Optimizing Agrivoltaics Adoption to Support Groundwater Conservation in California’s Central Valley

This model presents results from an intertemporal hydro-economic optimization model of land use and water allocation in California’s Central Valley (CV). We assess potential competition for land use between traditional agricultural production, solar leasing, and agri-voltaics production methods that jointly produce crops and solar electricity on the same unit of land. We evaluate the extent to which setting aside agricultural land for solar generation or switching to agri-voltaics (AV) production methods can provide groundwater conservation benefits under a wide range of illustrative policy scenarios. We find that solar and AV can complement groudnwater conservation efforts in the CV at a local scale, but would require substantial land use change and investment to provide broad water conservation benefits across the region. Our results also highlight the potential for ”water leakage” from concentrated innvestments in solar and AV systems in lieu of traditional crop production as regional crop mix patterns could shift, leading to irrigation intensification in other regions and potentially exacerbating water management challenges.