VSS Livestream: Virginia's Place in the New Global Energy Game & Potential for a New AgPV Playbook
Join the Virginia Solar Summit community live for a comprehensive energy brief exploring the macro dynamics bringing a new order to global markets, Virginia’s position as top electricity importer and center of energy innovation, as well as a sweeping world tour of breakthrough solar developments boosting agriculture in Europe, China and the U.S. led by VSS Executive Producer, Dan French.
A “new solar” renaissance is beginning to harvest compelling results around the world via dual-use developments known as “agrivoltaics,” or ‘actual solar farms’ that continue to be agriculturally productive while simultaneously producing electricity. A French vineyard in Tresserre this fall, for example, harvested +60% more chardonnay grapes of better quality with less irrigation in its solar tracking trellis–consistent with similar recent results achieving more and better quality grapes under solar panels in Italy.
Beyond electricity, solar can do more. A lot more. When developed with agriculture or conservation in mind, solar can do things otherwise hard or impossible to achieve. Solar can save farms, start farms, diversify production, preserve and protect land, create habitat and enhance biodiversity, and revitalize rural communities. It already is, here and there, but agrivoltaics is ready to scale to new heights of productivity without having to make hard land use compromises.
Virginia needs all the energy it can get, but it needs the broad cornucopia of homegrown benefits that agrivoltaics can cultivate in fields all across the region just as much, if not more. After all, solar ‘pays where it lays’ and benefits local economies in ways baseload power cannot. And as pure agricultural value-add, agrivoltaics provides another order of local economic development opportunity entirely.