07 October 2026, Västerås, Sweden: Researchers at Mälardalen University in Sweden have shown that broccoli grown beneath semi-transparent, magenta-tinted solar panels used sunlight roughly 4.5 times more efficiently than broccoli grown in open fields, offering fresh evidence that colored photovoltaic panels can let farmland generate electricity and food at the same time without one activity badly undercutting the other. The findings, published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science on October 2 and led by researcher Silvia Ma Lu, add to a small but growing body of agrivoltaics research aimed at easing the land competition between solar energy expansion and food production.
The panels used in the trial are thin-film cadmium telluride cells engineered to filter incoming sunlight by color, allowing red and blue wavelengths, the parts of the spectrum plants rely on most for photosynthesis, to pass through to crops beneath, while the panel itself still captures a usable share of the light to generate power. Magenta, red and blue variants were tested, with the magenta panels, filtering out mainly the green light that solar cells do not use efficiently anyway, producing the strongest result for broccoli. The research team described the approach as deliberately splitting the solar spectrum between the two competing uses, rather than treating crop growth and power generation as a straightforward trade-off.
The trial was not without costs. Broccoli grown under the magenta panels took 25 additional days to reach harvest maturity compared with fully sunlit plants, even though the crop ultimately reached a comparable size. The solar panels themselves also generated roughly 100 megawatt-hours less electricity per hectare annually than conventional, unfiltered panels would on the same land, reflecting the inherent trade-off of diverting part of the spectrum toward plant growth rather than power output. An independent expert cited in coverage of the study, Ramesh Rayudu, said the central commercial question is whether the extra agricultural value captured under the panels is large enough to offset that lost generation, a calculation that will vary by crop, electricity price and local climate.
Part of a Broader Push to Make Solar and Farming Coexist
The study adds a specific, tested data point to the wider agrivoltaics field, which has mostly relied on neutral, semi-transparent panels or simple elevated panel structures that provide shade rather than spectrum-selective filtering. By tuning the panel’s color to match a crop’s photosynthetic needs, the Mälardalen team’s approach points toward a future in which panel design could be adjusted crop by crop, rather than applying a single generic agrivoltaic structure across different farms. The research was funded by Sweden’s J. Gust Richert Foundation, the Swedish Energy Agency, the Knowledge Foundation and the Carbon2Food initiative, reflecting the project’s position within a national push to expand renewable generation without displacing farmland.
The work remains at an early, small-scale field-trial stage, and broccoli’s response under colored panels will not necessarily translate directly to other crops with different light requirements or growing cycles. Commercial deployment would also need to account for the higher manufacturing cost of colored thin-film cells compared with standard panels, a factor the published study does not resolve. Even so, the result offers agrivoltaics developers a concrete efficiency figure to test against other crops and climates, rather than relying solely on shade-based designs that sacrifice more electricity output for a smaller agricultural benefit.
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