‘Agrivoltaics’ can both power AI data centres and increase food production — new study
‘Agrivoltaics’ can both power AI data centres and increase food production — new study
Publish Date: 2026-06-17 11:37:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
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.
Read more:
The gift that keeps on giving: How solar panels on farms can help increase crop yields
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…
