The opportunity is staggering and the science is settled. So what actually stands between agrivoltaics and the Global South? A close look at the bottlenecks, from the grid to the ground.
In a 2020 study in the journal Sustainability, researchers at Oregon State University calculated that putting agrivoltaics on less than 1% of United States farmland could supply about 20% of the country's electricity.[1] Carry that arithmetic forward and roughly 5% of American farmland, shaded by panels with crops still growing beneath, could in principle cover the entire national load. It is a thought experiment, not a deployment plan. But the order of magnitude is not in dispute, and it should reframe the whole conversation: the constraint on solar was never that the planet lacks room.
So ask the question that actually matters. If that is true in the United States, a temperate, middle-of-the-pack solar country that already wastes most of its rooftops, what is true of the places with the strongest sun on earth, the most uncultivated land, and the people who most need both power and food? The honest answer is that the real opportunity was never in America. It is in the Global South. And the most important part of that opportunity is one almost no one talks about: these countries are not simply behind the rich world's energy system, they are unburdened by it. They have a rare chance to build their energy and food systems correctly, from the ground up, and agrivoltaics should be designed into that build from the start. This article is about why that is not happening yet, and what specifically stands in the way.
The same arithmetic that is a curiosity in America becomes a development strategy in Africa, and it is worth walking through slowly, because the claim is large and every input is sourced.
The inputs:
The calculation:
In plain terms: farming and generating on just 1% of Africa's cropland could produce nearly twice the electricity the whole continent uses today.
Figure 1 · The export surplus, an illustrative scenario built from the sourced inputs above.
This is not a number I am inventing or stretching. It is the regional version of a finding published in 2019 in Scientific Reports by Elnaz Adeh, Chad Higgins and colleagues at Oregon State University, who modeled global land cover and concluded that converting only about 1% of the world's farmland to solar would meet projected global electricity demand.[6] Africa contains close to a quarter of the world's farmland, and it gets stronger sun than almost anywhere that farmland sits. Run the same model on the best inputs on earth and the result is not surprising; it is overwhelming.
What that overwhelming result produces is a surplus, and the surplus is the real prize. Even after powering every home, farm and factory on the continent, this much generation would leave an enormous amount of electricity left over. Today Africa cannot deliver power to about 600 million of its people, the largest unelectrified population on earth and roughly 85% of the world's total.[7] Yet the same arithmetic says its farmland could generate far more than the whole continent consumes. That leftover is, by definition, exportable: a power-poor continent could become a power exporter, on land that is feeding its own people at the same time.
The export idea is not theoretical hand-waving. In the places with the best resource, it is already national strategy, and three examples show the shape of it.
Chile is the clearest case, and the most instructive, because it shows both the promise and the trap. The Atacama Desert receives about 9 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day, the highest solar irradiance measured anywhere, with capacity factors reaching 35% and an estimated 1,700 gigawatts of installable potential.[8] Chile built solar faster than its grid could absorb it, and the result was waste: in 2024, it curtailed (generated and then threw away) nearly 6,000 gigawatt-hours of clean electricity because the transmission and storage to use it were not there.[9] Its response was to make storage the fix rather than an afterthought, and by late 2025 it had about 1.5 gigawatts of battery storage operating and roughly 6.8 gigawatts more under construction, including projects like Oasis de Atacama that pair 2 gigawatts of solar directly with 11 gigawatt-hours of batteries.[9] On the export side, Chile's National Green Hydrogen Strategy targets 25 gigawatts of electrolysis by 2030 and a place among the world's top three hydrogen exporters by 2040.[8]
Namibia shows the leap a power-poor country can make from a standing start. It is one of the least-electrified nations on earth, yet it has committed to a roughly $10 billion project, called Hyphen, that pairs 5 to 7 gigawatts of new solar and wind with electrolysis to produce about 2 million tonnes of green ammonia a year, almost all of it for export. Namibia's own government estimates the project could add around $6 billion to GDP, close to a one-third increase.[10] Hyphen is a green-hydrogen project rather than agrivoltaics, but it proves the structural point: a country with strong sun, open land, and almost no legacy grid can design a brand-new renewable export industry from scratch. The same logic that lets Namibia export hydrogen could let a Sahelian country export both electricity and food from the same fields.
