Agriculture and photovoltaics: as in France they try to moderate land use
In March 2023, the French government passed a law requiring all solar projects on farmland to provide some kind of service to agriculture : from improving yields to protecting crops from frost or heat waves . The decree, titled “Accelerating the Production of Renewable Energy,” hopes to respond to growing calls to protect agriculture from increasing the amount of land used for solar energy harvesting rather than growing crops.
This trend has become common, thanks to the decreasing costs and increasing profitability of the photovoltaic technology underlying solar panels. In France, a landowner could earn 10 to 100 times more per hectare by renting their land to an energy company than by traditional farming. This puts the future of agricultural land at risk.
The rule hopes to build a compromise, with the aim of satisfying the requests of energy companies to install solar panels, without damaging the yield of land used for food production. Other laws on the topic are in the works, including one that specifies penalties landowners may face for failing to meet productivity goals.
The government's goal of generating 100 gigawatts of solar energy by 2050 looms over the discussions, but in a country where the agricultural lobby holds immense political power, every debate is fraught with political tension. Furthermore, the changing balance of market forces in France could be a sign of economic changes elsewhere. As solar projects become cheaper to build and many global economies demand more renewable energy, what will they do on conventional farmland?
Ongoing protests by farmers across Europe, particularly in France, could influence upcoming debates on the use of solar technologies on agricultural land. Distrust of the new rules, as well as demands for better prices and access to affordable agricultural land, fueled the strikers' protest.
Changing the old viticulture to get the right riesling
According to the French Agency for Ecological Transition, photovoltaic projects are expected to contribute 16 gigawatts to the French grid in 2022. So far, only 1.3 gigawatts are expected to come from PV built on farms, some of which are still under construction. About 61.4 gigawatts (45% of the country's electricity) comes from nuclear energy. Today, renewable energies represent only 20% of the total energy consumed in France and the government has committed to reaching 33% by 2030. The government has committed to reaching 33% by 2030 and to respecting the target European Union's ambition to obtain 42.5% of energy from renewable sources by 2030.
For decades, French researchers have been studying how to install solar panels without damaging crop growth. Farms make up half of France's territory and are by far the easiest to host solar energy projects than the urban regions, forests or protected natural areas that cover the rest of the country.
Christian Dupraz and his team of agronomists at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE) in Montpellier study the benefits of temporary shade for plants and how solar systems can help. In Occitanie, southern France, the team experimented with various ways to mitigate the colder temperatures of the inverse, which would damage crops. Shade structures equipped with solar panels are part of one of these techniques. With this system, dubbed agrivoltaics by Dupraz, panels rise above crops to protect them from sunlight when needed, rather than simply replacing farmland.
Agronomic tracking model
Several companies are working on these models, including Sun'Agri, based in Lyon, France, which has been running a joint research program with Dupraz's team for over a decade. Damien Fumey, agronomist at Sun'Agri, says that in fields in the south of France equipped with mobile solar panels there has been an increase in the yield of perennial crops such as vines or fruit trees.
INRAE also created a national cluster of 56 partners, including energy companies, for agrophotovoltaic research in February 2023. The director, agronomist Abraham Escobar-Gutiérrez, refers to an Applied Energy publication from 20231, in which it is concluded that the cultivation of alfalfa (Medicago sativa) – plants similar to beans – combined with mobile panels showed slightly higher yields than those obtained elsewhere, thanks to the reduction of evapotranspiration and the adaptation of the plant to the shadow.
A challenge between nuclear and solar
Although the agrophotovoltaic model seems like an attractive compromise on the surface, it is less interesting for the energy industry, because it produces lower electrical returns than panel systems, which simply favor their location in relation to the sun. Critics also point to the costs of these systems. Escobar-Gutiérrez estimates that a sophisticated agronomic tracking system is ten times more expensive than a standard solar system.
Another battle concerns the percentage of land that can be covered by solar panels. Energy companies are lobbying the French government to allow solar panels to cover up to 40% of agricultural plots in the name of profitability. Agronomists argue that a percentage higher than 25% would compromise agricultural production. Dupraz argues that “by accepting high panel coverage while prohibiting agronomic losses, the law may be unenforceable.”
Japan, another country trying to find a balance between sustainable agriculture and the transition to green electricity, has chosen to regulate yield losses rather than ground cover. If the yield drops, the government blocks the authorization of new plants. A way to combine agricultural and energy production, which is actually feared by Japanese farmers.
A fight for the light
Last year's law aims to redress the balance and prevent this from happening in the future. “Before the 2023 law, photovoltaic projects in agriculture were very heterogeneous across the country: some local authorities allowed all projects to proceed, while others systematically blocked them in the name of agriculture. The law tries to find a bridge between the two,” explains Benoit Grimonprez, a rural law researcher at the University of Poitiers, France. Escobar-Gutiérrez says he is "optimistic".
While the regulatory approaches of France and Japan are motivated by the protection of food quality and supply, a different trend is emerging in the United States and Germany, driven by the market and supported by energy lobbies who want access to land at lower cost, says Dupraz. Germany accepts a loss of one third of the yield of farms with solar panel systems. But more legal and economic battles could arise in the coming years in countries with similar conflicts over land use. Land, as Georgist economists would say, is the truly rare and limited asset to be valued, and this is even more true today.
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The article Agriculture and photovoltaics: how France tries to moderate land use comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/agricoltura-e-fotovoltaico-come-in-francia-cercano-di-moderare-lutilizzo-del-suolo/ on Wed, 21 Feb 2024 08:00:39 +0000.