October 17 ribbon-cutting brings farmers, community leaders, solar industry together in celebration

Media Contacts:
Ashish Kapoor, Senior Energy and Climate Advisor, [email protected]; 540-347-2334, x7054
Teddy Pitsiokos, Community Farm Manager[email protected]; 540-347-2334, x7069

Aldie, Va. (Oct. 24, 2025) – On an appropriately sunny Friday afternoon, Oct. 17, more than 70 community members came together at The Piedmont Environmental Council’s Community Farm at Roundabout Meadows to officially “cut the ribbon” on Virginia’s first crop-based agrivoltaics project. The ribbon-cutting ceremony was a celebration and announcement of the culmination of 18 months of research, planning, collaboration, installation, and planting.

In his opening remarks, PEC Senior Energy and Climate Advisor and project lead Ashish Kapoor explained that Virginia lacks a formal definition of agrivoltaics, but is moving toward a general consensus. “We want some sort of agricultural production done under panels where the arrays are developed in conjunction with the agricultural side, with agriculture driving the development of that project.” (Video clip, :33)

Initially planning to add rooftop solar to its Community Farm, the harvest of which is fully donated to local food pantry partners, PEC established the quarter-acre demonstration site to explore a dual land-use solution — bringing crop-based agriculture and solar-voltaics together. The intent is to enable energy independence for farmers and to better position smaller scale distributed generation and battery storage as a much larger part of the Commonwealth’s clean energy system, all without sacrificing working farmland.

“This project really isn’t that much more complicated [than barn rooftop solar]. Ultimately, you’re generating solar energy; we have two power walls [in that shed] that provide battery storage that allows us to really run this farm… I just checked the stats today and 97% of the farm was run by just the solar panels and battery storage. So that’s really it. It’s not that different than a rooftop solar array, and it falls into that same space of distributed generation. So you’re creating energy on the site and you’re using it on the site, and anything you’re not using, you’re getting credited for,” Kapoor said. (Video clip, 1:30)

PEC, a land conservation organization, advocates for clean energy solutions that respect and preserve the region’s natural resources and rural economy. The agrivoltaics project serves as a demonstration site for farmers, installers, developers and policymakers to visit and to inform distributed generation policy in Virginia. PEC hopes the project will create a path forward that supports both Virginia’s climate goals and its agriculture — a critical backbone of the Commonwealth’s economy.

Project Highlights:

• Dual-use production: 42 solar panels are installed 6-8 feet high, with vegetable crops growing both in-ground and in raised beds underneath. Four rows of vegetables are planted directly in the ground to mimic a traditional farm setup, and four rows are planted in raised beds. A portion of the project not under solar array will also serve as a control group. Cold-weather crops growing now include: cabbages, lettuces, green onions, turnips, broccoli, bok choy, collard greens… all guided by what is needed by local food pantry partners.
• Battery Backup: The system includes a built-in battery that keeps the farm running, even when the grid goes down. When combined with other solar-plus-battery systems in the region, this battery can also function as a future revenue stream for farmers through virtual power plants.
• Farm energy independence: The fully operational panels and battery backup together generate enough to power the farm’s energy needs, from well pumps to refrigeration. Well pumps require significant power to start, one of the reasons for the substantial battery capacity.
• Replicability: The design is engineered for easy adoption by other farmers, and the raised beds make the project equally relevant to smaller applications, including urban settings, parking lots, rooftops — especially flat rooftops — and other built environments.
• Demonstration site: PEC constructed this crop-based agrivoltaics project as a template for learning, policy making, and replicability, and designed it with accessibility for visitors in mind.

Farm Preservation and Energy Independence

A tension often exists between the clean energy and land conservation communities in Virginia, where utility-scale solar proposals to meet the state’s 100% carbon-free energy by 2045 often threaten hundreds and sometimes thousands of acres of working farmland and forests — each with their own environmental and community benefits. Virginia needs to decrease barriers and increase incentives to make distributed generation — which has wide agreement and connects clean energy to the grid more quickly than larger-scale solar — more accessible to more people.

“The subject of solar being a form of competition with farmland and being something that is debatable in a lot of communities. As I talk with people about that, I hear people say ‘why don’t you do solar on parking lots… on rooftops… on brownfields?’ What I’m hearing people say when they say that is, “Why don’t we do solar projects where they’re not the only use of land, and have another use of that land along with it? And if that’s on agricultural land, can we keep that in agriculture? I think those are great questions to ask and great goals to try to achieve,” said Commissioner Joseph Guthrie, of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, during his remarks at the ribbon-cutting. (Video Clip) 

Meanwhile, with rising land prices and a national food system that favors large-scale industrial agriculture, Virginia lost nearly 500,000 acres of farmland between 2017 and 2022, according to the Virginia Farm Bureau. As farmers increasingly struggle to remain financially solvent, the temptation to convert arable agricultural soils into solar arrays for income is compelling. Dual-use agrivoltaics can provide an effective way to significantly reduce farmers’ utility costs and create new income streams while keeping the land in agricultural production.