Surplus power is useless without somewhere to send it, and Africa is building that too. A nation can only export electricity if there is a grid to carry it and a market to sell it into, and the continent is assembling both. The African Union launched the African Single Electricity Market in 2021, an effort to connect national grids into a single continental market, intended to become the largest by number of countries.[11] Its masterplan, developed with IRENA and the AU's development agency, models scaling Africa from about 266 gigawatts of generating capacity today to roughly 1,218 gigawatts by 2040, and lifting power traded between African countries toward about $136 billion a year, on a cumulative investment of around $1.3 trillion.[11] Concrete pieces are going in: the East and Southern African power pools are due to link by 2027, and a single new line now ties the grids of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.[11] Surplus power is worth nothing without wires and a buyer; this is the continent building both.
Here is the part of the story that inverts the usual framing. The instinct is to see the Global South as decades behind the rich world's grid. The more accurate view is that the rich world is now trapped in the slow, costly work of retrofitting a system built for a different century, a grid designed around large central coal and gas plants, with substations, transformers and transmission corridors sized and sited for fossil generation, now being torn up and rebuilt to accept distributed, variable, renewable power. That legacy is a liability. Most of the Global South does not carry it.
This would not be the first time the continent skipped a generation of infrastructure. When mobile phones arrived, hundreds of millions of Africans bypassed landlines entirely and went straight to cellular.[12] The same leap is underway in electricity. In 2024, the most recent full year reported, about 4.8 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa were connected to power for the first time through grids and mini-grids, most of those new mini-grids running on solar rather than diesel, and another 2 million gained their first electricity from solar home systems.[12] Decentralized, renewable-first solutions now make up more than half of all new connections in the region.[12] A grid that does not yet exist does not have to be torn down before it can be built right.
And "built right" increasingly means solar paired with storage by default, which is exactly the lesson Chile is teaching in real time. Having wasted nearly 6,000 gigawatt-hours to curtailment in 2024[9], Chile is now treating batteries as a standard part of a project. This is also where the bridge to Part 3 begins. Chile is not only mandating storage through its grid rules; it is financing it through carbon markets. In 2025 a Chilean battery-storage project secured authorization under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement through a bilateral agreement with Switzerland, and Chile's decarbonization plan leans explicitly on Article 6 finance, with its carbon framework prioritizing projects that face higher technical and financial barriers, the category storage falls into.[13] That is the quiet power of a host-country carbon framework: a government that recognizes it needs storage can write storage into the rules that decide which projects earn carbon finance, and pull private capital toward exactly the thing its grid is missing. Part 3 is about turning that same lever toward agrivoltaics.
Because these systems are being designed now, agrivoltaics does not have to be retrofitted onto them later. It can be an intentional element of the build from the outset: solar sited where it also protects crops, paired with storage, and planned into the grid and the market as both are drawn. The chance is not only to electrify. It is to electrify, feed people, and restore land at the same time, on purpose.
The reason agrivoltaics, rather than ordinary solar, belongs at the center of that ground-up build is that the Global South faces two scarcities at once, power and food, and agrivoltaics is one of the few tools that addresses both on the same hectare.
Figure 2 · The paradox agrivoltaics is built to address.
One of those scarcities we have already met: roughly 600 million Africans live without electricity, about 85% of the world's unconnected.[7] The food scarcity sits right beside it. The African Development Bank and the UN report that around 282 million people in Africa, close to 20% of the continent, are undernourished, and that Africa imports on the order of $50 billion in food a year, a figure they project could climb toward $110 billion by the end of the decade without intervention.[14] The paradox is the punchline: Africa holds about 60% of the world's uncultivated arable land yet cannot feed itself.[14]
South America's profile is different and worth naming honestly. Most of the continent is already electrified, so the acute power poverty that defines Africa is not the story there. What South America shares is the other half: water-stressed agriculture and world-class export potential. Chile is living through a multi-decade drought even as it holds the best solar resource on earth, and Brazil's semi-arid Northeast (the setting for Part 1's Ecolume system) is exactly the kind of hot, dry, variable-rainfall land where agrivoltaics protects crops while it generates. So in South America the case rests on water and export; in Africa it rests on water, food, power, and export at once. Both point the same direction.
Set those scarcities next to Part 1's science, where partial shade in hot, dry climates protected crops, cut water use, and held or raised yields, and the case writes itself. A hectare of African or South American drylands under a well-designed agrivoltaic array can generate power for people who have none, grow food for people who do not have enough, and use less water doing it.
