The elevated panels provide shade, reducing direct summer radiation, thermal stress and water consumption for the vegetation below. They also protect against hail, frost and heavy rain. RWE has launched a three-year monitoring programme with the University of Naples Federico II to assess impacts on soil health, microbial diversity, crop yield and pollinator communities.  

‘Sunny Italy and agri-PV are a perfect match,’ stated Sopna Sury, CEO of RWE Renewables Europe & Australia. ‘Advanced agri-PV enables us to use scarce land resources responsibly and efficiently by generating two different yields from the same land: agriculture and renewable energy.’

The company has begun construction on four additional agri-PV projects in Italy, adding 50,000 solar modules and 38.2MWac of capacity. These include Acquafredda 2 (11.7MW) in Campania, Cave (9MW) in Calabria and Enna (9.5MW) and Carcitella (8MW) in Sicily, all scheduled for completion in 2026.

‘We are now looking forward to installing a further 50,000 solar modules, which will supply electricity to an additional 20,000 homes, while sheep graze below,’ Sury said. Local farmers oversee agricultural activities at the sites, cultivating crops such as alfalfa, oats, broad beans, rosemary, chamomile and medicinal herbs.

Agri-solar news roundup  

Swedish renewable energy company, Orrön Energy AB, recently sold a 91MW Agri-PV solar project in eastern Germany to Gülermak Renewables Ltd for up to €5.6mn. Orrön Energy received an initial €2.4mn, with the remaining balance contingent on achieving development milestones. The company expects to be construction-ready by 2027. The 91MW German project is ready for permitting and includes an option for battery storage.  

Chinese digital manufacturing company, Antaisolar, introduced its Agri-PV Tracking System Solution at Intersolar Europe in Munich. Global Technical Director, Emmanuele Chiappori, presented tracking hardware with adjustable ground clearance from 1.3m–5m to accommodate agricultural machinery. The Antaisolar system uses a two-section pile foundation to increase pull-out resistance and a ‘SmartTrail’ control system with a dedicated harvest mode for lateral movement of machinery.  

Staying in Europe, institutional research programmes are integrating energy storage into agricultural solar designs. In Romania, researchers launched a three-year, €10mn demonstration project titled ‘Increasing the resilience of the food supply chain to the complex challenges of the modern world’ to develop an agri-solar system integrated with batteries. The National Institute for Research and Development of Isotopic and Molecular Technologies leads the Romanian initiative, in partnership with the Agro-Food-IND Napoca Cluster and industry partners. Prodfer Construct, a subsidiary of the engineering, procurement and construction company Parapet, deploys the photovoltaic panels and energy storage units for the Romanian pilot. The infrastructure supplies electricity directly to irrigation systems serving cereal crops, vegetables and medicinal plants.  

Across the Atlantic, a US research team led by the National Laboratory of the Rockies developed an economic framework and simulation demonstrating that widening the spacing between solar panel rows makes large-scale, mechanised agrivoltaics financially viable. The researchers simulated a 160-acre project in Colorado over 25 years with tracked solar arrays and four distinct crops (potatoes, onions, sugar beets and wheat). They found that spacing the solar rows between roughly 9.6m and 18.8m allows heavy farming equipment to navigate freely, maintaining standard crop production without sacrificing efficiency. The analysis showed that when agricultural profits reach roughly $200 per acre, the combined revenue from power purchase agreements and sustained crop sales often outpaces traditional utility-scale solar-only installations, making the system highly adaptable to variations in capital costs and demonstrating that farm-scale food production and clean energy can thrive on the same footprint.