Artificial intelligence (AI) use is exploding. More than 50 per cent of new internet content was generated by AI in 2025, according to an industry report. We even train AI on AI-generated content now and, although this can degrade performance, it continues at breakneck pace.
All this AI is consuming a lot of energy. It’s straining the electrical system, raising consumer electricity costs and breaking large-scale electrical grid planning. And the “AI energy crisis” is deepening. The International Energy Agency predicts that global electricity demand from data centres will double by 2030, to more than the electricity consumption of Japan today.
At the same time, solar photovoltaic technology — which uses the sun’s energy to generate electricity — offers the cheapest energy in the history of the planet. The sector is growing rapidly. However, both solar and AI projects threaten to take over valuable agricultural land, generating public protests.
A new study I co-authored reveals “agrivoltaics” — the use of land for both electricity generation and food production — to be a very promising solution.
In the first study of its kind, we found agrivoltaics to be a viable way to meet growing AI energy demands in the United States, while also increasing food production.
In Canada, agrivoltaics could produce enough electricity to eliminate the need for fossil fuels on the grid entirely, using less than one per cent of the country’s agriculture land.
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Solar panel fences
Agrivoltaics allows farming communities to generate photovoltaic-based electricity while continuing to produce food, sometimes with even higher yields than before.
In our study, we looked at two types of agrivoltaic — vertical and single axis tracker solar — because both of them could be integrated into most farms without inconveniencing farmers.
Vertical agrivoltaics are essentially fences made out of solar panels. The solar fences are spaced far enough apart that farmers can drive tractors, combines and other equipment down field rows without hitting them.
Single axis tracker solar arrays use the same trick — you just space them out for agrivoltaics. The trackers, however, track the sun and thus produce more energy per panel. When farming, they park themselves vertically just like the fences. Both of these types of solar agrivoltaics barely impact the sunlight hitting the crops, so work well with most crops.
(B. Kayla Coban)
A beneficial microclimate
Several studies of a wide variety of food crops, including basil, broccoli, celery, chiltepin peppers, corn, maize, lettuce, pasture grass, potatoes, spinach, tomatoes and wheat, have demonstrated that agrivoltaics can increase crop yield. For example, we showed strawberry yield in Ontario increased by 18 per cent in a normal year.
This is because agrivoltaic solar panels can create a “shield effect,” generating a beneficial microclimate in which plants are somewhat sheltered from sun, heat and wind.
This shield effect depends on the weather. For example, agrivoltaics generally helps lettuce, but last year’s hot summer intensified its shield effect so that lettuce fresh weight increased by more than 400 per cent compared to unshaded control plants and by over 200 per cent relative to the national average yield.
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Eliminate fossil fuels
In our study, we used state-level data centre energy consumption and modelled agrivoltaic generation potential. We explored how much of the digital sector’s demand could realistically be met with agrivoltaics. We also looked at how much farmland would need solar energy investments to cover AI loads within the American states that have the largest data centres.
Our results showed vertical agrivoltaics required only between 0.003 to two per cent of farmland across the targeted states. This is almost nothing. Single axis trackers need even less, at 0.001 to 0.548 per cent.
America’s AI energy crisis could be averted by putting up some single axis trackers on at most 0.5 per cent of land in less agriculturally rich states.
Canada is even more blessed — using less than one per cent of agriculture land, the country could produce enough electricity to eliminate the need for fossil fuels. That would include energy for everything, not just AI.
(AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
Dual revenue stream
Agrivoltaics maintains farming jobs, increases food supply and radically improves farming incomes because of the high value of solar electricity production.
It offers a dual revenue stream: one from the sale of agricultural produce, and the other from the sale of electricity or by offsetting a farm’s electrical needs.
Unsurprisingly, agrivoltaics is growing rapidly and the market has already reached over US$14 billion globally. Even the Vatican is now powered by agrivoltaics.
Antiquated regulations
In some jurisdictions, however, antiquated regulations effectively prevent new agrivoltaic developments. In Canada, Ontario provides an example.
Agrivoltaics has been economically successful in Ontario when integrated into lamb and sheep grazing to provide vegetation management on conventional solar farms. Unfortunately, this is the only widespread agrivoltaics in the province due to restrictions on large-scale solar deployment on farmlands.
To fix this impediment to job creation, food security and economic development, Ontario can update regulatory guidance to exempt agrivoltaics from the current restrictions. This would attract large-scale capital investments and enable crop-based agrivoltaics.
Specifically, the Ontario government can include agrivoltaics as “agricultural related use” in the provincial policy statement to circumvent the “on farm diversified use” restrictions.
That way, we would all get to produce more food and more solar energy to meet rising demands.
