A new survey conducted by Fraunhofer ISE in Germany shows that 72.4% of farmers in the country are considering the deployment of agricultural PV projects. Among the main factors behind this choice, the researchers identified additional sources of income from solar power generation and the practicality of the technology.

The core question of the survey was "in principle, would you be willing to use an agricultural PV system on your farm?" It is also based on a technology acceptance model, which considers the "perceived usefulness" and "perceived ease of use" of a given technology. The former describes the extent to which a person believes that a certain technology has improved their job performance, while the latter describes the extent to which a person believes that using a certain technology is effortless.

The survey also considered factors such as risk tolerance, innovation, knowledge level, environmental awareness, climate change impacts, energy price impacts and subjective norms. The latter refers to the social pressure felt by influential people.

The scientists explained that the survey was conducted in February 2023 and based on the responses of 214 valid respondents, the survey completion rate reached 66.7%. "To find out which factors influence the likelihood of farmers wanting to use agPV on their farms, we applied binary logistic regression," they stress. "The eight factors extracted from the factor analysis were used as independent variables to explain farmers' decision-making behavior."