On May 4, RENEL hosted AGRISOL’s co-creation workshop at the Alexandria Innovation Zone in Thessaloniki, Greece. The workshop started with the project’s overview delivered by AGRISOL’s coordinating partner, Q-PLAN International. A panel discussion followed, bringing together voices from regional public administration, energy consulting, business and solar industry actors . An engaging discussion among the panelist and the participants followed before engaging the audience to a World Café session to identify barriers and co-design support measures. The session aimed at validating AGRISOL’s preliminary research: agrivoltaics (APV) is seen as promising in Greece, but their uptake is held back by unclear regulation, limited hands-on experience, high costs, and low awareness among farmers. What stood out in Greece specifically was the weight placed on Greece’s newly introduced legal framework for APV which was deemed as complex in practice, with caps on installed capacity, land coverage, structure height, and restrictions tied to high-productivity farmland. Participants also pointed to a lack of coordination between the Ministry of Environment and Energy and the Ministry of Rural Development and Food, given that APV inherently relates to both.
A theme that surfaced repeatedly, and set the Greek discussion apart, was reputation. Conventional solar parks have, in various Greek rural areas, become associated with land abandonment and landscape change, leaving a degree of local mistrust that APVs now must overcome. Participants stressed that communication needs to draw a clear, visible line between those two. Closely related was a recurring question that arose from a farmer representative: whether APV genuinely works for specific crops or not. Cotton and wheat, which are common Greek open-field cultivars, came up as example cases where farmers are not yet convinced that they can be coupled with APVs.. In contrast, greenhouses, orchards, and livestock farming could be more relevant in the case of APVs , where shading, water savings, and added income streams are viewed favorably.
Cost and financing emerged as the top overall priority. High upfront investment, combined with limited access to bank credit for farmers with modest liquidity, was flagged as the single biggest obstacle to scale. The ESCO model, where a specialized company takes on the financing, design, and management of an APV installation, reducing the farmer’s own risk and complexity, drew particular interest from the business community present, alongside cooperative and collective ownership structures that could let smaller farms pool resources.
Beyond financing, participants converged on the need for a practical, crop-specific technical guide and a platform or service path showing which crops, regions, and farm types are best suited to APV in Greek conditions, echoing the country’s diverse agricultural base, from olive groves and orchards to specialty products. Locally validated pilot projects were considered essential to build the kind of concrete, farm-level evidence that generic information aboutAPVs simply doesn’t provide.
On tools, stakeholders want the future APV Assessment Tool and the ASEP platform to stay grounded and usable: crop-suitability mapping, a plain-language regulatory checklist, financial viability estimates, and links to real case studies and funding opportunities: all built for farmers and local advisors, not specialists. A recurring request was for the platform to explain clearly, in Greek, how APVs differ from a conventional solar park, since that distinction is doing a lot of work in whether the technology gets easily accepted locally.
Looking ahead, participants asked for future sessions to reach a wider circle of farmers and cooperatives. There was also broad support for treating agrivoltaics as more than an energy project. Several stakeholders framed it explicitly as a tool for rural resilience, addressing depopulation and the shrinking presence of young people in Greek farming, not just a new source of electricity.
