Faced with the heatwave, agriculture must also learn to protect itself: agrivoltaics on reasonable areas and with human-scale projects can contribute to this

Heatwaves are becoming a lasting reality with serious consequences for French agriculture. The summer of 2026 provides further evidence of this: extreme temperatures, drought, weakened crops, pressured yields, and increasingly precious water resources.

Faced with this reality, our agriculture is entering a new stage: producing, but also sustainably protecting our capacity to produce.

By combining agriculture and energy production on the same plot, it makes it possible to imagine a new generation of agricultural infrastructures, capable of both contributing to the production of decarbonized, renewable and competitive electricity for sale, self-consumption and supporting the adaptation of certain crops to climate change.

The modulated shade from the panels can reduce exposure to the most intense radiation, mitigate extreme temperatures, limit evapotranspiration and thus help to reduce thermal and water stress.

The solar panel then becomes more than just an energy tool: it becomes a tool at the service of the plant, the animal and the farmer.

This is the vision that France Agrivoltaïsme promotes: an agrivoltaism designed from agricultural needs, adapted to each crop, each farm and each territory, based on agronomy, research and evaluation of results.

The question is simple: how can we use technology to enhance the resilience of our farms?

Our food sovereignty will depend tomorrow on our ability to adapt French agriculture to new climatic conditions.

Water, soil, seeds, irrigation, farming practices, and diversification form the foundations of this adaptation. Agrivoltaics enriches this toolbox by harnessing an abundant resource—the sun—to simultaneously address several challenges:

To produce renewable and competitive electricity.
Protecting certain crops against extreme weather.
Conserve more of the available water.
Strengthening the economic resilience of farms.
To contribute to our energy and food sovereignty.

This convergence opens up a powerful prospect for French agriculture. As photovoltaics gains in competitiveness and technologies progress – panel control, storage, agronomic monitoring, energy management – agrivoltaics becomes a true energy and agricultural infrastructure for the territory.

Our ambition must now be to accelerate: develop research, multiply experiments, measure results by culture and territory and rapidly disseminate solutions that demonstrate their effectiveness.

Climate change necessitates a phase-out of fossil fuels and transforms agricultural production conditions. Innovation provides us with the means to respond.

Making the sun a source of energy while using its shade to protect our crops: that is the whole promise of agrivoltaics.

Agriculture that produces. Agriculture that protects itself. More resilient agriculture.

This is the type of agriculture that France Agrivoltaïsme wants to help build.

Opinion piece by Thierry Vergnaud, co-president of France Agrivoltaïsme ( LinkedIn ).