New Jersey Awards 16 Dual-Use Solar Projects Totaling 52.06 MW in Its First Agrivoltaics Solicitation

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities awarded 16 solar projects totaling 52.06 MW on August 17, 2026, in the first solicitation of its Dual-Use Pilot Agrivoltaics program. The projects sit on working farms in eight counties: Atlantic, Cumberland, Gloucester, Hunterdon, Mercer, Monmouth, Salem and Warren. Each pairs generation with active farming, including soybeans, hay, grains, vegetables, fruit and livestock. The pilot can support up to 200 MW over three years, and individual projects are generally capped at 10 MW.

What the Board Awarded

Agrivoltaics places panels above or among crops and grazing land rather than taking the field out of production. That distinction is the whole point of the program. New Jersey is dense and its farmland is under development pressure, so a solar buildout that competes with agriculture for acreage runs into a hard political limit. Dual-use is the attempt to route around that limit by using the same acre twice.

Interest ran well ahead of the award. The first solicitation drew 33 preliminary proposals totaling roughly 140 MW, against the 52.06 MW the board actually approved. Projects must sit on unpreserved farmland already in active agricultural or horticultural use. Eligible teams must include a landowner, a farmer and a solar operator, and the farmer has to participate meaningfully in planning and operation rather than simply leasing the ground.

How the Pilot Is Structured

The program comes from the Dual-Use Solar Energy Act of 2021. The board runs it with the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, the Department of Environmental Protection, the State Agriculture Development Committee, and Rutgers University’s Agrivoltaics Program. That last partner matters more than it looks. A pilot only produces useful evidence if someone measures crop yield under the panels, and Rutgers is the party positioned to do it.

NJBPU president Ben Hertz-Shargel said the program lets farmers make operations more profitable while adding capacity to the grid, and keeps farmland in active production. State senator Bob Smith, who sponsored the 2021 act, said the 16 projects show the state does not have to choose between farmland and generation capacity. Lessons from the full pilot are meant to inform a permanent agrivoltaics program.

Why It Matters

At 52.06 MW this is small next to utility-scale procurement, and it is worth being honest about that. The interesting number is not the capacity but the ratio. The board approved barely more than a third of the megawatts proposed, which suggests the screen on farm eligibility and team structure is doing real work rather than waving projects through.

The open question is cost. Mounting panels high enough to farm underneath means more steel and more expensive racking than a conventional ground mount, and no public figure yet shows what premium these 16 projects carry. Whether dual-use scales past a pilot depends on whether that premium is smaller than the cost of the land fights it avoids. The three-year pilot window is when that answer arrives.

Sources

• Solar Power World, New Jersey greenlights 16 agrivoltaics projects on local farms, August 17, 2026
• NJBPU, NJBPU Opens Highly Anticipated Dual-Use Solar Program to Establish New Revenue Stream for Farmers
• Rutgers Agrivoltaics Program, NJBPU Opens Dual-Use Solar Program
• Office of the Governor, Governor Sherrill Nominates Ben Hertz-Shargel as Commissioner of the Board of Public Utilities, June 5, 2026

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