In California, sheep safely graze amid giant solar farms. In India and Mexico, solar panels on stilts power remote villages while shading and watering crops. Across Asia, photovoltaics spread over the still waters of reservoirs behind hydroelectric dams, doubling up on power production. And in Minnesota, the gaps between solar panels support “little prairies” full of meadow grasses, birds, and pollinating insects.
The race is on to find ways of reconciling demands for land to grow crops, raise livestock, and conserve nature with demands from the developers of solar and wind farms, which are needed to rein in climate change. Increasingly, the answer can be found in innovative ways to share the same space.
The need is urgent because solar and wind farms are spreading rapidly worldwide. Many economists believe that solar power, in particular, has crossed an economic threshold — it’s usually cheaper to deploy than fossil fuels — and will become the dominant energy source globally before mid-century.
But there is a headwind blowing, and from a surprising front: environmental and social concerns. As “green” energy companies scale up operations, they are being accused of grabbing land from smallholder farmers, Indigenous communities, and livestock herders, as well as from intact ecosystems. The climate gains from reducing carbon emissions, these critics say, are being undercut by losses to biodiversity and food production.
China is installing solar farms faster than the rest of the world put together, leading to conflicts in its grain-growing heartland.
There are no up-to-date figures for this land take, but solar and wind farms are gobbling up ever more food-producing farms and encroaching on natural areas. By 2050, they could have a footprint of around 30,000 square miles, the size of the Czech Republic, according to data in a recent assessment headed by Chinese land-management researcher Wu Xiao of Zhejiang University. We face the prospect of “trading food for energy,” he warns.
Ever more land conflicts seem inevitable — certainly for solar power, which operates best in unshaded areas with gentle winds and moderate temperatures, the same conditions favored by many crops. Moreover, the push to scale up renewable energy is often greatest in the most densely populated countries, where open space is in the shortest supply.
China, for instance, is installing solar farms faster than the rest of the world put together. While giant projects in the Gobi Desert may proceed without objection, Xiao identifies escalating conflict hotspots in eastern China — places such as Hubei, the country’s densely populated grain-growing heartland, and amid high-value horticultural land around Shanghai in the Yangtze Delta.
A solar farm in China’s Hubei Province.
Zheng Xintao / VCG via Getty Images
Meanwhile, in many less densely populated countries, renewables are exacerbating long-standing land conflicts. According to Michael Klingler, a political ecologist at Boku University in Vienna, European investors and energy companies, including Italy’s Enel, France’s Engie, and U.K.-based Actis, now owned by the U.S. equity firm General Atlantic, have executed “large-scale green grabbing” in Indigenous and other traditional lands for wind and solar farms in Brazil.
Klingler and his colleagues have mapped 868 square miles of land —mostly public lands with long-standing rights of use by local communities — that have been acquired by these companies and their local partners to host wind farms in the poor northeast of Brazil. Land grabs are being “legitimized by the climate change mitigation imperative,” he concludes, while anticipating that the take could grow fortyfold by 2050.
Legal challenges to such land grabs are multiplying. In Norway, the Supreme Court ruled that construction of Europe’s largest onshore wind farm, in the north of the country, violated the rights of semi-nomadic Sámi people to their traditional reindeer pastures. Forced to concede, the government last year reached a deal: The turbines can stay, but the Sámi will be paid compensation, gain new winter pastures, and have a veto on whether the turbines can be replaced when they reach the end of their working lives, around 2045.
There is a flurry of interest in agrivoltaics, where farmers or energy companies install solar panels above crop fields or grazing land.
Judges in the U.S. are proving even tougher. In December, a federal court in Tulsa confirmed an earlier judgment that the 84 giant wind turbines erected on 8,400 acres of Osage Nation land in Oklahoma amounted to trespass. It ruled that all the turbines must be removed and the land returned to its “pre-trespass” condition before the end of this year.
Other disputes are festering. In India, a national push for solar farms in the Thar desert of Rajasthan, the world’s most densely populated desert, has brought angry protests from tribespeople over the desecration of their sacred natural sites, water sources, and seasonal livestock pastures.
Similar tensions have dogged Africa’s largest wind farm, on the shores of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya; in 2023, courts ruled the project had taken land illegally from local pastoralists. And in Morocco, a proposed $20 billion megaproject to send 11.5 gigawatts of solar and wind power by undersea cable to Britain could take more than 300,000 acres of sheep and camel pasture currently used by nomadic tribes.
Solar and wind farms require much less land than some rival non-fossil-fuel power sources, such as biomass burning, but many times more land than fossil fuels. So the critical question is, how to reduce their impact on the world’s agricultural and natural landscapes?
John Kristian Jama, a Sámi herder, beside a wind farm built on traditional Sámi grazing land in Afjord, Norway.
Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP via Getty Images
One approach is to put renewables on old industrial or brownfield sites in both urban and rural areas. Across the U.S., decommissioned landfills are being repurposed as solar farms in Rhode Island, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere.
Offshore wind is taking off, too, with China and the U.K. the biggest deployers. The shallow waters around the British Isles are now peppered with large wind farms, developed both because the winds are stronger offshore and in response to public opposition to giant onshore turbines. But the best sites are now largely taken, and there is growing concern that spinning turbine blades threaten seabirds that feed on shallow mud banks, that undersea cables snag fishing nets, and that noise and electromagnetic fields repel marine life. To minimize some of these concerns, developers are building floating wind farms in deeper, less contested waters. One of the world’s largest could be generating power on 100 square miles off northern Scotland by 2030.
