Agrivoltaism: what role can local authorities play in balanced regional development?

Alexia Michoud, Pauline Chatelain, April 2025

Pays et Quartiers de Nouvelle-Aquitaine, le centre de ressources sur le développement territorial en Nouvelle-Aquitaine (PQNA)

Agricultural land is currently at the crossroads of various transition objectives, notably the relocation and diversification of agricultural and energy production. Local authorities must address these two issues to ensure balanced regional development. At a Café des territoires et PAT event organised by PQN-A on 26 March, around thirty participants from local authorities and energy transition associations exchanged views with each other and with the Vertigo Lab research consultancy to understand the issues involved in developing agrivoltaic projects.

Context

The ecological transition at the regional level requires us to question how land is used. Indeed, relocalising food production, and therefore agriculture, generalising agroecological practices, producing renewable energy, rehabilitating brownfield sites, revitalising the local economy and town centres… all require land.

With regard to the energy transition, beyond efforts to reduce consumption, the law of 10 March 2023 on accelerating the production of renewable energies (RE) aims to facilitate the deployment of RE. In 2020, France was the only country not to have achieved the European target of 23% RE in the energy mix.

This is why the government plans to increase solar energy production tenfold by 2050. To achieve this, the law establishes a territorial planning mechanism for the deployment of RE, in order to facilitate local acceptance of projects and ensure their contribution to balanced territorial development.

In particular, after consultation with the public, local authorities will have to identify areas for the accelerated development of renewable energy, which will be debated at the inter-municipal level to ensure consistency with the regional development plan, and then finalised in a map by the prefectural representative.

With regard to agrivoltaics specifically, a decree of 8 April 2024 clarified the conditions for the development of these projects, making them conditional on compatibility with significant agricultural production and requiring that the installations improve or do not hinder the agronomic performance of farms.

With regard to the food transition, following the Etats Généraux de l’Alimentation (National Food Conference), the National Food Programme 3 (PNA3) sets out national guidelines on food: social justice, waste reduction and food education. To guarantee healthy food for all, one of the levers for action identified is the deployment of Regional Food Projects.

Created by the 2014 Law on the Future of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, Local Food Projects (PAT) bring together stakeholders in a given area to define the challenges related to food and agriculture and strive to find solutions. One of the challenges is to enable the structuring of local food chains, so that the food consumed in the region is produced locally and, where possible, in a way that respects human and animal health and ecosystems. However, diversifying production and transforming practices (e.g. favouring extensive livestock farming) requires more agricultural land. It is therefore essential to preserve and make agricultural land accessible in order to encourage the establishment and diversification of agricultural activity. This is already a complex issue, but it may become even more pressing as this land can also be used for other purposes, such as energy production.

Issue

In this context, more and more municipalities and landowners (including farmers) are being approached by energy companies to accelerate photovoltaic electricity production, including on agricultural land, as evidenced by the participants in the exchange.

A project manager for the ‘Projet Alimentaire de Territoire’ (Regional Food Project) in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, who initiated the discussion, explained the situation in her region.

The region is grappling with land retention and speculation. Forests and grazing areas are at risk of flooding and fire, the agricultural landscape is diverse but the soil is very sandy, and the agricultural sector is in decline. The three public inter-municipal cooperation establishments structured as Pays (under the Voynet Law) have launched a Territorial Food Project with the support of local associations. The aim is to relocalise the sectors for a nourishing, resilient and sustainable agriculture. The territory also has a Territorial Climate Air Energy Plan (PCAET) which guides the local energy transition in particular.

Like other regions, this region is experiencing strong growth in photovoltaic energy production, particularly agrivoltaics.

The region is now considering how to coordinate the objectives of the PAT and the PCAET and needs to understand the issues and regulations relating to agrivoltaic projects in order to ensure their balanced development.

What is agrivoltaics?

The Vertigo Lab design office presented the regulatory framework:

Among several definitions, the one to remember comes from the APER law (2023): a photovoltaic installation whose modules are installed on an agricultural plot and which contributes sustainably to the establishment or maintenance of an agricultural activity with sustainable income by providing a service.

As a reminder, agrivoltaics originated in the field of agricultural research. In 2011, Christian Dupraz, a researcher at INRAE in agroforestry, conducted an initial study to assess the synergy between agriculture and energy production.

