IEEFA report: “States should have primary responsibility for agrivoltaics”

Agriculture, a key mainstay of the Indian economy has a vital role to play in the creation of renewable energy capacity, especially if ways could be found to combine it with solar generation. This is where agrivoltaics assume such vital importance. A study focused on ‘Agrivoltaics in India: Fertile Ground?’ by Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) points out that Agrivoltaics, could become an important new renewable energy sector in India.

However, the report says that the government needs to take pointed measures to protect farmers and food production for agrivoltaics to accelerate the renewable energy roll-out. Agrivoltaics is a practice of generating solar power on farmland in ways that complement agricultural production.

The biggest roadblock is the fact that currently, the sector’s growth is limited by uncertainties stemming from the separation of responsibilities between state ministries of agriculture and energy, the IEEFA report points out. This is reflected at the central level with its Ministries of New and Renewable Energy on the one hand, and Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare on the other.

There are numerous precedents at both state and union levels for establishing Inter-Ministerial Committees or working groups, and the development of the sector may benefit from such arrangements, especially in its early stages when policy and regulatory uncertainty is at its peak.

The report also suggests sorting out issues like regional variation in crops and conditions, farming practices and markets -which suggests that states must have primary responsibility for agrivoltaics, with support from the Union government limited to items such as minimum standards and definitions, incentive schemes, and centrally funded research and agricultural extension.

The report outlines three major national challenges that agrivoltaics could address – accelerating the renewable energy roll-out by distributing it throughout the country at various scales, relieving the pressure of renewable energy facilities on sensitive lands and ecosystems, and contributing to a stronger and more diverse rural economy.

In India, the outlook for energy needs and distributed renewable energy infrastructure; geographical characteristics of the solar resource, farmland coverage and land use patterns; and capacity to address some of the socio economic challenges apart from advantages attached to particular agrivoltaic panel configurations for local needs are some factors that can make the sector well suited to the conditions here.

The report from IEEFA suggests removal of various policy and regulatory hurdles in order to help agrivoltaics sector move from the pilot project stage to a more widespread adoption.

Another report ‘Agrivoltaics in India – an Overview of Operational Projects and Relevant Policies’ from NSEFI and Indo-German Energy Forum, which had analyzed agrivoltaics in India had observed that in  most reviewed cases, operation of the solar plant and farming activities are conducted by two different parties. This often leads to poor coordination between stakeholders frequently compromising on the efficiency of agrivoltaic plants.

As per the estimates shared in this report by NSEFI and Indo-German Energy Forum the capacity of the agrivoltaic installations in India ranges between 10kWp and 3MWp. Utility-scale projects of more than 3MWp have not yet been deployed. As a result, there are no experiences of respective technical, economic and agricultural viability. The energy forum report had said that government should consider tendering projects specific to agrivoltaics while also encouraging pilot projects to sensitise stakeholders.

The global market estimates of agrivoltaic installed capacity have grown from about 5 MW in 2012 to approximately 2.9 GW today, states the IEEFA report. This is led mostly by Germany, France, and Italy  (whose COVID recovery plan devotes over 1 billion Euros towards establishing 2GW of agrivoltaic projects).

In India, the joint German-Indian report had listed 16 existing installations with details of their location, type, size, crops and panel configurations, and had also developed a publicly accessible online map of these projects. India’s 60% of land area under farming, means a much higher share than the world average of 39%. Therefore, agrivoltaics in India is better placed than in most countries to relieve pressure on other land and ecosystems, IEEFA’s recent report on mid-century land-use had suggested recently.

Although areas such as Rajasthan offer especially high levels of generation potential, large tracts of the country are capable of producing solar power in higher quantities and more reliably than almost any European countries except Spain and Portugal, says the IEEFAs’s current agrivoltaic report.

The report claims that the Indian conditions may favour particular types of agrivoltaic technology. For example, new panel designs suited for this application are starting to be developed, including transparent panels and those with spectral sensitivity tuned to particular locations as well as the use of Fresnel lenses to preferentially direct sunlight onto crops (or into greenhouses) in winter and to panels in summer, an approach that has been evaluated in Spain and Italy. These, the report says, would increase the cost, but potentially enhance the productivity of agrivoltaic projects.

Suggesting measures to develop agrivoltaics in India, the report recommends that Government must take care of the capital costs of installation as a whole or as part in the sectors early growth phase, as Indian farmers struggle to even afford seeds and other essential inputs. Direct support mechanisms are suggested as the preferred option if small farmers are to be encouraged to adopt agrivoltaics, as additional loans would simply aggravate debt burdens for many.