to combine solar with existing industries so that limited land could generate multiple benefits – the “Solar+” model was born.

● Solar panels can be mounted on rooftops, wastewater ponds, and more. “Solar+” can also be paired with aquaculture, sand-fixation, pastoral farming, and other activities. Over the past decade, what has truly scaled up is solar combined with crop cultivation, aquaculture, or forestry. Left image: hakunamatata; right image: Foodthink

Hu Zhanping, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, North China Electric Power University, told Foodthink: ‘In previous years, governments at all levels provided enormous support to distributed solar PV – subsidies of around 0.5 yuan per kWh were commonplace, and in some areas the stacked subsidy rate could even reach 1 yuan per kWh.’

Research has shown that a wholly owned subsidiary of CECEP in Weinan City, Shaanxi Province, enjoyed generous policy privileges for its 20 MW agrivoltaic project. As the first central state-owned enterprise brought in through the county government’s investment-attraction drive, the project’s land-transfer fees of over 2.8 million yuan for more than 1,000 mu of land in the first three years were fully subsidised by the government. It also benefited from a “three-year full exemption, three-year half-rate” tax incentive. The benchmark on-grid electricity tariff was set at 1 yuan per kWh, and the National Energy Administration granted a per-kWh subsidy of 0.6654 yuan covering the full lifecycle and all electricity output for 25 years. Annual revenue from electricity sales and subsidies approached 47 million yuan.

‘So even when facing formidable resistance to land transfer, PV companies still had an enormous incentive to push forward with such projects. To a certain extent, this became a major driving force behind China’s agrivoltaics boom since 2013,’ said Hu.

II. Solar+ Greenhouse: Agriculture and Solar Struggle to Complement Each Other

During the period when agrivoltaic projects were greenlit nationwide and racing ahead, the business model was packaged as a compelling story: farmers transferred their land to solar-powered farms in exchange for rental income, while also taking employment on the farm – earning two incomes at once.

Once familiar with day-to-day greenhouse operations, farmers could lease greenhouses themselves, ascending in status to “agri-entrepreneurs”: PV panels on the roof supplied the greenhouse with free electricity, surplus power was sold to State Grid, and greenhouse tenants grew organic vegetables following the company’s technical guidance and contract specifications, selling them back to the company at above-market prices. The economic returns were said to be several times those of a conventional greenhouse of comparable size.

In practice, however, this scenario is rarely seen on the ground.

First, all growth depends on the sun – solar not only competes with agriculture for land but also for light.

In Shouguang, Shandong, Hu Zhanping found that small-scale farmers were unwilling to install PV panels on their own greenhouse roofs. Not only did the panels severely affect the growth of tomatoes, cucumbers, and other vegetables, but the investment and maintenance costs were too high – farmers had neither the willingness nor the means to bear them.

Consequently, PV companies tend to build new greenhouses specifically for solar. The range of suitable crops is limited to shade-tolerant leafy greens, mushrooms, and the like. ‘Achieving agricultural productivity inside a solar greenhouse is very difficult – I haven’t yet seen a successful case in the field,’ said Hu Zhanping.

Over the past two years, Chen Jing, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Energy Transitions and Social Development, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, surveyed solar greenhouses in Beijing, Shandong, Jiangsu, Guangdong, and other regions, and likewise found widespread farmland abandonment inside many of them.

‘A few years ago the Solar+ greenhouse concept was hyped enormously, and projects sprang up everywhere, with operators rushing to grow high-value crops such as mushrooms,’ she said. ‘Mushroom yields went up, but prices fell, returns were low or even loss-making, and many people lost their enthusiasm again.’

● A Xinhua report on a mushroom-and-solar agrivoltaic project in Zhejiang, showing a mushroom farmer checking the perforation of mushroom substrate blocks. Source: screenshot

In her view, the root of the problem is that PV companies generally have no agricultural expertise. They force agriculture into the equation simply to secure solar PV project quotas, only to find they cannot generate sustainable profits. The agricultural designation of the land then restricts any alternative use, so they simply abandon the fields.

The Shandong agrivoltaic project mentioned at the start of this article is another case in point. The project originally claimed annual power generation exceeding 100 million kWh, with plans to grow 70,000 tonnes of mushrooms, raise 150,000 geese, and provide over 500 stable jobs locally. But due to design flaws, insufficient indoor temperatures in winter made mushroom cultivation and goose-rearing impossible, leaving the vast majority of greenhouses vacant.

● Many agrivoltaic projects have also been actively developing agricultural tourism. In 2017, the Weinan agrivoltaic project mentioned above generated over 15,000 yuan per month from spring and summer pick-your-own experiences, but this remains a pittance compared with electricity-sale revenue and policy incentives. Source: screenshot

Chen Jing has come across cases where things did work: a trial solar greenhouse project in Anhui Province used specialised glass materials installed between the PV panels and supplemental lighting technology to distribute sunlight evenly throughout the greenhouse, maintaining crop yields no lower than open-field cultivation. However, the spectral-splitting glass is imported and prohibitively expensive, making large-scale domestic deployment difficult for now.

In Chen Jing’s view, the extensive development of agrivoltaics is also linked to the absence of standards.

‘Germany has already legislated on solar greenhouse height, shading ratio, and crop output. If companies want to operate, they must comply with certain industry standards. We are also currently researching and developing standards for agrivoltaics here in China.’

