How Does Italy Balance Agriculture and Solar Energy in Agrivoltaic Projects?

Added: 2026-05-03

[00:00:00][music] >> Record high oil and gas prices are pushing many countries closer to renewable energy, but in Italy, red tape is getting in the way of some of the most innovative solutions. One independent power company is developing an agrivoltaic project. It's a farm that will produce crops while also harvesting solar power, but it's not all sunshine and roses. I asked Patrizio Denati, MD of TerraWatt, how the dual-use farming project is progressing.

[00:00:35]Right now in Italy, if you want to realize a solar farm on agricultural land, it must be dual-use, what we call agrivoltaics, right? So, you must find a solution which will integrate the existing agricultural practices with the solar farm, which can sometimes be a technical challenge depending on on what the agriculture is. And also, let's face it, both solar panels and your crops are competing for sunlight. Is there ever a a clash?

[00:00:58]Yes, I think at times there is a this that's a technical challenge, right? So, sometimes you would have a solution where you would have crops growing underneath the solar panels, or you might have crops growing between the rows of solar panels, but there's always a balance to be struck between the benefits to the agriculture and the benefit to the solar.

[00:01:13]>> You've spoken about some of the technical challenges which you've outlined. What about uh bureaucratic and policy challenges? Are you breaking new ground in that way? Uh yes, so uh Italy is notoriously difficult to permit in because obviously we have a uh a a very beautiful landscape with loads of history, and there's lots of interest in preserving that landscape and history, and so you need to obtain some very sometimes convoluted permits which can take a very long time to get. I think we're looking at more or less between 4 and 5 years to get the permit to build a solar farm, which you can then build in less than 6 months. So, these are the challenges that we face.

[00:01:44]Given what we're seeing in the Middle East with the oil price now today for the first time it went over $125 for a barrel of crude, has that pushed Italy more and more towards renewables, towards granting these licenses? Uh I think we've seen this already in 2022 when the war in Ukraine broke out. Italy was one of the most affected countries by the rise in gas prices, and now we're essentially seeing round two of the same issue, right? Having a geopolitically exposed energy supply chain bears risk for the economy of that country. Um and so I believe that, you know, right now we're still living the crisis and the effects are still being felt, but I'm fairly certain that if we look towards 2027 and 2028, there's going to be a very strong push to try to de-risk our energy supply chain because it has implications for inflation, business competitiveness, um and the future of the country. Is it more expensive to set up a dual-use farm uh compared to just installing solar panels on the stop top of a building, for example? Uh Yes, it depends uh in the sense that uh there are always increased costs when you're trying to combine agriculture and uh and solar, but the reality is that even if we were to cover every single building with solar panels, this would still not be enough to satisfy the energy needs or even just the targets that we've set for ourselves as a country for by 2030. This is true of most countries in in Europe. So, some amount of ground mount, it's called ground mount when it's on the field, um will be required regardless of how much rooftop is being installed. You uh are responsible for pulling together the entire project, but you don't manufacture solar panels, do you?

[00:03:18]>> Correct. No, we do not. Almost all of our solar panels are imported from China, essentially, which is the most uh tier one producers, they're called are our Chinese our Chinese firms.

[00:03:27]One of the big barriers, say 10 years ago, was the cost um of uh solar panels.

[00:03:32]Has that come down massively? I mean, are we seeing ongoing decreases in prices, or are they going up again because of what we're seeing globally? I think uh when the first solar installations were being built, they were they were being built for more or less maybe 3 to 4 million per megawatt.

[00:03:50]Now, these can be built for less than 1 million per megawatt. So, there's been an incredible decrease in prices. Um when we started in 2022, we were looking at the the metric for solar panel prices cents per watt. Um so, we're looking at more or less 30 cents per watt. You know, we we closed some orders late late last year for less than 10 cents per watt, right? So, you can see there's already really big decrease. At this point, it's hard to see how it can keep going down, you know, but I think this is probably about as cheap as it's going to get, and then we're hopefully going to maintain this level and maybe see some increase based on, you know, additional transport costs due to the the rise in oil prices um and other geopolitical tensions.