New Delhi: Countries of the Global South need stronger cooperation to share their technological, governance and regulatory experience in agrivoltaics, Makoto Tajima, Senior Research Fellow at Japan’s Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP), said on Wednesday. He was speaking at the Leaders’ Dialogue on the first day of the 7th AgriVoltaics World Conference 2026, held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi under the theme “Powering the Global South.”
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Tajima drew on lessons from more than a decade of agrivoltaics implementation. He stressed affordable technologies, mixed cropping and solar structures built around specific crops. “Choose the crop or the market, design the structure for the machine, the shading number comes last, not first,” he said.
Other speakers at the dialogue put the farmer at the centre of the discussion. Muhammad Khalequzzaman, Bangladesh’s representative, outlined his country’s policy roadmap, pilot projects, farmer awareness efforts and grid connectivity. Farmers’ interests had to come first, he said. “Megawatt is not the issue. The issue is how farmers will be benefited.” Suitable crop selection, farmer education and private investment would all be needed to take agrivoltaics forward, according to Khalequzzaman.
Suman Chandra, Director in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), made a similar point about reaching farmers. She spoke about crop suitability, subsidies, feed-in tariffs and farmer-centric communication. “Good communication is the task half done,” she said. Farmers should be addressed in the languages they prefer, Chandra said, and two-way communication should be strengthened so that they take part in the transition towards Viksit Bharat, or a developed India.
Ashish Khanna, Director General of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), moderated the dialogue. “The potential and opportunities are transformative,” he said, summing up the discussion.
The ISA also released three knowledge products at the session to support agriphotovoltaics deployment worldwide. These were the Global Agriphotovoltaics Climate-Zone Technical Framework, the Agriphotovoltaics Policy & Regulatory Compendium and the ISA Agriphotovoltaics Digital Toolkit.
The framework offers technical guidance on designing systems that suit a given climate and crop. The compendium sets out policy and regulatory approaches across countries, while the toolkit is a digital aid for planning and decision-making. The ISA said the products aim to promote the dual use of land for farming and solar power generation.
The session opened with a keynote by Jaymin Gajjar, Senior Programme Analyst at the ISA. He set out the core principle of agrivoltaics as putting agriculture first and designing solar infrastructure around farm needs. Crop selection, system optimisation and knowledge-sharing were the areas he focused on.
Researchers from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) argued along the same lines. Oliver Hörnle, its Head of Group Agrivoltaics, said agrivoltaic systems vary widely, and the frameworks governing them must be regional, local and practical enough to account for farm needs. “Agrivoltaics only deserves the name when agriculture is being considered as a given framework,” he said.
Hörnle did not see the need for a single global rulebook. “We don’t necessarily need a global standard for agrivoltaics, but what I would love to see is a global understanding of agrivoltaics with agriculture first,” he said. Countries should share their mistakes and challenges as well as their success stories, he added, so that they could learn from each other.
His colleague Brendon Bingwa, Head of Team Agrivoltaics, Technology Integration at Fraunhofer ISE, said technical expertise had to be combined with local partnerships. That combination would produce practical solutions suited to each context, he said, and bring agrivoltaic technologies closer to farmers and their needs.
A second panel, moderated by Awadhesh Jha, Chief of Projects & Programme Implementation Unit at the ISA, took up deployment across different climate zones. Gajjar told the panel that crop requirements, farm machinery, soil conditions and local climate risks must guide how a system is designed. “Climatic zones tell us where to start, while the field or real site tells us where to finish,” he said.
Policy safeguards were also needed, Gajjar said. Minimum crop yields should be kept at 70-80 percent of reference yields, he said, and the Land Equivalent Ratio (LER) should be greater than one.
Gawan Heintze, Board Director at Germany’s Association for Sustainable Agri-PV (VnAP), shared findings from field trials in Bavaria. Different system configurations are being tested there through crop rotation. “The width and spacing of the systems are important for agricultural machinery,” he said. Keeping the ground covered all year round also mattered, he added, because it keeps soil erosion to a minimum.
Dr Mukhammad Muryono, Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Biology at Indonesia’s Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS), said microclimate conditions such as temperature and humidity had to be assessed along with crop health and water management. “We need to look beyond whether crops can grow under the panels and consider the farmers’ livelihoods and the market,” he said.
Vietnam’s experience with feed-in tariff incentives showed the trade-offs between power generation and farm output, according to Do Huy Thiep, Deputy Director of the Institute of Agricultural Economics and Institutions (AEI) at the Vietnam National University of Agriculture (VNUA). “Agrivoltaics policies need to balance energy generation with agricultural production,” he said. Systems built for self-consumption may also need a different approach from grid-connected projects, he noted.
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Ulrike Ebeling, Country Director of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) India, closed the session. She said international collaboration, knowledge exchange and locally adapted solutions were central to advancing agrivoltaics. Countries, researchers, policymakers and farmers had to build stronger partnerships, Ebeling said, so that new technologies could become practical solutions for farm productivity and renewable energy across the Global South.