Agrivoltaics, the fine art of developing land for both agricultural use and clean energy generation, is becoming more commonplace, emerging as a workable compromise for farmers concerned over potentially losing acres of crops to solar development in America’s heartland. And somebody needs to get ahead of wrangling all the sheep.
Eyeing a set of industry standards, the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) are teaming up to figure out best practices for harvesting the fruits of nature- in all their forms.
ASABE, an international producer of standards for agricultural systems accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and SEIA, a solar trade bulwark and also an ANSI-accredited organization, will start the process by consulting their respective memberships. They’ll sort out high-priority topics for standards creation, including establishing and defining common terminology across agricultural land-based solar and energy storage projects.
“We’ve been viewing agriculture and solar power generation, just like solar developers and farmers, as natural partners for the past couple of years,” said a spokesperson for Doral Renewables, a trailblazer in dual-use techniques. “Every framework that supports the expansion of dual-use practices in utility-scale solar projects, resulting in optimization of land use and diversification of revenue streams for farmers, will have our support.”
Industry stakeholders can participate in the process either through their respective memberships or by applying to join a standards committee once applications are published online. National agrivoltaics standards will assist both farmers and clean energy developers in understanding common expectations of how projects should be designed, developed, and constructed according to consensus-based principles developed with their common best interests in mind.
“SEIA is committed to delivering the tools and resources that farmers need to maintain their operations while speeding up clean energy deployment. Industry standards for agrivoltaics will empower farmers seeking to explore large-scale solar on their properties with lower costs, less risk, and increased market efficiency,” said SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper.
“This collaboration harnesses the expertise of ASABE members in agriculture and agricultural facilities alongside the specialized knowledge of SEIA members in photovoltaic and energy storage technologies,” added Darrin Drollinger, executive director at ASABE. “Together, we aim to establish comprehensive standards that will advance the field of agrivoltaics and promote sustainable land use.”
Sheep, pigs, and Mammoth?!?
Some solar developers are making fast friends with farmers through their agrivoltaics efforts, like the Doral Renewables crew managing dual land use of the massive Mammoth Solar in Indiana. The first phase of the 13,000-acre, 1.3 gigawatt project was completed late last year, with two more to go.
Doral worked with Purdue University and the state of Indiana to maximize the utility of the land used for Mammoth, which still grows certain crops while more than 1,200 animals graze amidst the project’s PV panels. Sheep, pigs, donkeys, and alpacas get to do what they do best while helping produce clean energy.
“Vegetation will grow anyway,” points out Ed Baptista, Doral’s VP of development and agrivoltaics. “If we do nothing, we still have to deal with vegetation management, which can be a lot over the lifetime of a project.”
Baptista has put a lot of effort into the endeavor. He was rewarded for his blood, sweat, and tears when Mammoth Solar was named Dual-Use Plan of the Year in the 2024 North American Agrivoltaics Awards. Mammoth North hosted a commercial operations ceremony on July 9, 2024, attended by the whos-who of Indiana including Governor Holcomb, who signed an official proclamation declaring the date to be Agrivoltaics Day in celebration of Doral’s achievements.
Last November, the crew hosted its first farm-to-table event, featuring a spread entirely comprised of crops and livestock harvested from the Mammoth Solar site.
“We had more than 100 people enjoying a real farm-to-table meal that demonstrated bringing heritage farming back to the community,” beamed Baptista.
The Mammoth Solar project will be one of the largest in the United States once it is completed. Doral should be selling electrons by 2026 and be completed in Q4 2026 or Q1 2027, the company’s president and CEO Nick Cohen told Renewable Energy World in a recent interview. Once the leases for Mammoth are up, the solar panels will be removed and the land will remain the property of the families who have, in many cases, maintained it for generations.
Last August, another developer, Enel North America, announced it was hiring more than 6,000 new employees of the four-stomached variety, inking a deal with Texas Solar Sheep Company to deploy more than 6,000 sheep to feast on greenery sprawling eight Texas solar sites. It is the largest known solar grazing agreement executed in the United States, per the companies.
Enel, also Texas’ leading operator of utility-scale battery storage, says Texas Solar Sheep’s vegetation managers will munch on more than 10,100 acres of land used for solar, an area roughly 75% the size of Manhattan.
“Most of these sites are situated in high rainfall, long growing season parts of Texas that pose huge challenges for vegetation management,” explained the owner of Texas Solar Sheep LLC, JR Howard. “We look forward to displaying how rotational grazing can positively impact these solar sites along with the surrounding communities.”
A recent American Solar Grazing Association survey estimates that 100,000 acres of U.S. solar sites are being similarly chewed upon. As that figure increases, the standards laid out by ASABE and SEIA will shape the direction the emerging industry takes.
