Agrivoltaics: Three Incomes From One Acre
💡 Agrivoltaics In India: Key Highlights
- The next phase of PM-KUSUM will carry a dedicated agrivoltaics component, so farmers can keep cropping the land while also earning from the electricity generated above it.
- Three income streams from the same acre — the crop sold, the power sold to the DISCOM, and the diesel no longer burned, per Union Minister Pralhad Joshi.
- Land ownership stays with the farmer, with the focus on small and marginal holdings, Farmer Producer Organisations, cooperatives and panchayats.
- Around 29 lakh pumps have already been solarised under PM-KUSUM, and decentralised solar added 16.3 GW last year — 7.6 GW of it through PM-KUSUM.
- India added 55.29 GW of non-fossil capacity last year — more than the entire installed power capacity of Norway, Switzerland, Austria or Belgium.
- The 7th Agrivoltaics World Conference runs 21–23 October 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi.
A farmer with one irrigated acre in India sells one thing from it: a crop. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) now wants that same acre to pay three times over, and the mechanism it is betting on is agrivoltaics. In India, PM-KUSUM’s next phase will carry a dedicated agrivoltaics component — making farmer solar income a designed feature of the country’s flagship farm-solar scheme rather than an incidental benefit of it.
Speaking at the curtain-raiser event ahead of the 7th Agrivoltaics World Conference 2026 in New Delhi on 9 September, Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy Pralhad Joshi put the proposition in the plainest possible terms: a farmer can earn three streams of income from the same acre — from the crop sold, from the power sold to the distribution company, and from the money saved on diesel. His framing for the shift was that the annadata, the provider of food, is becoming the urjadata, the provider of energy.
That is a bigger claim than it first sounds, because it addresses a conflict that has shadowed India’s solar buildout: whether a country that has to feed itself can afford to hand fertile land over to power generation. Agrivoltaics says it does not have to choose.
What Agrivoltaics Actually Means On An Indian Farm
Most people have seen the two familiar shapes of solar power in India: rooftop solar, where panels sit on a house or a factory shed, and utility-scale solar, where a few hundred acres of desert or scrub are covered in panels and wired into the transmission grid. Agrivoltaics is a third shape, and the least familiar of them: solar panels placed above land that is still being farmed.
Instead of resting close to the ground on short frames, the panels are mounted on tall stilts — high enough for a person, and ideally a tractor, to work underneath. The rows are spaced further apart than in a conventional solar farm so that sunlight still reaches the soil in moving stripes through the day. Crops grow below; electricity is generated above. As the Minister put it, the same land can continue to grow crops below while generating clean energy above, so there is no need to choose between a crop and a solar plant.
Why panel height and spacing decide whether it works
The engineering detail is where agrivoltaics succeeds or fails, and MNRE is explicit that the answers are not yet settled. The right panel height, row spacing, tracking system and business model differ by crop, climate and region — a shade-tolerant leafy vegetable behaves nothing like a tall, sun-hungry cereal. That is what BAIF’s Rural Innovation Centre in Pune is working through: researchers there are testing 17 solar configurations across 30 crops to find which combinations hold up in the field.
The Three Income Streams From The Same Acre
The three-income framing is the most concrete part of the announcement, and worth separating out, because each stream behaves differently.
The existing farm income continues, because the land is never taken out of production. This is the stream agrivoltaics is designed not to disturb.
Electricity generated above the crop is sold to the state distribution company — a payment that does not depend on rainfall or on what the mandi pays this season.
Solar power running the irrigation pump replaces diesel that would otherwise be bought at market prices. Money not spent is the most reliable of the three.
The reason MNRE keeps returning to this structure is not the arithmetic but the volatility. A farmer’s earnings depend on the monsoon and on market prices, neither of which the farmer controls. A solar tariff paid by a distribution company does not move with either. In the Minister’s words, for a small farmer solar income is not just extra income — it is security, providing a regular income in both good years and bad.
What PM-KUSUM’s Next Phase Changes For Farmer Solar Income
PM-KUSUM is not new. Launched in 2019, the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan was built around three components: small grid-connected solar plants set up by farmers and their institutions, standalone off-grid solar pumps for farms with no reliable connection, and the solarisation of grid-connected agricultural pumps. Around 29 lakh pumps have been solarised under the scheme to date.
Farmland solar was always technically permitted within that design — the original guidelines allowed a plant to be installed in “stilt fashion” on agricultural land, but directed the component primarily at barren or uncultivable land. That made farm-gate solar a question of what to do with land a farmer could not use, rather than what more a farmer could earn from land already in production. A dedicated agrivoltaics component inverts it: the productive acre becomes the target, not the fallback.
Who the next phase is aimed at
Two design choices matter more than any subsidy number here. The first is who the component is for: small and marginal farmers, Farmer Producer Organisations, cooperatives and panchayats — the smallholder end of Indian agriculture, not large landholders or developers. The second is that land ownership remains with the farmer. Solar leasing arrangements have a habit of separating the person who farms the land from the person who owns the asset on it; keeping title with the farmer is what makes this an income stream rather than a land transfer.
- Machinery clearance. Mounting structures have to let tractors and harvesters move freely underneath, and survive local weather — a taller structure is a costlier and more wind-exposed one.
- Missing crop data. Crop-wise and region-wise evidence has to come from ICAR, agricultural universities and Krishi Vigyan Kendras before any configuration can be recommended at scale.
- The cost gap. Stilted structures cost more than conventional ground-mounted solar. Closing that gap through better structures, materials and mounting systems is the innovation the ministry is asking industry for.
