Now that technological breakthroughs have revealed solar power's potential as a source of electricity and have scaled its development across countries looking to decarbonize their energy systems, an opportunity cost in land use has inevitably emerged.
While sunlight can be inexhaustible during sunny days, solar facilities require a lot of land, possessing a particular bias on flat, sunny terrains that also characterize the fields used for farming. In the Philippines, a net food and energy importer, the growth of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is projected to take up significant agricultural space. As a rule of thumb, a hectare of land can be used to build a megawatt of solar energy capacity or produce about four metric tons of rice each year.
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