Virginia Defines Agrivoltaics in Law, Clearing Path for Dual-Use Solar Projects
New legislation gives solar developers and farmers a single regulatory category for co-located solar and agricultural operations, ending a legal ambiguity that had complicated permitting.
Virginia passed legislation formally defining agrivoltaics on Monday (2026-06-29), creating a legal category for projects that combine solar power generation with active farming on the same land. The move, reported by Utility Dive, ends a regulatory ambiguity that had complicated land-use approvals and slowed agrivoltaic development across the state.4
The legislation sets out multiple criteria for what qualifies under the definition. One pillar is flexibility for the farmer — the framework is written to accommodate a range of agricultural practices, including rotational grazing operations in which livestock are cycled systematically across parcels rather than confined to fixed areas. That provision reflects a recognition that dual-use projects only work commercially if the farming component remains genuinely viable.4
For solar developers, the benefit is a clearer path through rural permitting. Without a formal definition, agrivoltaic projects occupied a contested middle ground: they carried too much generation capacity to fit cleanly into agricultural land categories, yet their farming component made county planning authorities reluctant to apply standard utility-solar rules. Virginia's definition creates a single framework applicable to both.4
"That's driving parts of the economy, and it's creating a whole new market for solar-grazed land," one participant in the legislative process said.4
The stakes are significant for the broader U.S. solar expansion. BloombergNEF projected in a May 2026 report that solar will become the largest single source of electricity in the United States by 2035, surpassing coal, oil and natural gas in aggregate.1 Reaching that scale requires sustained access to large land parcels, and in states where the best sites are already developed or protected, agricultural land is increasingly the residual pool.
Virginia hosts a concentrated load center in its data center corridor, and the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2026 projected that server electricity consumption in standalone data centers will grow substantially through 2050, putting upward pressure on both regional generation and transmission capacity.2 Reducing the land-access friction for in-state solar projects directly addresses that supply gap.
The political environment has added complexity. The Economist noted in May 2026 that investment in U.S. solar continued to rise despite what it described as presidential animus toward the sector, a pattern reflecting state and corporate demand pulling ahead of federal policy.3 State-level definitional moves like Virginia's operate in a separate lane from federal subsidy disputes, offering developers a form of regulatory certainty that does not depend on Washington.
Agrivoltaics also addresses an objection that has repeatedly slowed solar permitting at the county level: that utility-scale development permanently removes productive farmland from the agricultural base. Dual-use projects, by definition, maintain farming activity on the parcel. Whether that argument holds up in individual planning reviews is partly a function of how the new state definition interacts with local zoning codes, which in some Virginia jurisdictions explicitly restrict large-scale solar installations.4
The rotational grazing provision suggests the drafters anticipated this challenge and tried to write the definition broadly enough to serve a range of farming operations. The first projects filed under the new framework will test whether county authorities read the state agrivoltaic definition as preempting local solar restrictions or as a guideline subject to local discretion. That determination will set the practical ceiling on how much land the legislation actually opens.4