There is a further dividend that is easy to miss: agrivoltaics can help rebuild the land itself. Research in Frontiers in Environmental Science found that vegetation grown beneath and around solar arrays gains soil moisture, biomass and water-use efficiency, because the panels shade the ground and break the wind.[15] Large desert solar farms in China have been observed to increase vegetation cover across roughly a third of their footprint[16], and a 2025 analysis in PNAS argues that rapid solar development in deserts is a missing element of desertification control, with some modeling suggesting very large Saharan installations could even increase rainfall and vegetation downwind in the Sahel, a modeled projection, not a measured result.[17] Set against the African-led Great Green Wall, the 8,000-kilometer effort to restore 100 million hectares of degraded Sahelian land[18], agrivoltaics starts to look less like a power plant with a farm attached and more like a tool of land restoration that also exports electricity.
Agrivoltaics works, and it has begun, but only barely. When Fraunhofer ISE published its agrivoltaics guideline, it counted at least 2.8 gigawatts-peak installed across the world.[20] Real deployment has clustered in a handful of markets that wrote supportive rules early, Japan, China, France and Germany among them, while most of the world has almost none, and the IEA's 2025 review of dual land use still classes it as an emerging application rather than a mature market.[21]
To see how small that is, set it against solar as a whole. Global solar crossed roughly 3 terawatts, about 2,970 gigawatts, of cumulative capacity by the end of 2025, the latest figure, after adding nearly 700 gigawatts in 2025 alone.[19] Measured against a fleet that size, agrivoltaics is a rounding error: a few gigawatts of dual-use land against nearly three thousand gigawatts of conventional solar.
The shortfall is not potential, and it is not the science. Fraunhofer estimates Germany alone could responsibly host 500 gigawatts of agrivoltaics on its farmland[22], and Part 1 laid out the field results that prove the technology delivers. The gap is the distance between that proven potential and a deployment that has barely started. Why it has barely started is the rest of this article, and the reasons turn out to be the same ones that make utility-scale solar of any kind slow and expensive to build, only more so once a crop is added underneath.
The clearest way to see the bottleneck is to follow the actual development process, because agrivoltaics does not escape any of it. It inherits every step a normal solar project faces, those steps are harder in the Global South, and the crop adds a further layer on top of each. Take them in order.
1. Securing the land. Every project starts with site control. In the United States this is usually a straightforward lease.
Harder in the Global South across much of Africa, land is held under customary or communal tenure rather than a formal registry, so who may lease it, who must consent, and how a community or traditional authority responds are unresolved questions rather than paperwork. The economist Tim Krieger of the University of Freiburg, who led the social analysis of an agrivoltaics project across Mali and The Gambia, put it plainly: the region had "abundant sunshine and dry soils, in theory ideal conditions," but in practice it ran straight into who owns the modules, who may use them, and how villages react, which makes it "far from being just a technological issue."[23]
Harder with agrivoltaics because the farmer must keep farming for the system to work, the deal is not a one-time lease of idle land but an ongoing partnership with whoever works the ground, which raises the bar on consent and cooperation further.
2. Permitting and environmental review. Every project needs permits and an environmental and social impact assessment.
Harder in the Global South with thinner institutional capacity, this phase is slower and less predictable, and it is already the least predictable phase even in the United States.[24][25]
Harder with agrivoltaics a dual-use project is assessed as both an energy facility and an agricultural operation, two regulatory frames instead of one.
3. Connecting to the grid. This is the decisive step, and the one that kills the most projects. A solar farm is worthless without a wire to carry its power to demand, and "connecting" does not mean reaching the grid in the abstract. It means reaching a specific substation, or a transmission or distribution line, that has the spare capacity to receive the power. Proximity to that infrastructure is one of the first things a serious developer screens a site for, because if the land is not near a substation with room on it, someone has to build the line to reach one, at the project's expense. You cannot drop a solar farm on any parcel and plug it into any wire; the network has to be physically able to take the power in.
