Eki Agrivoltaics
Farming the soil and sun, together.
Idea in Agriculture and Farming
Introduction
Eki is an agrivoltaics company – we enable the coexistence of agriculture and solar energy by scaling innovative PV technologies and offering a streamlined service for farmers. We unlock millions of acres for clean energy, help rural areas and generate more revenue/acre. Let’s farm soil and ski together.
Problem
The EU faces a fundamental constraint: before the Ukraine war, 40% of natural gas came from Russia and 50% of cereal supply came from Ukraine, showing how fragile energy and food systems are. In this critical context, should land be put towards clean energy or feeding the population? Through Eki, we can have BOTH.
This would solve different sub-problems:
-Land tensions: they have emerged in areas where solar energy competes with agricultural land, fueling movements like NIMBYism. In fact, Delia’s family has been farming for generations and has witnessed these movements firsthand.
-Struggling farmers: they are barely making profit to maintain the lands, so agrivoltaic plants would provide them an additional revenue stream and enable them to participate in the €435 billion the EU has put aside for its REPowerEU renewable energy plan.
-Climate change: we unlock millions of acres to be used for clean energy, accelerating the energy transition and avoiding gigatons of CO2 emissions.
Opportunity
Eki empowers farmers to establish agrivoltaic plants on their lands, providing an additional revenue stream (over x10 per acre!). Hence, Eki enables a dual-use of land that tackles environmental and social issues, since it generates clean energy while protecting food security.
Our plan is to leverage Eki’s current network of farmers in Spain and the fact that farmers are organized through cooperatives (~10k members) — they are our main customer. Specifically, we 1) provide customized project design for their crops and land (we use innovative tech such as vertical bifacial PV and semitransparent PV), 2) manage contracts with power buyers, 3) provide the capital (mix of public/private grants and loans), 4) manage construction and maintenance contracts. Eki gets a one-off fee (10% CAPEX) and O&M fee (2% annual savings). The projects will typically range 100-1000kW with an investment of €200-2000k and an annual revenue of €20-200k.
The farmer gets extra revenue from day one, and EU gets solar energy from day one. Profit and power unleashed!