Power system managers around the world are increasingly facing significant challenges with expanding and sustaining the integration of solar energy technologies. This is the result of both its variable generation and the rapid pace of market growth. According to the International Energy Agency, the total installed capacity of solar photovoltaics around the world took 40 years to reach more than 1,100 GW of cumulative capacity in 2022. It took only two more years to double that total. Most of this recent growth has occurred in China. In 2024, the country added more than 357 GW of solar power, more than twice the amount of the rest of the world combined. Still, the adoption of solar is growing all over the world. In 2025, 4.5 GW of new solar PV capacity was installed in Africa, representing about 54 per cent increase year-on-year, the Global Solar Council says. However, solar energy development still faces several challenges due to grid problems and land use conflicts.
Solar energy is not only a challenge for grid management, it is also adding pressures on other economic sectors. Solar is most productive and cost-effective when installed at utility scale on flat land. This often means that agricultural areas are targeted for solar siting, as they offer productive potential, easy access, and fewer permitting requirements than public lands. This rapid growth of solar PV on farmlands places added pressures on rural areas that are already experiencing fragmentation in agriculture due to urban sprawl. As a result, despite its low-carbon emissions, the energy density of solar PV means that it needs a large land footprint, fueling the argument that the development of PV could severely disrupt food security and supply.
Concerns regarding pressures on food and energy systems have occasioned the need for innovation in technology and policy to help navigate these rather complex difficulties across the agriculture and clean energy industries. Driven by these pressures, along with the continued decline in costs of solar PV, engineers have begun to explore systems that are less burdensome to rural lands, such as the use of PV modules for fences or integrating them with the production of food.
For vulnerable and often isolated rural communities in West Africa, solar development does not only alleviate the age-long challenge of energy poverty, but it also creates a new pathway to re-engineering food security and promoting climate resilience through agrivoltaics which is the integration of solar energy generation and agricultural production on the same piece of land. This technology offers the opportunity for a triple win for both farmers and energy developers, offering pathways to increase both revenues and resources. Agrivoltaics can be deployed without diminishing crop yield, and may even provide some benefits by reducing heat stress on crops. It can significantly reduce water usage on a farm by providing partial shading of crops. At the same time, the electricity produced can be used either onsite or sold back to a utility. These impacts can all produce financial savings. Even on small scale agrivoltaics installations, revenue from the power generated could be much greater than that earned solely from agricultural activity on a similar sized plot of land. This is on top of avoided expenses resulting from reduced water usage.
To promote the widespread adoption of agrivoltaics in manner that helps reduce energy poverty while ensuring food security in rural West Africa, a team of researchers from the Oregon State University (USA) traveled to West Africa in the summer of 2025 to investigate the opportunities that exists for adoption. The research mission was particularly important because, in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is estimated by the IEA that West Africa has the highest energy poverty rates, electrification rates in the region stood at a low coverage of 29% in rural areas once again demonstrating a need for alternative energy sources to propel development in these areas. Visiting both Nigeria and Ghana and partnering with some of the foremost universities in both countries, the team interacted with several categories of stakeholders including government officials, renewable energy developers, farmers and agri-business owners and researchers. Although the technology was well received, it immediately became clear that deploying it in climate vulnerable countries such as Nigeria and Ghana pose significant policy and socioeconomic challenges. Some of the immediate pathways to adoption in these areas include introducing context-specific policy and market mechanisms that promotes private investments into the technology and encourages social acceptance.
Adding Value with Battery Storage
One of the critiques of solar and wind power is that the technologies cause significant problems for power grid management due to the limitation of variability and predictability of generation. Energy storage from batteries (more formally called battery energy storage systems, or BESS) is therefore particularly valuable. Most importantly, batteries help with load levelling, storing excess generation when electricity is abundant and cheap (periods of low demand) and dispatching it when demand and prices spike, or when there are unexpected electrical outages. Energy storage also has importance beyond mitigating supply and demand disparities. It provides voltage and power soothing, ensuring stable, even energy delivery by regulating fluctuations and surges. Moreover, it avoids the need to rely on building new power plants or relying on peaker plants that are powered mostly by fossil fuels. Batteries are even more valuable in rural areas such as those found in West Africa because it allows for storage of energy that could be used to not only continue agricultural activities such as storage but for basic uses such as electricity for children to study at night.
The most common types of rechargeable batteries include lithium-ion, nickel-cadmium and lead acid batteries. Over the last decade, these types of battery energy storage systems have gained recognition as a potential solution to mitigating these risks to the electric power grid. When compared to other emerging technologies, battery energy storage systems possess higher flexibility in terms of storage capacity, rapid response capabilities, and scalability, which makes them a reliable solution for enhancing the stability of local and even regional grids. In addition, as the costs of both solar PV and batteries rapidly fall (both have dropped by more than 90 percent in the past ten years) the integrating of battery energy storage systems with solar PV will become even more cost-friendly over time.
As agrivoltaics continues to gain traction as a viable response to the competing demands of farmland and clean energy generation, incorporating onsite battery systems provides an additional opportunity to extend the benefits to agricultural communities (particularly those that are isolated or not tied to the grid) to enhance energy reliability, local resilience, and cost-effectiveness.
Combining agrivoltaics with BESS produces a rather potent combination that improves profitability, operational efficacy, flexibility, and sustainability of individual farms and larger agricultural systems. This integration has the capacity to address problems such as unreliable power supply and difficulties with grid management in rural areas. For farmers who choose to opt for additional revenue and in jurisdictions that support off-taker agreements from private power producers, farmers can sell stored power back to the grid. In other scenarios, energy stored may be used for other essential agricultural activities such as irrigation and refrigeration which may have to continue long after the sun settles or when peak demand may be causing electricity supply challenges for isolated farms. Studies are finding that farms which have leveraged this powerful integration have been identified to be economically viable, allowing farms to achieve greater energy independence by removing the requirement for unreliable grid power or even very expensive diesel generators.
In the broad context of mitigating climate change and promoting technologies that safeguard energy and food supply even for the most isolated vulnerable communities, agrivoltaics may just be a remedy, especially when deployed with battery energy storage systems. The team from Oregon State University envisions pilot projects in selected rural sites in Nigeria and Ghana to gather data that will be helpful in making projections on the most suitable locations and climatic conditions for agrivoltaics in the West Africa sub-region. Techno-economic modelling will also be developed to identify more accurate estimates of implementing agrivoltaics installation in these West African countries. Undoubtedly, the unresolved conflicts over large-scale solar energy deployment and land use serve as a reminder that there is an opportunity to take advantage of technological and economic opportunities to change practices that are deeply embedded in the fossil-fuel based global economy.
About the Authors:
Patrick Dapaa Kwao is a PhD student at Oregon State University with a major specialization in renewable energy policy, energy transitions and the design of policy mechanisms that encourage investment in climate-smart energy and agricultural technologies. He previously served as an investment promotion official with the Government of Ghana.
David Bernell is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University. He is the author of “The Energy Security Dilemma: U.S. Policy and Practice,“ and “Constructing US Foreign Policy: The Curious Case of Cuba.“ He also served in the Clinton Administration with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and the U.S. Department of the Interior.
