Agrisolar Farms for Farmers

The ask

Develop a land-lease and power-purchase model that installs elevated solar panels over agricultural land in Bangladesh — farmers receive a guaranteed land-lease income, crop production continues beneath the panels (with some crops outperforming in the partial shade), and the solar power is sold to the national grid or used for on-farm irrigation, with surplus revenue shared back to the farmer.

Why now

SREDA's net-metering rules (2021) and Bangladesh's 40% renewable energy target by 2041 have created a clear regulatory pathway for distributed solar. Meanwhile, diesel irrigation pump costs have spiked 60%+ since 2022, squeezing boro rice farmers who pump 12–15 times per season. Agrivoltaic research from Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) and global pilots (Japan's solar sharing, India's PM-KUSUM scheme) shows 10–20% crop yield improvement for shade-tolerant vegetables under standard panel arrays. The land-lease model removes the capital barrier for farmers who cannot afford panels but own the land.

Why Bangladesh

Bangladesh has 8.5 million hectares of agricultural land, most of it smallholder plots of 0.5–2 acres. Over 70% of irrigated area uses diesel pumps; switching to solar-powered irrigation would eliminate ৳8,000–15,000 per bigha per season in fuel costs. The country also has an acute electricity-vs-agriculture land tension — BPDB is struggling to site large solar farms because flat land is farmland. Agrivoltaics resolves that tension: the same land serves both purposes simultaneously. IDCOL has an existing solar irrigation pump programme that provides a procurement channel.

As a business

The developer structures each farm as a 20-year land-lease agreement: the farmer receives ৳25,000–40,000/bigha/year in lease income (2–3× what they'd earn farming alone), the developer builds and owns the panels, and revenue comes from selling electricity at the BPDB feed-in tariff (৳8.45–11.50/kWh for solar under current RERE rules) or via a direct PPA with a nearby industrial or commercial buyer at a premium. The developer-operator captures the spread between energy revenue and land-lease + O&M cost.

Economics

Move the sliders to model your own agrisolar project. Defaults are order-of-magnitude estimates — pressure-testing them is part of what a founder pitches us.

What ZEPH would back

A developer-founder who has already secured a grid connection approval from BPDB and a signed land-lease MOU from a farmer cooperative — those two steps are the hardest and slowest, and a team that has navigated them already is worth backing. We'd participate in a first project of 200–500 bighas as both equity investor and potential offtake connector, with the goal of a replicable project structure that can be cloned across 10+ sites within three years.

Impact

At 500 bighas (67 ha), the default installation generates roughly 16 GWh/year, displacing an equivalent volume of coal-fired grid power and avoiding approximately 12 000 tCO₂e annually — more than 85% of a small industrial site's footprint. Elevated panels reduce crop-water demand by up to 30% through microclimate shading, a material benefit in Bangladesh's drought-stress seasons, while the guaranteed land-lease income de-risks smallholder livelihoods. Agrisolar displaces an estimated USD 500 000/year in fossil-fuel imports at default scale; as Bangladesh's grid coal dependency drops, this FX benefit compounds with each additional bigha enrolled.