French winemaker spent €4 million on 6,000 solar panels to protect grapes
Solar panels are seen atop of the vineyard of winemaker PC: Alexandre Minguez Why a cognac grower gave up his wine label for solar panels
Solar panels are seen atop of the vineyard of winemaker PC: Alexandre Minguez Why a cognac grower gave up his wine label for solar panels How the solar canopy protects vines from hail and frost What the data from other Sun'Agri vineyards shows Why French wine regulations are divided over agrivoltaics How American vineyards can use solar panels without losing their label A cognac grower in western France has voluntarily given up the right to call his wine cognac, all so he could build a solar canopy over his vineyard. David Moreau planted four hectares of ugni blanc grapes at Saint-André-de-Lidon, near Saintes, and covered them with 6,000 solar panels held five metres above the vines. The panels tilt through the day to balance shade and sunlight, and lie completely flat when hail strikes, forming a hard shield over the fruit. The project cost around four million euros to build, yet Moreau earns just 600 euros a year in electricity rent from it. He will not know if the gamble paid off until his first harvest under the system in 2029.French wine rules are strict about what happens above a vineyard as much as what happens in the soil. A regulation dating back to 2002 bans any roof or covering over vineyards that carry an AOC or IGP designation, the geographical labels that apply to roughly 95 per cent of everything France bottles.
Moreau's solar array falls foul of that rule, so whatever wine comes off his four hectares will be sold without the cognac designation. He accepted that trade because his real enemy is a heat problem called echaudage, the scorching of grapes on the vine during a summer spike, which costs him 5 to 10 per cent of his harvest most years.The hardware was built by Sun'Agri, the agrivoltaic arm of the French construction group Eiffage, and it runs on software that reads plant growth models and on-site weather sensors to decide how the panels should tilt. When hail approaches, the array folds flat, and Moreau has told the French news agency AFP that this saves 70 to 80 per cent of his vines during a storm. The same flat position also traps a layer of warm air near the ground on cold nights, cutting frost risk by around 90 per cent according to the grower. Sun'Agri's published findings on vine growing describe a roughly 2-degree Celsius buffer during near-freezing conditions and up to 5-degree cooling under the panels during heat spikes, numbers that come from the company running the technology rather than an outside audit.Moreau is not the first to try this. At Domaine de Nidolères in the Pyrénées Orientales, growers have run a Sun'Agri array since 2018 alongside an uncovered control plot, giving the project several years of comparative data.
The BriefWire