Solar energy in Europe’s countryside: huge potential, complex challenges

Europe’s rural areas, especially in southern and eastern countries – from Romania to the Iberian Peninsula – hold enormous potential for renewable energy production, which could be crucial to the continent’s decarbonisation journey.
Photovoltaics, in particular, could enable many often depressed and depopulated regions to produce more than 30 times their energy needs, without affecting productive agricultural land and protected areas.
However, this opportunity clashes with technical limitations – the need for increasingly efficient storage systems and networks – and with environmental and social obstacles, including conflict with agriculture, damage to the soil and the risk of concentration of energy power in the hands of a few large players. To achieve its goals while avoiding new imbalances, Europe must act quickly, but without neglecting local complexities.

The transformative potential of solar

To explore the actual possibilities and obstacles on the road to full solar development, we analysed the data made available by various official sources, elaborated them in the context of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet) project and tried to contextualise them through in-depth journalistic work. The complete data and the methodology used are available here.
A recent study by the EU Joint Research Centre estimated the untapped potential of the continent’s main renewable sources. Among these, solar appears to be the one with the greatest potential: its production could in fact increase by as much as 44 times, from the current 250 TWh (Terawatt hours) per year up to 11,000. This could radically reshape the European energy landscape, bringing it closer to the objectives of climate neutrality (set by Brussels for 2050) and self-sufficiency.
78% of this potential is found in rural areas, characterised by large open spaces and strong solar radiation. These areas, which cover 83% of the EU’s surface area, already produce almost three-quarters (72%) of the continent’s renewable electricity.

Producing much more than needed

The areas with the greatest potential are concentrated in the Iberian Peninsula, the lowlands of Romania and some regions of Central-Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.

Significantly, these areas – sparsely populated or subject to depopulation and often economically marginal – are also those where energy demand is lowest. Comparing untapped renewable potential and energy demand, it emerges that in as many as a fifth of European regions, renewables could make up the main item in the energy mix. In large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, South-Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries, production would fully satisfy total demand. Many territories – especially in Spain, Portugal and Romania – could produce 30 times or more the energy required, becoming major energy exporters.

The technical challenges of photovoltaics

However, exploiting this potential is far from simple. Solar energy, first of all, is intermittent, with peaks on sunny days and at times and seasons that often do not coincide with the highest consumption. Furthermore, rural areas need a widespread and efficient electricity grid, and storage systems that are often lacking. The situation in countries with the greatest potential is diverse. In Romania, solar development is recent and has experienced tumultuous growth, which has now slowed down, both due to cuts in incentives and the failure to adapt infrastructure. “It has reached the point where when an investor wanted to build a plant in an area where they were already present, they did not get permission because the grid was congested,” explains Corina Murafa, an expert in energy and sustainability and a professor at the University of Bucharest. On the other hand, she continues, where there is no network, with the same potential, investors do not arrive. “Investors tend to concentrate in the areas that are already developed. There has never been an active policy of support in this sense”.

France and Spain (a country where in the last 12 months over 50% of electricity has been produced from renewable sources) have more solid networks, but with ample room for improvement, especially in view of further developments. “We are no longer in an era of static infrastructure planning that remains the same for decades”, stresses José Donoso, president of UNEF, the Spanish association for photovoltaic energy. “Planning must be dynamic, at least on an annual basis, because projects are constantly changing”. Then there is the issue of storage, for which, in addition to modern battery systems, methods derived from other renewable sources such as hydroelectric storage are useful. In its latest report, SolarPower Europe – the main association of the European solar industry – estimated that, between now and 2030, the total capacity of batteries would need to increase 16-fold, from the current 48 GWh to 780. For the association, it would be important to provide greater incentives for network operators to introduce systems that make energy use more flexible, such as Demand-Side Response (DSR), which allows users to modify their electricity consumption based on the needs of the network, temporarily reducing it (with the help of batteries) at times of maximum demand and increasing it at times of maximum renewable production. At the policy level, however, we should work to make grid connection costs more affordable in rural areas.

