Austrian agrivoltaic trial reports more wheat under the widest-spaced rows
Victoria Shinder2 min readAustrian agrivoltaics company EWS says winter wheat grown between its tracking solar rows at a research site in Bruck an der Leitha yielded 14% more this year than a control plot without panels. pv magazine reports the figure, which EWS attributes partly to shade and to changes in the microclimate under the modules during the dry summer of 2026.
The detail matters more than the headline. The site, built in 2022 with the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU), was designed as an experiment in row spacing: its movable module tables sit 8, 11 and 14 metres apart, leaving cultivation strips 6, 9 and 12 metres wide. The 14% gain is from the widest, 12-metre strips. In 2024, according to results EWS published earlier, the 6- and 9-metre strips produced wheat yields close to the unshaded control while the 12-metre zone produced about 10% more.
EWS is careful about the claim. BOKU is still analysing this year's harvest, with findings due in the project's final report by the end of 2026, and the company notes that site, crop, weather and soil compaction during construction all influence yields. At a second site, the 4.58 MW Pischelsdorf am Engelbach array in Upper Austria, EWS says soybeans came through the drought well, but it has not published yield data.
The trackers follow the sun in normal operation, can be laid flat for field work, and during harvest the rows can tilt away from each other by up to 70 degrees to let machinery through.
What it means
Agrivoltaic results are easy to over-read, and this one invites it. A single season, a single crop, a company-reported figure and an unfinished university analysis are a reason for interest, not a yield rule. The more durable finding is the pattern across spacings: in both reported years, the widest strips did best and the narrowest did no better than open field. Shade helps a crop under heat and drought stress only up to a point, and the geometry decides where that point is.
For developers, that turns row spacing into the central design trade-off. Wider strips mean less capacity per hectare but better farming results; narrower strips mean more electricity and, on this evidence, no agricultural gain. The final BOKU report will be the number worth quoting.