Impacts of agrivoltaics on the territory

Land consumption

The Multi-Year Energy Plan (PPE) does not specifically set a target for agrivoltaics, but industry players such as France Agrivoltaïsme have proposed a scenario aiming for 20GW of agrivoltaic energy produced by 2030 and 45GW by 2035 to contribute to the PPE. In concrete terms, this requires installing panels on less than 1% of France’s usable agricultural area (UAA), or 30,000 to 200,000 hectares. Paradoxically, more than one million hectares have already been ‘secured’, i.e. identified by developers (energy companies) for agrivoltaic projects.

The importance of agrivoltaics in terms of surface area must therefore be put into perspective on a national scale. Nevertheless, certain areas, particularly those that are sunny or connected to the electricity distribution network, are more targeted and may potentially see a concentration of development projects.

Agricultural productivity

Although the impacts on agricultural production are difficult to quantify and qualify, studies are currently underway. These are being conducted by Chambers of Agriculture and the scientific community (INRAE, engineering and agronomy schools, ADEME, etc.) over the long term (5-10 years) in order to assess the effect over several crop cycles. These studies tend to be comprehensive: agronomic trials, climate studies, socio-economic analyses (profitability for farmers, revenue-sharing models, etc.). The creation of an agrivoltaics observatory by ADEME should make it possible to collect data on projects.

Pending the results of these studies, in order to ensure that agricultural productivity is preserved, the law stipulates that agrivoltaic projects must provide at least one of the following four services during the operational phase:

It must also be demonstrated that it does not substantially impair any of these services or only slightly impair two of these services (see Article L. 314-36 of the Energy Code).

An environmental impact assessment (including a section on wetlands, if necessary) is mandatory, and applications must demonstrate the quality of the integration into the landscape.

Other measures are not mandatory but are strongly recommended: technical and economic studies, agro-pedological analyses, mobilisation of agricultural land, environmental impact assessment, wetlands, landscape integration study, etc.

Financial income

Many landowners, including farmers, are tempted by the financial windfall that installing solar panels represents. In economic terms, this often allows agricultural land to be put to better use than for farming. This is one reason why landowners favour this use in their leases and why farmers diversify their income, particularly with a view to their retirement.

How can the whole region benefit from this source of income, which is currently concentrated on certain farms?

Several avenues have been explored:

What levers are available to local authorities?

What can local stakeholders do to ensure the balanced development of agrivoltaics and to ensure that agricultural objectives and income take precedence over energy production?

Local authorities and their groupings can take action through:

During the exchange, the Bazadais community of municipalities (33) spontaneously shared its experience of revising the PLUI in 2024, which provides a framework for a dozen agrivoltaic projects in its territory:

The PLUI provides for several thematic Development and Programming Guidelines, which integrate agrivoltaics by making it subordinate to agricultural activity and defining environmental and landscape limits for projects. In the PLUI regulations, green and blue corridors are defined as areas where agrivoltaic projects are prohibited. The glossary of the regulations defines the limits of the projects: surface area limited to 25 hectares, mandatory implementation with a farmer already established in the territory, 200-metre setback from residential areas, integration into the landscape, etc.

The development of agrivoltaic projects is framed by the South Gironde Territorial Coherence Scheme (SCoT), which provides for 90 hectares of photovoltaic panels (including agrivoltaics) by 2050. These figures are included in the Bazadais PLUI thematic OAP.

Vigilance and a case-by-case approach

While urban planning documents provide a framework for negotiation with developers, as evidenced by the Bazadais urban planning manager, Vertigo Lab points out that these documents may be subject to legal challenges, particularly by energy companies. Vertigo Lab recommends setting agricultural objectives in parallel with energy production objectives. Agriculture must be the farmer’s main source of income. This analysis must be carried out on a case-by-case basis, ensuring the viability of the agricultural project with the farmer-developer partnership. It is worthwhile to partner with the Chamber of Agriculture, which can support these partnerships in the testing, prototyping and construction phases of the economic model.

Importance of consultation

Participants in the exchange reported increasingly strong opposition to projects from local residents, especially when there are multiple projects in the same area.

Since 2024, a project committee has been mandatory for projects located in renewable energy acceleration zones. However, local authorities complain that the meetings organised by developers are too short and more informative than consultative. The public inquiry phase of projects comes late in the process and only allows for amendments.

The participants proposed the following avenues for exploration :

Changing working practices

Reconciling energy and food transition to promote balanced regional development requires creating or strengthening synergies between public policies and exchanges between elected officials and technicians responsible for PATs and PCAETs, in line with the regional project and contracts (COT, CRTE, contracts with the Region).

The diversity of professions represented at this Café demonstrates the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration on this issue. PQN-A strives to support this cross-disciplinary approach through its various missions, particularly the Contractual Policies and Transitions mission.

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