The Southeast has more farmland, more sun, and more food insecurity than almost anywhere in the country. It has almost no agrivoltaics policy.
The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy put numbers to that gap in a report published August 4. Across the United States, 671 agrivoltaic sites cataloged by the National Laboratory of the Rockies generate more than 13 gigawatts of electricity, and the true count is likely higher once unreported sites are counted. Massachusetts pays a $0.09 per kilowatt-hour adder for dual-use solar. Colorado has awarded $1.3 million in agrivoltaics grants over three years. Maryland gives property tax exemptions for agrivoltaics projects. In the Southeast, there is no state policy or mandate for agrivoltaics at all. North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida offer guidance and voluntary programs, mostly built around pollinator habitat. Guidance is not an incentive. It does not pay for the higher cost of raising panels high enough to farm under, and it does not give a small operation a bankable second income.
The systems behind that gap are plain to see. Utilities in the Southeast operate as regulated monopolies, so there is little pressure to open the grid to small-farm solar. The region has few renewable mandates to force the issue. Grazing is the main form of agrivoltaics here so far, and Tennessee-based Silicon Ranch holds the largest wholly-owned agrivoltaics portfolio in the country, which shows the model works on working land. What is missing is the policy layer that turns scattered examples into something a farmer can plan around: a payment for dual-use generation, a tax break, a grant program, a definition in law. Nine states considered agrivoltaics bills last year, and none of them were in the Southeast. Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina have published studies on solar and agricultural land, and the University of Georgia and North Carolina State University are doing the practical research. The knowledge is building. The law is not.
Federal policy has made the math harder, not easier. The USDA Rural Energy for America Program was halted March 31, 2026 pending new rules. An April 2026 court injunction blocked five agency directives and could clear the path for 57 gigawatts of stalled solar capacity, but the Department of Justice appealed it in June. A farmer weighing panels over a field cannot build a plan on an injunction under appeal and a grant program on hold.
That is the stakes for the Black Belt. The land is here, the farmers are here, and the need is here. What is not here is the policy infrastructure that makes agrivoltaics pay for the people who would host it. Until that changes, the Southeast will keep watching other states pay farmers for the same work its farmers are already positioned to do. The sun is not the constraint. The policy is.