Panels also have an impact

Technical limitations are not the only obstacle to the development of photovoltaics in rural areas. Although it arouses less controversy than wind power, this technology still raises complex environmental, social and economic issues.
In fact, without adequate planning, the environmental impact of photovoltaics can be significant, even leaving aside the problems related to the entire supply chain. In his book Dalla parte del suolo, Paolo Pileri highlights the critical issues related to ground-based solar systems: large-scale systems can reduce the organic matter of the soil, alter its temperature and humidity and compromise biodiversity, with possible consequences also on agricultural productivity. For this reason, researchers recommend placing systems on abandoned or unproductive land, and the studies used for this article refer to these areas.
However, the news reports cases in which the opposite occurs. In areas subject to depopulation, renting land to an energy company is often more convenient than cultivating it, especially if the owner is not the farmer too. The risk is that photovoltaics will take away space from agriculture, since the most fertile areas – flat, sunny and easy to work – are also the most sought after for systems. Such an imbalance fuels discontent, with communities seeing their landscape transformed without direct benefits. Sometimes the protest is explicit, as in the case of the tiny town of Villar del Campo, in Castile and León, which opposed a solar project with all its might. Other times the dissent is more silent, but widespread. Furthermore, even land that is currently uncultivated could be useful in the future: food production is as crucial as energy, and with the climate crisis every choice must be carefully considered. Despite the promises of economic revival for marginal areas, large projects do not always arouse the enthusiasm of the population. “The experience of the past shapes the present”, Murafa comments. “In Romania, rural communities have not benefited much from the renewable energy projects developed so far. Poverty is still widespread, problems with sewerage, mobility, and education persist. Many owners have sold their land for paltry sums and now see producers making huge profits, feeling excluded. We should look for solutions to better involve local communities”. In the meantime, some governments – under pressure from the agricultural sector as a whole rather than from marginal populations – are imposing increasing restrictions. While Italy, in its National Integrated Plan for Energy and Climate, has gone so far as to ban new ground-mounted photovoltaic systems in agricultural areas, other countries, such as Spain, still lack a national strategy to balance agriculture and energy. José Donoso, however, downplays the problem: “There is no real conflict. To achieve energy objectives, a small part of the territory is enough, and every year the abandoned lands exceed those occupied by the systems. The real problem with agriculture is that it is often unprofitable: photovoltaics helps to diversify”.

The promise of agrivoltaics

To reconcile energy production and agriculture, many researchers and policy-makers are banking on agrivoltaics, which combines solar panels and crops on the same plots, bringing, in many cases, benefits for both production and the environment. According to another JRC report, to double Europe’s photovoltaic capacity it would be enough to convert just 1% of agricultural land to agrivoltaics. However, despite some large-scale examples, such as the Alhendín project, near Granada, this practice is still in its infancy, and there is no shared definition at European level that guarantees its technical and economic compatibility with agriculture.
Soazig Darnay, a French geographer and expert on rural areas and vineyards in Catalonia, invites us to carefully evaluate this solution: “Agrivoltaics is presented as a win-win relationship: on the one hand, for example, the panels provide shade for grazing animals, on the other they take care of the maintenance of the land. In Spain, however, it is already difficult to find shepherds, and there is not always enough grass. If you install the panels, you often have to fence the fields, preventing access to the animals unless substantial changes are made to agricultural practices. For agrivoltaics to truly support the countryside, strong political will is needed, but that is not always present”. This practice also needs regulation. France, under pressure from farmers, has imposed limits on agrivoltaics, setting the maximum usable surface area at 40% and ensuring that agricultural yields do not drop by more than 10%. In other countries, however, there is a lack of clear regulation.

Energy democracy and communities

Today, solar growth is driven by large-scale systems (over 1,000 kW), which in 2024 accounted for 42% of the market, to the detriment of small systems designed for self-consumption, even if these – like rooftop photovoltaics in urban areas – still represent the majority in numerical terms. While, on the one hand, large systems are more efficient, on the other, they reduce the protagonism of communities and raise questions about the promise of energy democracy that has always been associated with renewables.
A possible balance could be achieved with energy communities, in which citizens participate in the production and consumption of energy, obtaining savings on bills and greater control over local resources. In 2023, there were over 4,000 of them in Europe, with almost one million members, but their spread is uneven, with a strong gap between urban and rural areas. As emerges from the monitoring of European environmental legislation by REScoop.eu, the European federation of energy cooperatives, development is often hindered by the lack of a clear regulatory framework articulated in the different countries. In Spain, the Ecodes association highlights how, despite the growth of photovoltaics, the absence of precise rules initially favoured the involvement of large groups such as Repsol, which on the one hand provided means and know-how, but on the other reduced local involvement. Today, the sector is much more open to bottom-up projects, but only 11% of new energy communities are already effectively operational. Romania is even further behind, with 21 energy communities in 2024. Corina Murafa explains: “The current legislation is incomplete. It allows for their creation, but does not clarify how they should operate, who does what, and so the actors are effectively blocked. To make them operational, a regulatory framework that regulates their operation and the sharing of energy among members is crucial, with clear directives from both the ministry and the National Energy Authority”. Fortunately, she adds, “surveys carried out in Romanian villages say that over 40% of the inhabitants are aware of the concept of an energy community and more than 70% would like to be part of one”. Even using the most stringent environmental criteria and the most inclusive economic and social policies, the transformative potential of solar in the countryside remains enormous. The real unknown is whether there will be the will, capacity and coordination needed to seize it quickly and without creating further imbalances.