Solar farming in our agricultural landscape

To reach EU’s climate target, it is necessary to expand renewable energy sources, including the development of smart energy systems that combine renewable energy technology with efficient energy and land use. Denmark and Sweden share a common need for solutions where multiple benefits can be generated from the same land. One solution is to combine agriculture and photovoltaics.

The concept is called agrivoltaics, but in this project we refer to it as solar farming systems. A pre-project has shown a lack of knowledge and proven experience in how and whether solar farming systems can be designed to effectively produce solar energy while maintaining or even improving food production.

To evaluate the expansion of solar farming systems, there is a need for development work to analyze in the long term how solar cells, crops, agricultural machinery, and energy storage can be practically used and combined. Therefore, in this project, we aim to create a cross-border Living Lab to theoretically and practically investigate and demonstrate how solar farming and energy storage can be effectively combined on the same land. The Living Lab is a dynamic platform with long term building and disseminating knowledge about new innovative solar farming systems. The project creates a Living Lab consisting of four different demonstration environments, two in Sweden and two in Denmark. A cross-border collaboration is crucial for evaluating systems based on a Nordic context. Additionally, it creates several added values when the project gains geographical distribution.