Illinois team tests the costs, benefits of agrivoltaics across the Midwest

(Press-News.org) CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In a world where increasing demands for food security and energy strain existing resources, scientists are looking for new ways to maximize both. One potential option, agrivoltaics, integrates solar photovoltaics with crops. A new study examines the agricultural and economic trade-offs that come with installing solar arrays on working farms across the Midwest.

The study found that agrivoltaics can increase or reduce yields and profits, depending on the crop and where such agrivoltaic systems are deployed.

The new findings are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Led by scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the team first developed a process-driven model to quantify the impacts of agrivoltaics on energy, water and plant-soil dynamics. The model was first validated and published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.

The team integrated an economic model to estimate annual net profits per acre from crop production and energy generation for agrivoltaics, conventional agriculture and stand-alone solar energy systems.

The researchers ran 15-year simulations involving different climate conditions and agrivoltaic systems across the Midwest. In the agrivoltaic simulations, solar arrays covered 33% of each site.

These analyses revealed that average aridity or humidity was a key driver of crop yields and the economic viability of agrivoltaic systems.

“In the humid eastern Midwest, solar shading reduced photosynthesis, reduced maize yields by 24% and soybean yields by 16%, lowering farmers’ profits,” said study first author Mengqi Jia, a research scientist in the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center in the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment at the U. of I. “In contrast, in the semi-arid Midwest, shading alleviated water stress, moderating maize yield losses and increasing soybean yields by 6%.”

Jia led the study with crop sciences professor Bin Peng; natural resources and environmental sciences professor Kaiyu Guan, the founding director of the ASC; and iSEE director Madhu Khanna, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the U. of I.

“Our integrated modeling framework is a new and powerful tool to investigate the food-energy-economic nexus,” Peng said. “We identified ‘win-win’ opportunities where soybean-based agrivoltaics in the semi-arid region produce economic benefits for both farmers and solar developers, highlighting the necessity for region-specific designs tailored to local climate conditions.”

“Our in-depth research provides a scientific basis to support land-use planning and offer policymakers, land managers and investors practical guidance for expanding agrivoltaics in locally appropriate and environmentally resilient ways,” Guan said.

“While agrivoltaics can produce benefits for soybean farmers, especially in semi-arid regions, the high installation costs of increasing the height of solar panels limits their economic competitiveness relative to stand-alone solar for developers across most of the Midwest,” Khanna said. “Utility-scale solar developers would therefore need policy or market incentives in order to adopt agrivoltaics with row crops.”

The economic viability of agrivoltaics in the Midwest also depends on several market factors, including commodity crop process, land-lease prices and overall weather patterns, the researchers said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture supported this research through the Sustainable Agricultural Systems project entitled “Strategically Co-locating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems” at the U. of I.

Editor’s notes:  

To reach Mengqi Jia, email mengqij@illinois.edu.
To reach Bin Peng, email binpeng@illinois.edu.
To reach Kaiyu Guan, email kaiyug@illinois.edu.
To reach Madhu Khanna, email khanna1@illinois.edu.

The paper “Climate-driven divergence in biophysical and economic impacts of agrivoltaics” is available online. 
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2514380123

The paper “Assessing the impact of agrivoltaics on water, energy, and carbon cycles using the community land model version 5” is available online. DOI: 10.1029/2025MS005092

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