Harder in the Global South across Sub-Saharan Africa the transmission and distribution network is weak, under-built and limited in reach, so the substations and lines able to receive new power are few and far between, and the distances to them are long.[26] The IEA reports that about 1,650 gigawatts of advanced-stage solar and wind worldwide are already waiting for a grid connection, and that the world spends only about $400 billion a year on grids against roughly $1 trillion on generation, an imbalance it says must close, with grid investment needing to reach about $600 billion a year by 2030.[27]
Harder with agrivoltaics no difference at this step, which is exactly why it matters. The single hardest barrier is one agrivoltaics shares fully with all solar.
4. Signing a bankable power purchase agreement. Even with a connection, the developer needs a long-term contract to sell the electricity, because without a bankable offtake there is no debt and no project.
Harder in the Global South the buyer is often a state utility with a weak balance sheet, eroded by technical and commercial losses, so its promise to pay is not bankable without a sovereign guarantee, and an entire advisory practice now exists to move these deals toward credit enhancement because the underlying counterparties are not creditworthy.[26][28] Layer on currency risk, costs in dollars against revenue in local currency, and the financing knot tightens.
Harder with agrivoltaics the project needs a higher price or a second revenue stream to clear its higher cost, which makes the already-hard offtake negotiation harder still.
5. Financing the build. Every project has to raise the capital to get built and then earn it back, and this is the step where the crop adds real, quantifiable cost.
Figure 3 · The agrivoltaic build-cost premium (Fraunhofer ISE).
Harder with agrivoltaics the structure itself is far more expensive. Raising panels high enough and spacing them wide enough to farm beneath takes more steel and heavier mounts. In a like-for-like Fraunhofer comparison reported by pv magazine, an elevated agrivoltaic system cost about €1,234 per kilowatt against roughly €572 for a conventional ground-mounted plant, about 2.16 times as much, with the mounting structure alone adding roughly €130 to €220 per kilowatt.[29] Across configurations, the levelized cost runs from about 4% to as much as 148% higher than ground-mounted solar; the US national laboratory's dual-use benchmark documents the same premium.[29][30] The cost is not only the steel: because the shade has to be tuned to the specific crop, each project is a bespoke design rather than a repeatable template, which forfeits the standardization that drives prices down, and it runs two businesses on one site with unsettled questions about who maintains what and who bears the loss when one harms the other.
Harder in the Global South that premium has to be financed where capital is scarcest and most risk-averse, so an extra cost a wealthy market might absorb can sink a project outright.
6. Storage, increasingly non-negotiable. As Chile's 6,000 gigawatt-hours of 2024 curtailment show[9], solar without firming is power you cannot fully use.
Harder in the Global South in grids far weaker than Chile's, the batteries and transmission needed to make the generation useful are not optional, and they have to be financed alongside the generation, raising the capital bar again.
Add it up and the lead times stretch to four to six years before a shovel moves, with a high chance the project dies somewhere in the middle. That is the bottleneck, step by step.
It would be comforting to assume these are problems of poverty that a wealthy grid would not have. The United States proves otherwise. As of the end of 2024, the latest data from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, there were about 956 gigawatts of solar sitting in American interconnection queues.[31] The median project now spends over four years, about 55 months, working through the process, and of all the capacity that requested a connection between 2000 and 2019, only about 13% had been built by the end of 2024, while roughly 77% was withdrawn.[31] Most projects die in the queue. The cost of connecting has climbed too: Berkeley Lab puts the median network-upgrade cost for solar near $253 per kilowatt, and in the largest US regional market, PJM, found average interconnection costs rose roughly 728%, from about $29 to about $240 per kilowatt, as the expense of upgrading an aging grid landed on new generators.[32] The irony is sharp. By the most-cited industry benchmark, Lazard's annual levelized-cost analysis, new utility-scale solar and onshore wind have been the cheapest sources of new electricity for eleven years running: in the 2025 edition, utility solar runs roughly $38 to $78 per megawatt-hour, against about $48 to $109 for combined-cycle gas, $71 to $173 for coal, and $141 to $220 for nuclear.[36] Solar is the cheapest power to generate, yet it pays among the highest costs to connect, because renewables tend to be sited where the grid is weakest.
Figure 4 · Solar is the cheapest power to generate, yet among the costliest to connect (Lawrence Berkeley Lab, PJM).