In Asia, there is also growing enthusiasm for floating solar farms, on lakes and reservoirs. Regina Nobre, a freshwater ecologist at the University of Toulouse, last year identified 643 operational projects. One of the biggest, with 340,000 panels, covers more than 500 acres of the giant Cirata reservoir on the densely populated Indonesian island of Java.
In Ohio, a solar farm operated by a Shell subsidiary grows forage crops such as alfalfa and hay in the gaps between the panels.
Besides not taking farmland out of production, “floatovoltaics” have collateral benefits for reservoir operators. By partially shading the water, they reduce evaporation that, in arid tropical regions, can remove more than a third of the water. But there are ecological downsides, says Rafael Almeida, a freshwater ecologist at Indiana University. The shade can limit plant life in the water, reducing oxygen production and fish stocks. Solar panels can also reduce wind speeds at the lake surface, reducing water mixing and further damaging freshwater ecosystems. Almeida believes the impacts are usually minimal if only small portions of the water bodies are occupied, but he acknowledges “the environmental trade-offs remain quite unclear.”
Still, the opportunities to avoid developing on land are limited. Most observers believe the best way to integrate solar farms into the wider landscape is to combine them with agriculture and conservation projects.
Hence the flurry of interest in agrivoltaics, where farmers or energy companies install solar panels above crop fields, or experiment with livestock grazing between or even beneath their solar arrays. Typically, engineers raise solar panels by 6 or 8 feet to allow sufficient sunlight to reach plants.
In hot countries, the panels can also shield crops and livestock from overheating. In southern France, for example, global warming is causing some varieties of grapes to ripen too quickly, spurring some growers to install solar panels to shade vines while they harvest an extra energy “crop.” Proprietary systems have rotating panels that can also be maneuvered to maximize sunlight on cloudy days and to insulate vines from winter frosts. In Italy, similar systems add value to tree crops such as almonds and olives.
The United States also is experimenting with agrivoltaics. Altogether, there are almost 600 projects in the U.S., according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
In Madison County, Ohio, a 1,900-acre solar farm operated by Shell subsidiary Savion began commercial operation last July: It sells energy to Amazon while growing forage crops such as alfalfa and hay in the gaps between the solar panels. After crops are harvested, the stubble will be grazed by sheep, creating what Ohio State University renewables researcher Eric Romich, who is monitoring the project, calls a triple commodity system: energy, crop, and sheep for meat and wool.
In Central California, the 4,700-acre Topaz solar farm, once the world’s largest, now allows thousands of sheep to mow the grass between its panels. In a state where many farmers are contracting with solar developers, this dual use generates synergies that benefit both.
Experts say solar and wind installation can be redesigned to protect ecosystems or even revive those that have been lost.
For now, farming beneath solar farms in Europe and North America is still sporadic and piecemeal. But elsewhere, agrivoltaics is becoming part of national strategies for economic development of rural communities. China has more than 500 agrivoltaics projects, according to Shengnian Xu, of the World Resource Institute, incorporating crops, livestock, aquafarming, greenhouses, and even tea plantations. In the Yellow River Delta in China, the shade from solar panels has boosted shrimp yields by up to 50 percent.
In rural India, the National Solar Energy Federation is erecting panels on remote farms. They have increased vegetable yields in their shadows by a third or more and powered cold storage on farms that reduces post-harvest waste, says Arvind Poswal, a renewable energy researcher for the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.
In Nepal, solar panels installed on small farms by the U.N. Development Programme power irrigation pumps. In Mexico, they shade crops of pumpkins and tomatoes during the day, and capture dew to water the soil at night.
A farmer harvests soybeans beneath hanging solar panels in Amance, France.
Patrick Hertzog / AFP via Getty Images
Of course, like any development, a utility-scale solar or wind farm has environmental trade-offs. Roads constructed to build and maintain Scottish wind farms have often been built on peatlands, damaging these valuable ecosystems and potentially causing the eventual release of as much climate-warming gas from degrading peat as would have been emitted by burning fossil fuels instead. Solar farms in California’s Mojave Desert have reportedly destroyed rare desert tortoise habitat and reduced cacti cover, for instance.
But experts say such installations can be redesigned to protect existing ecosystems and even revive those that have been lost, by restoring water to drained peatlands or managing the land beneath solar panels to retain or reestablish lost native vegetation.
The potential for “ecovoltaics” is certainly there, says Fabio Carvalho of Lancaster University in the U.K. “Solar farms have long operational lifespans, experience low levels of disturbance during operation, and can be managed… for biodiversity conservation,” he says. His research group found a wide range of native mammals, birds, and insect life across 87 British solar sites surveyed in 2023. In a separate study in the intensively farmed East Anglian fens, research sponsored by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds found that threatened bird species, such as corn buntings, yellowhammers, and linnets, were more numerous amid solar panels than among field crops, especially when they contained a variety of flora that provided food and encouraged insect life.
In the U.S., solar farms could even be the missing ingredient for the revival of native prairie. The NREL has successfully tested seeding strategies beneath three commercial Minnesota solar farms that have restored native grasslands rich in bees and other pollinating insects, with native species increasing between five- and eightfold. James McCall, the laboratory’s energy and environment analyst, calls it “the little prairie under the panel.”
