Food system resilience is increasingly challenged by climate change and global trade volatility, even in high-income nations. Agrivoltaics (co-locating crops and solar photovoltaic technologies) offers a sustainable production strategy to optimize land use and address both food and energy security. A recent study that looked at lettuce production during a heat wave found crazy high yield increases by putting the lettuce in agrivoltaic shade. Scientists found over 400% as much lettuce under solar panels compared to unshaded control plants and by over 200% relative to the national average yield . But that may have been just a freak event – a few days of a particularly hot summer crushing the yield of lettuce. What about the future? While most agrivoltaic studies like the one above focus on current climates, a new study evaluates lettuce production under a future climate and the shielding impact agrivoltaics could play.

Future Climate Study on Lettuce With Solar Panel Shade

The study grew lettuce under simulated 2025 and 2050 climates using sealed biomes, integrating scenario analysis into agrivoltaic system design. Ten PV module transparencies were tested to advance innovative sustainable food-energy systems for the future, including semitransparent thin-film cadmium telluride and crystalline silicon modules. The latter are the most common types of solar modules and the ones you are used to seeing on buildings. The 69% transparent crystalline silicon modules obtained the higher transparency simply by leaving off rows of solar cells. That type of solar panel demonstrated the strongest adaptability among agrivoltaic treatments, achieving fresh weights good in current climates (2025) and only a little worse in future climates (2050), with select replicates exceeding control yields a little bit (by up to 3.6%). Lettuce production simply got worse in the higher temperatures of a future climate. Despite a 26.8% yield decline under the 2050 control, select treatments (e.g., 30% and 60% thin film and 69% crystalline silicon) limited losses, and the 40% semitransparent cadmium telluride treatment even improved yield. Agrivoltaic treatments also enhanced water-use efficiency and maintained strong physiological performance.

Not Only Future Climate Protection, But Solar Shaded Lettuce Could Bring in Money

We already know that with agrivoltaics you get inexpensive power , agricultural jobs and perhaps most importantly more food. Putting that all together shows lettuce agrivoltaics would make money . Agrivoltaics has since exploded into a >$20 billion dollar market and from the results of the future climate studies looks like it will only get bigger. The Vatican already is 100% powered by agrivoltaics and it looks like people in the surrounding area will enjoy more fresh food. The economic value of lettuce is ~4x the value of agrivoltaic-generated electricity on the same land area so the farmers win economically too.

Economic modeling under a hypothetical 25% import tariff scenario projects up to CAD $779 million in value for Canadian-grown agrivoltaic lettuce, highlighting the role of such systems in circular food-energy production, trade risk mitigation, and sustainable urban provisioning.

This study demonstrated the viability of agrivoltaics as a climate-adaptive, resource-efficient production system within future sustainability transitions. This is not the first, earlier we saw that agrivoltaics could similarly protect what is normally considered a southern crop: amaranth . It appears that in the future in hotter climates a good way to keep from getting yields of produce destroyed is to partially shade them with solar panels. The fact that solar generated electricity costs less than the grid electricity now, is really just a bonus. If we want to eat as much salad in the future, agrivoltaics looks like a good solution to climate change challenges.