“Our goal was to be energy independent. Farms live at the end of the distribution line, the first to go out, the last to get fixed, going two or three days without power. We designed this system so the battery storage was sufficient that the pumps will turn on based on battery power. The battery-sun combination makes this a workable proposition and is key to being independent,” said PEC President Chris Miller. (Video Clip).

Miller noted that if every farm in Virginia produced just 1 megawatt of power through an agrivoltaics approach, Virginia could produce 40,000 megawatts, twice Virginia’s peak load (before the surge in data centers). “That’s enough to power everything we have… all with solar and all at a scale we’re all comfortable with. So let’s do that. Let’s figure out how we can get [every farm] taking care of themselves first and then hooked into the grid,” he said. (Video Clip)

Built with Replicability in Mind

Community Farm Manager and agricultural lead on the project, Teddy Pitsiokos, explained that the raised beds, not typical in a farm setting, are just part of the research. “Growing in-ground is what we do on farms in general in our nice Virginia soil…. These raised beds were an important part of the project, and while it is more expensive to grow in these beds, the whole idea of this project is that we want the information we’re gathering and the voices we’re bringing to the table to be relevant and useful to people who might not have agricultural soil to be growing in, who are thinking about doing this in an urban farming setting, on an impervious surface.” said Pitsiokos.

“Over the next several seasons, we’ll be trying out different crops as we go, so we will be doing some warm weather crops next year, and we’ll be sharing that data. We want it to work. We want to grow good food out here and we want it to grow well. So far so good. It’s part of my job to be skeptical, and we were a little bit skeptical along the way, but I think it looks pretty good,” Pitsiokos said.

Planning for the project began in March 2024, and in September 2025, plantings went into the soil and solar panels were connected to the grid. Along the way, Kapoor and Pitsiokos have encountered a variety of surprises, delays and budget overruns that are the predictable and intended point of a pilot project. “From hammering through bedrock, permitting and interconnection issues, added grid expenses and more, we are making that investment and figuring out the pain points to help shape local and state policy that can make projects like this easier for farmers,” Kapoor said.

“Research and demonstration are really important, because seeing is believing, not just for our farmers, but for our elected officials, our policymakers. And it’s important to have that buy-in and experience and opportunity for our farmers to take part in this learning,” said Rachel Henley, a fourth-generation dairy and grain farmer and advocacy specialist with the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation. “As a young farmer, it’s really encouraging to see other opportunities, because land access is really hard, so the more we can encourage a dual-use opportunity instead of losing that land to a single use is really important.” (Video clip)

“What’s really kind of neat about agrivoltaics is it’s different for each region, so what works in your particular soil type, what you grow in that region, the precipitation, the climate. There are hundreds of these projects in Europe, and north Germany versus south Germany are wildly different, Japan I think has 2,000 or 3,000 projects…. So it’s really important to do more of these. The purpose of this project isn’t just for us to talk about this for five years. Our hope is that other folks can do this in their region and share and then we can build good local and state policy based off of those findings,” Kapoor said. (Video clip, :20)

Accessibility through net metering

PEC is also encouraging the public to engage with the State Corporation Commission to maintain the current 1:1 net metering structure, which is critical to keeping distributed energy sources like agrivoltaics viable for small farms and homeowners. Net metering is a policy that allows people with solar to get a fair credit on their bill for the excess energy they produce from their system.

Dominion Energy views net metering as a threat to its bottom line, so the utility company is more than willing to sacrifice the many benefits of distributed generation, including ratepayer savings, grid reliability and environmental impacts, to maximize profits for its shareholders. PEC has recently commissioned and released the results of a study that calculates the actual value of distributed solar generation, factoring in the range of benefits that utilities do not acknowledge when they propose big cuts to net metering values.

The analysis by Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors demonstrates that small-scale, distributed solar delivers substantial value that far exceeds what is currently acknowledged under Dominion’s net billing framework. “As Virginia advances toward its clean energy targets under the Virginia Clean Economy Act, policy frameworks must reflect the full range of benefits provided by distributed solar and storage to avoid underinvestment in these resources and overreliance on other, less beneficial energy sources,” Kapoor said. (Video clip explaining net metering)

LEARN MORE: View video updates and project details at pecva.org/agrivoltaics

#####

Links for media (please credit Hugh Kenny, Piedmont Environmental Council):

• Downloadable, high resolution images 
• B-roll of the actual ribbon-cutting
• Ceremony full recording
• Full-length speaker remarks
  • PEC Senior Energy and Climate Advisor Ashish Kapoor, Part 1
  • PEC Senior Energy and Climate Advisor Ashish Kapoor, Part 2
  • PEC Community Farm Manager Teddy Pitsiokos
  • VA Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Joseph Guthrie
  • Virginia Farm Bureau Federation Advocacy Specialist Rachel Henley
  • PEC President Chris Miller 

The Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) works to protect and restore the lands and waters of the Virginia Piedmont, while building stronger, more sustainable communities. Founded in 1972, PEC is a locally based, community-supported 501(c)3 nonprofit and accredited land trust. At the core of PEC’s approach is a focus on educating, engaging and empowering people to effect positive change in their communities.