India’s Land Arithmetic: 18% Of The People, 2.4% Of The Land
The strategic case for agrivoltaics in India rests on a single uncomfortable ratio. India has roughly 18% of the world’s population but about 2.4% of its land. More than 85% of Indian farmers are small and marginal, cultivating under two hectares — an area on which there is very little room for a dedicated solar plant beside the crop.
Together those facts explain why land-neutral generation is not a nice-to-have here. A country adding tens of gigawatts of solar a year needs somewhere to put it, and the cheapest, flattest, best-connected land available is usually farmland. Every gigawatt built above a crop rather than in place of one costs the country nothing in food production — and on a two-hectare holding, it is the only version of the deal a smallholder can realistically accept.
What It Means For India’s Renewable Energy Scale
A farm-level scheme deserves attention at national scale because of the sheer size of what India is now adding annually: 55.29 GW of non-fossil capacity last year — more, as the Minister noted, than the entire installed power capacity of several developed economies.
| Comparison | Total installed power capacity |
|---|---|
| India’s non-fossil capacity added in one year | 55.29 GW |
| Norway | 40.6 GW |
| Austria | 34 GW |
| Belgium | around 33 GW |
| Switzerland | around 30 GW |
Within that total, the decentralised share is what makes agrivoltaics strategically interesting. Decentralised solar contributed 16.3 GW last year — 7.6 GW through PM-KUSUM and 8.7 GW of rooftop solar, largely under PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, which is now touching 5.6 million beneficiaries. That is not a rounding error on the national build; it is a parallel grid being assembled a few kilowatts at a time.
Three different channels, one rural electricity story
Read alongside the rest of India’s decentralised solar push, agrivoltaics is best understood as a third distinct channel rather than a variation on the first two. PM Surya Ghar reaches rural India through the household rooftop, cutting a family’s electricity bill. Off-grid solar under PM-JANMAN and DAJGUA reaches tribal hamlets that the grid has not yet arrived at, replacing no electricity with some. Agrivoltaics reaches the same villages through an entirely different door — the field, and the farmer’s income statement. Same technology, three separate problems.
Scaled up, the consequence is millions of small generators injecting power into rural feeders — the raw material of a virtual power plant, where distributed capacity is aggregated to behave like a single dispatchable resource. That is also the harder half of the job: absorbing this much distributed generation needs utilities able to manage two-way flows at the feeder level, which is why India’s 300 GW non-fossil milestone is increasingly a grid story rather than a generation one. On skills, at least, the groundwork exists: India has trained almost 70,000 Surya Mitras, the village-level technicians who install and maintain these systems.
The 7th Agrivoltaics World Conference, 21–23 October
The announcement came at a curtain-raiser, not at the event itself. The 7th Agrivoltaics World Conference 2026 runs from 21 to 23 October 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, bringing farmers, policymakers, researchers, industry and international delegations together over three days to work through how the sector scales. The Minister launched the conference teaser and unveiled its official logo at the event.
Also announced was an Agrivoltaics Pitch Hub on the theme “Fueling Farm to Fork Innovations”, built around a 3F framework of Food, Fuel and Fibre, with the National Solar Energy Federation of India as knowledge partner. It will invite solutions that can contribute to the future of agrivoltaics. Detailed design of the PM-KUSUM agrivoltaics component — capacity allocations, tariffs, eligibility, financing — has not been announced, and the conference is where much of that conversation will happen rather than where it concludes.
The wider ambition is explicitly for export. India’s agrivoltaics experience, the Minister argued, is particularly relevant to the Global South, where farms have small holdings, abundant sunshine and grids that are still catching up — the same three conditions India is designing for. If a configuration works on two hectares in Maharashtra, it has a fair chance of working on two hectares almost anywhere in the tropics, which is a more useful thing to prove than another gigawatt of desert solar.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is agrivoltaics?
Agrivoltaics is the practice of generating solar power on land that is still actively farmed. Panels are mounted on tall stilts above the crop and spaced more widely than in a conventional solar farm, so sunlight still reaches the soil and machinery can work underneath. The land produces both food and electricity instead of one or the other.
How can a farmer earn three incomes from the same acre?
According to Union Minister Pralhad Joshi, the three streams are the crop sold, the power sold to the local distribution company (DISCOM), and the money saved on diesel that solar pumping replaces. The crop income continues as before, while the electricity income and the diesel savings are added on top of it.
Is agrivoltaics already part of PM-KUSUM?
Not as a dedicated component yet. PM-KUSUM’s existing design permits solar plants on agricultural land in stilt fashion but directs the component primarily at barren or uncultivable land. MNRE has now said the scheme’s next phase will carry a component specifically for agrivoltaics; its detailed guidelines have not been announced.
Does the farmer lose ownership of the land?
No. MNRE has stated that land ownership will remain with the farmer, with the component focused on small and marginal farmers, Farmer Producer Organisations, cooperatives and panchayats.
Do crops actually grow properly under solar panels?
That depends heavily on the crop, the climate and how the panels are configured, and India does not yet have settled answers. BAIF’s Rural Innovation Centre in Pune is testing 17 solar configurations across 30 crops for exactly this reason, and MNRE has called for crop-wise and region-wise data from ICAR, agricultural universities and Krishi Vigyan Kendras before recommending configurations at scale.
When and where is the 7th Agrivoltaics World Conference 2026?
It runs from 21 to 23 October 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, over three days, with farmers, policymakers, researchers, industry leaders and international delegations attending.
Source: Press Information Bureau — Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Government of India, 09 September 2026 (Release ID 2308489).