And the deeper bottleneck, transmission, is barely being built: the Department of Energy's own planning study says the country needs roughly 5,000 miles a year of new high-capacity regional lines, but it completed just 322 miles of high-voltage transmission in 2024, one of the slowest years in fifteen.[33] This is not villainy. The obstacles are structural rather than conspiratorial: interconnection study processes that cannot keep pace, cost-allocation rules that load grid upgrades onto the new project, local permitting friction, and transmission that no single party is responsible for building, all of it heavier because the United States is retrofitting a grid built for coal and gas. The clearest evidence the problem is structural is that regulators are rebuilding the machinery: in 2023 the US overhauled its interconnection rules, moving to a first-ready, first-served cluster process with deposits and penalties, after which the national queue posted its first decline in a decade.[34] If the wealthiest grid on earth needs half a decade and abandons three-quarters of its queued projects, the barrier was never the technology. The difference is that the Global South is still drawing its system, and can draw it better.
The reason to push through all of that is that agrivoltaics, done right, pays the people on the land twice, and understanding the payment also reveals where the project actually stalls.
In the United States, solar developers already lease farmland aggressively. Reported rates run from roughly $500 to $1,000 an acre a year on average and reach $3,000 to $4,500 in premium markets, usually with signing bonuses and escalators on twenty-to-thirty-five-year terms, often beating row-crop returns.[35] But a conventional lease takes the land out of production, so the farmer trades the harvest for the rent. Agrivoltaics dissolves that trade: the developer pays for access and the farmer keeps farming, collecting both the lease and the crop. Part 1's "two harvests" become two income streams.
Which exposes where projects actually stall. In the United States, the farmer is the easy part; a land lease is a willing transaction. What takes years and kills projects is everything downstream, the interconnection, the network-upgrade bill, and the bankable offtake. The farmer is not the barrier to entry. The grid and the buyer are.
In the Global South the same downstream wall stands, but the upstream relationship changes character entirely: it stops being a transaction and becomes a question of people. The counterparty is rarely a single landowner with clear title; it is a community holding land in common, with traditional leadership whose consent matters, and a development that only works if cooperatives and households stay engaged for the life of the system. Add local-content rules that shape who is allowed to build, and a state that has to treat this as a priority, with rules obliging the utility to buy the power and the capacity to actually process a connection, and the model that works looks nothing like a developer arriving with a lease. It looks like a developer integrating with communities, cooperatives and ministries so that the project becomes something the country is building rather than something built on it.
Pull back and the barriers share one striking property: not one of them is agronomic, and almost none is even technical. The solar panels work. The crops grow, and in the right climate they grow better. The land exists in staggering abundance under the best sun on earth, beside the people who most need the power and the food. What stands in the way is a stack of financial and institutional problems.
That those problems are financial and institutional rather than technical does not make them small. These are exactly the barriers that have left 600 million Africans without power despite decades of available capital, and the reason is worth stating directly. The capital exists, but it does not flow, because each barrier above raises the risk or the cost of a project past the point where private capital will commit. A grid can in principle be financed, but the utility that would pay for the power is not creditworthy, so the loan does not close. An offtaker can in principle be credit-enhanced, but doing so requires scarce sovereign guarantees or donor-backed instruments that are slow to arrange and limited in supply. Storage and transmission can be built, but someone has to bear their cost up front, and the project that needs them cannot. The agrivoltaic premium can be earned back over decades, but the developer has to survive a four-to-six-year, high-mortality development gauntlet first. None of these is a wall money cannot climb. Each is a reason money does not show up, and together they explain the missing velocity: not an absence of capital or technology, but an absence of the institutional plumbing, bankable buyers, allocated grid costs, secured land, processed permits, that would let the capital move.
That is, in the end, a more hopeful diagnosis than it sounds, because the missing piece is identifiable. What these projects lack is a mechanism that prices the value agrivoltaics creates but cannot currently capture, the clean power, the protected and additional food, the restored land, the avoided emissions, and uses that value to close the gaps that stop capital from flowing: to make the offtake bankable, to help pay for the storage and the wires, to offset the premium of building a structure you can farm beneath.
There is a candidate for that mechanism, and it is where this series goes next. Part 3 takes up carbon markets, and specifically Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the same lever Chile is already pulling for storage, and asks whether it can be pointed at agrivoltaics. It will be the most speculative piece of the three, because there is not yet a single agrivoltaic carbon project to point to. That is exactly why it is worth exploring: the tool exists, the value is real, and no one has yet connected them.
36 references · verified June 2026 · figures labeled where derived or from trade press
Vera Meridian
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