At minimum, any standard must address: first, what to grow – crops suited to the local climate, soil, and water conditions; and second, when designing parameters such as panel height and shading area, how to integrate agricultural requirements from the very start.

III. Encroaching on Arable Land – Does Solar Hinder Agriculture?

The arable land red line and food-security policies, tightened repeatedly in recent years, have also put the brakes on agrivoltaics’ headlong rush.

In principle, policy encourages the use of wasteland, barren hills and slopes, and existing greenhouse structures for solar PV construction – such land use is consistent with the principle of efficient land use. In earlier years, solar power plants were predominantly centralised, sited on the vast tracts of wasteland in western China, such as the Gobi.

● Solar panels on hillsides in the Hebei–Inner Mongolia border region. Photo: Foodthink

But the west lacked sufficient energy-intensive industries to absorb the electricity, and long-distance transmission infrastructure was not yet mature, leading to large-scale incidents of wind and solar curtailment. After 2013, therefore, PV companies began turning eastward.

Over the past decade, with the backing of local governments, cases of PV companies occupying arable land – even basic farmland – have occurred repeatedly.

In August 2023, a paper by Li Zhongbin and other Chinese scholars published in Science, titled “Solar Projects Put Food Security at Risk”, pointed out that the spatial expansion of solar PV plants is encroaching on farmland. Data show that in 2017 alone, approximately 100 square kilometres of solar panels were newly installed in the North China Plain – the country’s key grain-producing region – more than the combined area of Beijing’s Dongcheng and Xicheng districts.

● In March 2023, the Ministry of Natural Resources, together with the National Forestry and Grassland Administration and the National Energy Administration, issued the Notice on Supporting Solar PV Industry Development and Standardising Land-Use Management, explicitly stipulating that solar PV arrays shall not occupy arable land. Since then, multiple provinces have released updated regulations on solar PV land-use management and begun investigating cases of PV projects encroaching on arable land.

● According to a China Business News report, a 2022 solar PV project in a prefecture-level city involved the occupation of several hundred mu of arable land, some of which was designated as permanent basic farmland; parts of the project were ultimately demolished. Source: China Business News website

Over the years, there have been repeated absurd incidents of government officials pulling up crops at harvest time and letting weeds take over, so that arable land could be passed off as abandoned plots to get solar PV projects approved. Forced signing of land-lease contracts and even outright land seizures have likewise become commonplace.

Take Shangbei Town, Xingtang County, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province: in April 2022, with just one month left before the wheat harvest, a solar PV company bulldozed several dozen mu of wheat fields before any land-lease contract had been signed, leading to physical confrontations with villagers.

Hu Zhanping frankly acknowledged that, across his fieldwork in Shandong, Hebei, Henan, and elsewhere, the vast majority of agrivoltaic projects showed a pattern of occupying arable land and marginalising small-scale farmers. The sole exception he came across was a coal mine subsidence area in Jining, Shandong.

Because pooled water in the mine pits had long made agriculture impossible, farmers could only receive meagre compensation payments from the coal company. Later, a solar PV company installed panels over the flooded pits, branding it a fish/agri-solar integrated project, and offered farmers an additional land-rent payment. Local farmers could also contract the ponds for fish farming.

Since the land had already lost its farming value, a little extra rental income was surely a good thing. In Hu Zhanping’s view, this was the one case he had encountered in which farmers were relatively content – but, he noted, ‘the increase in land rents alone has yet to drive the village’s overall development, such as by spurring some new industries.’

● A solar PV project on a wastewater pond in Tianjin in 2017. This was during the rapid expansion of “Solar+”, when every inch of land capable of holding PV panels held enormous appeal for companies.

Chen Jing encountered a similar story in Taishan, Guangdong. A company leased multiple abandoned tidal flats and small fish ponds, converted them into large, contiguous aquaculture ponds, and developed a Solar+ fishery-and-tourism operation – raising prawns and fish, and attracting visitors for recreational fishing – with farmers receiving land-rent payments.

“Farmers have stopped farming or raising fish because the returns are too low. It is not just Guangdong – we have seen farmers ceasing agricultural work in Shandong and Jiangsu as well,” said Chen Jing.

IV. What Kind of Agrivoltaics Do Farmers Need?

Beyond the top-down governance framework of food security and the arable land red line, the farming communities most directly affected have remained dispossessed and voiceless.

What does agrivoltaics mean for farmers? What kind of agrivoltaics do rural communities actually need?

“As things stand, farming households benefit mainly from the rental income their land brings in a solar project. But on the agricultural production side, it is really the agribusiness or solar companies that are profiting,” said Chen Jing.

In her fieldwork she found that most agrivoltaic projects had little interaction with local farmers – only occasionally were a few hired as farmworkers in the parks, because most farmers lacked the capacity to participate in agrivoltaics.

Take Solar+ greenhouses again. In practice, many farmers do not even possess greenhouse cultivation skills. “We went to southern Tianjin, where local villagers were running greenhouse trials on their own. But without knowledge of CO₂ concentration and temperature control, their crops failed,” said Chen Jing.

Recent Foodthink articles “Why Are Small-Scale Farmers Unwilling to Grow Greenhouse Vegetables?” It also analyses in detail how small-scale farmers are shut out by the technical barriers to greenhouse vegetable cultivation. Layer solar panels on top, and the difficulty for ordinary farming households becomes even greater.

II. Solar+ Greenhouse: Agriculture and Solar Struggle to Complement Each Other

Published by Foodthink