From Crops to Climate, Agrivoltaics Advances in Hudson Valley and Beyond

A 3D rendering of the agrivoltaic project planned for the Hudson Valley Research Laboratory. Credit: Jared Buono

Six decades after the modern U.S. environmental movement began in the Hudson Valley, the region has continued to mark its place as a present-day leader in planetary stewardship and sustainability. That includes the efforts of the Hudson Valley Research Laboratory in Highland, New York, which publicized its plans late last month to cover 1,100 apple trees with a 300-kilowatt solar panel array. As the project remains in the advanced design stages, those apples will soon be reaping the rewards of joining forces with renewable energy.

Solar panels operate through the process of photovoltaics, which simply means that they convert sunlight into electricity. When these panels share space with pollinator habitat, livestock land or crop production, the result is what’s known as agrivoltaics. Combine photovoltaic prowess with agricultural ability, and a dual-purpose system emerges — one that champions both people and the planet.

“There’s a lot of the same things that you would have in place for a normal solar project, but the difference here is that it’s co-located with agricultural production, either for crops or livestock. It’s not just a solar project,” said Stephen Ballentine, director of environmental advocacy and public policy for Scenic Hudson and a member of the New York State Agricultural Technical Working Group’s Agrivoltaics Specialist Committee.

Founded in 1923, the Highland laboratory building and 20-acre farm functions as a partnership between Cornell University’s AgriTech, its College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and local farmers. “The growers actually own this building and maintain the building that we’re in, and they are very involved in our research,” said Jared Buono, director of the Hudson Valley Research Laboratory. “Literally, they have buy-in, and so our researchers here develop research programs around the needs of the growers.”

In fact, Ballentine and other members of the Scenic Hudson team had the chance to learn more about the project for themselves about a year ago. “We actually went to the Cornell location and met with Jared Buono and saw the project that they’re proposing. We’re really excited to see how it turns out,” he said.

All those associated with the laboratory benefit from research related to a whole host of areas, from horticulture and plant sustainability to pest management and wine grapes. Earlier this year, New York State gave the laboratory $1 million in funding, and now, the site’s 25-30 varieties of apples all stand to benefit from the announced agrivoltaics project. Currently, shade cloths on top of a young orchard are emulating the potential panels to provide initial data expected by next year.

“Cornell is researching this across multiple crops in different parts of New York State, and as this research gets built out, we are going to be the location that’s going to study specialty crops,” said Buono. “We’ve been growing fruit in the Hudson Valley for hundreds of years, and it’s a prime location for it. It really makes sense to do it here, where we have a demand for not only local foods, but we have a high demand for renewable energy, and we’re constrained in the amount of land we have.”

From increased fruit production to decreased water use and irrigation, agrivoltaics creates financial incentives for farmers and environmental benefits for crops. For example, shading from solar panels can result in a reduction of photoinhibition — the process that reduces photosynthetic activity in plants due to excess sunlight. One study even found that agrivoltaic solar panels stay cooler during the day, maximizing system performance. 

As stated in a report prepared for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, New York ranks as the nation’s second top apple producer, and recent research suggests that agrivoltaics will support this crop in particular. Solar panels in France protected apple trees from frost, with 31% more trees bearing fruit. When accounting for rising temperatures due to climate change, all-day solar panel shading of apple trees increased the amount of water entering the fruit, thereby helping stimulate growth.

According to Buono, the position of the panels themselves can be manipulated throughout the day for a variety of purposes — these include reflecting different amounts of light onto the apples to achieve desired coloration, keeping root systems moist during breaks in rainfall and protecting crops from hail. All this science improves the quality of the region’s agriculture.

“We all like local foods, and we want a resilient food system. I think, after the pandemic, when the store shelves emptied, everybody looked to local farms and realized that these cold storerooms that we have in the Hudson Valley are critical to a sustainable and resilient food system,” said Buono.

In addition to positive impacts in practice, agrivoltaics also contributes to climate change mitigation efforts. In the German state of Baden-Württemberg, incorporating agrivoltaics on up to 5% of suitable land brought maximum greenhouse gas emissions down by an equivalent of 5.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. In the U.S., agrivoltaics could create over 100,000 jobs and reduce carbon dioxide emissions equal to eliminating 71,000 cars from the road on a yearly basis. 

“As we go out and we test that immense amount of renewable energy infrastructure, at Scenic Hudson, we’re also thinking about how we preserve farmland in the Hudson Valley and how we mitigate the impact of all that solar and other renewable energy infrastructure on natural resources,” said Ballentine. “We think that agrivoltaics is one of the best ways to walk that line of protecting farmland, while also building out additional solar capacity.”

According to the Agrivoltaics Map, the U.S. is home to just under 600 agrivoltaic installations, covering a total of over 62,000 acres. And although not currently at scale, agrivoltaics is beginning to emerge in prominence on the national level. For instance, last year, Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico introduced the Agrivoltaics Research and Demonstration Act of 2023. And per the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Futures Study, decarbonization scenarios demonstrate that solar power will serve up to 42% of national electricity demand by 2035. 

Here in New York, the state’s Climate Act Scoping Plan aims to achieve 70% renewable electricity generation by 2030 and to decrease the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 85% from 1990 levels by 2050. Just this month, the state finished installing six gigawatts of distributed solar, reaching the Climate Act’s 2025 goal a year early. But as 2030 approaches, Ballentine acknowledged that more needs to be done.

“In 2030, we’re supposed to have 70% of our electricity from renewable energy sources, and increasingly, we’re having a hard time hitting that goal,” said Ballentine. “We need to think hard about how we can build out additional solar more quickly, while also protecting farmland, prime agricultural soils and natural resources.”

In the words of the New York State Solar Guidebook, farmland comprises 20% of New York land area, meaning that up to 7 million acres remain available for potential agrivoltaic usage. According to Buono, about 2% of that farmland will be needed for installing solar panels, but the unknowns outweigh specific possibilities at the moment.

“How much of this will scale, and will we see orchards covered by panels in the future? Is that economically viable? We don’t know,” said Buono. “We need to do those experiments, and that’s why we have agriculture experiment stations, so that the growers don’t have to take that risk. We take that risk.”

On the international stage, there’s even an AgriVoltaics World Conference, which convenes hundreds of international participants on an annual basis. But support for the practice extends to the general public too. One online survey conducted in Germany last year found that 76.9% of respondents would buy apples from agrivoltaic production, preferring the attributes of “organic” and “green electricity.” In an even more promising finding from a survey conducted in two separate counties in Texas and Michigan, 81.8% of respondents were more likely to support community solar development if it included agriculture.

“I think people are generally very positive about agrivoltaics because people in the area want to support farmers, and they know how important farmers are to the region,” said Ballentine. “There are ways to build out solar without cutting down trees or preventing farmland from being utilized if there are prime agricultural soils. And so, I do think people realize that agrivoltaics is a win-win.”

Still, conversion of farmland for renewable purposes is not to be wholly expected. Compared to a projection of 247,500-642,200 acres of farmland converted to facilities and residences by 2040, just 151,250 acres are predicted to be converted to solar energy landscapes by that same year. From an economic standpoint, agrivoltaic systems are considered more expensive to install than traditional ground-based solar panels, due to the special considerations required when making sure to safeguard the land, as opposed to just using it. But in the long run, benefits for crops and the climate can surely outlast those initial costs.

“Having always worked with growers my whole life and having grown up on a farm, I had wanted to protect that land as well, but now I realize, there is a third option here,” said Buono. “It doesn’t have to be just farming or just solar. There’s a door number three, which combines the two — and maybe we can do that.”