New Delhi, Aug. 4 -- The Centre is testing whether the country's vast agricultural landscape can be tapped to produce both food and electricity through agrivoltaics-a system that grows crops beneath elevated solar panels. With pilots already in place, advisories for the use of this tech may be launched as early as next kharif season, according to officials involved in the project. Of the almost 37 pilot studies running across the country, the benchmark Indian Agricultural Research Institute's (IARI) study has completed its first season of crop trials, with preliminary findings suggesting that while leafy vegetables appear well suited to cultivation under solar panels, cereals such as rice and wheat may be more sensitive to shading, a senior Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) official told HT. According to another official of the agriculture ministry, "mustard showed great promise." The research comes as the government searches for ways to rapidly expand solar power generation without triggering conflicts over land use. Solar will have to account for much of India's future renewable energy additions, requiring annual capacity additions of roughly 35-40 GW, but acquiring large contiguous tracts of land for conventional solar parks has increasingly become a challenge. "Agrivoltaics offers the possibility of producing food and electricity from the same parcel of land," PS Brahmanand, Project Director of the Centre of Excellence on Agrivoltaics at IARI, told HT, explaining that the objective is to generate scientific evidence that can guide large-scale deployment. The Centre of Excellence, established with support from the MNRE, the National Institute of Solar Energy and Germany's GIZ, has so far tested growing crops, including cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, mustard and other vegetables beneath elevated solar structures. Fresh trials during the ongoing kharif season will expand the work to vegetables, paddy, and selected millets before scientists begin drawing conclusions across multiple seasons. Brahmanand says the project is intended to answer questions that have so far prevented agrivoltaics from moving beyond experimental projects in India. "Rather than identifying a handful of suitable crops, we hope to develop a crop suitability matrix for different agro-climatic zones, quantify the impact on yields, estimate water savings, evaluate additional farm income from electricity generation and design commercially viable models suited to India's predominantly small landholdings," he said. "The science is more complex than simply determining whether crops can tolerate shade." The findings will be compounded over the next two years and the technology will be launched at a mass scale thereafter, he said. Some crops are already expected to perform better than others. Brahmanand, however, stresses that even crops currently viewed as less suitable should not be ruled out until complete data is available....