Frontiers in multi-benefit value stacking for solar development on working lands

Abstract

Global solar power generation is predicted to expand significantly in the coming decades. Croplands and rangelands - commonly called working lands - will likely absorb a significant share of new utility-scale solar capacity due to land availability and proximity to existing load centers and transmission infrastructure. Beyond meeting energy needs, working lands already provide critical ecosystem services like food production, nature-based recreation, and biodiversity conservation. In the context of such competition for working lands, studies and real-world experiments have begun to investigate the co-location of solar with agriculture, habitat conservation, and water conservation, including through low-impact solar development. This has resulted in a patchwork of co-location approaches across multiple disciplines such as energy planning and policy, food systems science, and natural resources management. Prior work is also largely dominated by approaches to co-locate just one activity with solar development. However, beyond this patchwork lies a new frontier — an emerging need for broader and more deliberate consideration of multiple energy and non-energy activities on working lands. Therefore, in lieu of the current array of fragmented approaches and to facilitate a more systematic exploration of this new frontier, we offer a new Multi-Benefit Value Stacking (MBVS) framework to explore land use efficiencies from co-location of solar generation and non-energy uses on working lands, a clear conceptual definition of such opportunities and the scales at which they can be considered, a table of compiled examples, and key gaps for research and policy.

Explaining the emergence of land-use frontiers

“…Traditional smallholder colonist frontiers often expand into land occupied by Indigenous people, as do many corporate or commodity frontiers, which also expand into areas occupied by smallholders, semi-subsistence or traditional land uses, including pastoralists systems. Recently emerging renewable energy frontiers also typically expand on land already used, although it can also ‘stack’ onto these lands, for example, through agrivoltaics [ 127 ].…”