Agrivoltaics (also called agrisolar) is the practice of using the same land for both solar energy production and agriculture at the same time.

Instead of choosing between installing solar panels or growing crops, agrivoltaics combines the two into a dual-use system where solar panels are designed and positioned to allow farming to continue underneath or around them.

Water Efficiency & Drought Resilience

Water is the defining constraint in New Mexico agriculture—and agrivoltaics directly addresses it:

• Solar shading can reduce evaporation by up to ~14–50% in arid environments
• Systems can be designed to power irrigation directly via on-site solar (DG)
• Reduced water demand translates to lower operating costs and increased crop survivability
  
  

In practice, this means farms can:

• Maintain production during drought conditions
• Extend growing seasons
• Reduce reliance on increasingly scarce surface water
  
  

Distributed Generation (DG) as Farm Infrastructure. By pairing agrivoltaics with distributed generation, Somos transforms farms into energy-producing assets:

• Behind-the-meter solar offsets farm energy use (pumping, cooling, processing)
• Excess generation can be sold via community solar or utility interconnection
• Systems can operate as microgrids, providing resilience during outages
  
  

This creates stacked value streams:

• Agricultural revenue
• Energy cost savings
• Energy sales (PPA / community solar)
  
  

Land Value Multiplication (Not Trade-Off) Traditional solar development competes with agriculture for land. Agrivoltaics eliminates that trade-off.