pv magazine has spoken with Jochen Hauff, Senior Advisor for agrivoltaics to the Global Solar Council at the Smarter E trade show. He says agrivoltaics is rapidly evolving from a niche workaround into a standalone industry with its own technical, agricultural and social complexity, and that the solar sector must fundamentally rethink how it works with farmers and rural communities.
Agrivoltaics is no longer a workaround for land constraints but is rapidly becoming a distinct sector with its own technical, agronomic, and economic logic, according to Jochen Hauff from the Global Solar Council (GSC), who spoke about the topic in a recent interview during the Smarter E trade show in Munich, Germany, on the future of agrivoltaics.
“AgriPV is a creative solution that the PV industry has put forward to make PV deployable in countries with land constraints,” he said in an interview with pv magazine. “But the technology is now its own dimension, its own identity. It’s becoming sort of an independent business.” That shift, he argued, is still not fully reflected across the wider solar industry. While agrivoltaics is often treated as a secondary or compensatory approach, practitioners are increasingly seeing it as a primary development pathway.
