Chairperson's Message: Welcome to AgriVoltaics Conference 2024

Building Food-Energy-Water Resilience through Agrivoltaics at Multiple Scales

We warmly welcome you to 5^thAgrivoltaics World Conference 2024 in Denver, Colorado. After one online conference and three world conferences across Europe and Asia, we are excited to showcase the unique ways agrivoltaics is being deployed in North America.

Building on the successive achievements of the prior conferences, we have a diverse set of research topic areas, world class experts, and exciting tours of agrivoltaic facilities. We are also expanding our audience and participants and including more industry representation, agricultural participants, and sessions focused on social, economic, and equity aspects of agrivoltaics.

Our goal is to connect the scientific and non-scientific communities necessary for agrivoltaics to flourish. We also recognize that the most appropriate configuration, size, and type of agrivoltaics system will differ from place to place, and farm to farm. At this conference, including through our exciting field visits, we want to emphasize unique agrivoltaic solutions across small- and large-scales, as well as consider how different types of agrivoltaic systems (crop production, pollinator habitat and ecosystem service provision, grazing, and rooftop agrivoltaics) can all complement each other in a single geographic region.

Academic research has demonstrated the potential for agrivoltaics to enhance resilience by conserving water, enabling food production in new areas, and encouraging the development of distributed energy generation. Building out our broader understanding of agrivoltaic systems will force us to link our region- and country-specific findings into a collective framework that allows us to work across boundaries, borders, and socio-environmental spaces. Resilient agrivoltaic systems will need tailored solutions for different locations to ensure agricultural, ecosystem, and societal needs are being appropriately being met. This year’s meeting will intentionally bridges these communities across disciplines and facilitate the co-creation of new agrivoltaic insights and greater impacts of agrivoltaic systems.

Colorado and Arizona have emerged as epicenters of agrivoltaics development and innovation in the United States, but Arizona is simply too hot to host us in the summer. Nestled in the beautiful Rocky Mountains, Colorado has seen agrivoltaic deployment across multiple scales, PV technology types and configurations, and agrivoltaic applications. Please join us here for the 2024 conference, which will include tours to crop production, grazing, pollinator, and rooftop agrivoltaic sites at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Jack’s Solar Garden, Denver Botanic Gardens, Colorado State University’s SPUR campus and ARDEC facilities, and more!   

We invite all researchers, farmers and ranchers, project developers, government agencies, agrivoltaic experts, and all of those interested to join us in sharing insights on agrivoltaics in Denver!

Co-Chairs:

• Jordan Macknick (National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
• Greg Barron-Gafford (University of Arizona)