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2026 North American Agrivoltaics Awards Recipients
individual awards
2026 Solar Farmer - Joe Czajkowski
Owner/Farmer at Czajkowski Farm | Hadley, Massachusetts
Solar Farmer of the Year recognizes the outstanding achievements by a crop farmer in North America who has proven in the field that traditional farming and solar farming can share the same productive acre—and few examples anywhere in the world are as instructive as this year’s awardee, Joe Czajkowski, and the dual-harvest work on his family farm.
The 445-kilowatt array over Joe Czajkowski’s fields in Hadley, Massachusetts sits on ground his family has farmed for three generations—more than 400 acres in the Pioneer Valley in the heart of the Connecticut River Valley’s vegetable country. Half the power it generates runs his own farm operations; the other half flows to 17 low-income households across western Massachusetts through the project’s power purchase agreements, a structure that qualified the array for both the MA SMART Program’s Low Income Community Solar standards and its Agricultural Solar Tariff Generation Unit standards.
Getting an agrivoltaics array across the finish line required a developer willing to design the energy around Joe’s agricultural operation rather than the other way around. So Joe’s developer, Hyperion Systems, built the racking high enough and wide enough so that Joe never had to change tractors, attachments, or his planting calendar. He preps the soil and plants, and cultivates, harvests, and puts in a cover crop for winter, exactly as he did before the panels went up. That equipment continuity is what made cropping under the array feel low-risk rather than experimental. Alongside the broccoli, Joe has since grown shade tobacco, blueberries, sweet corn, and even broiler chickens beneath the panels.
The broccoli, in particular, has found buyers well beyond the farm gate. In addition to the UMass Amherst dining program, Joe has supplied it to area school districts and to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods—proof that produce grown under an agrivoltaic array can clear the same commercial bar as in a traditional greenhouse or open field agriculture.
And Joe has added an electric van—charged right off the array—to ferry produce straight to UMass Dining, which provides the farm with powerful input protection from rising diesel fuel prices that should pay agribusiness dividends far in the future.
Four years in, the results keep surprising skeptics. Sweet corn—a "full sun" plant—grown beneath the panels on Joe's far are yielding ~80% of open-field volume with matching quality—and the 20% loss resulting from less corn rows planted than stunted growth.
“It’s worked really well for us,” Joe says. “You shouldn’t have to work too hard to convince people it’s a good thing. No one’s really upset about anything. It makes farms more viable.”
Watch Joe talk about his experience on YouTube.
Learn more about Joe’s project on the Hyperion Systems website.
2026 Solar Rancher(s) - Arlo Hark & Josie Trople
Co-Owners, Cannon Valley Graziers | Northfield, Minnesota
Solar Rancher of the Year recognizes an outstanding livestock operation that has proven that pairing grazing with ground-mounted solar energy can become a powerful partnership between agriculture, animals, and the land far beyond the four corners of a mowing contract—and this year’s honorees, Arlo Hark and Josie Trople, were among the first to cultivate the potential of solar grazing and grow it into a thriving company.
Founding Cannon Valley Graziers in Northfield, Minnesota in 2017, Arlo and Josie began blazing the trail as a dedicated solar grazing operation that has now grazed more than 6,500 acres of solar farms for developers, operators and owners. And while starting in the upper Midwest, Cannon Valley Graziers currently rotates its flock across dozens of sites each season in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, as well as solar farms further afield in the western and central United States.
Their highly respected field work now spans three service lines—Solar Grazing, Vegetation Management, and Forestry Restoration. Accomplished experts with a high caliber of applied expertise in the field, Josie and Arlo have built a compelling stack of high return services into a single service offering: grazing-based vegetation management that costs less than mowing, builds soil health and biodiversity instead of just suppressing growth, and keeps working land working with Mother Nature's natural systems.
That difference-making, mold-breaking operating model has earned Cannon Valley Graziers coverage from Bloomberg, Minnesota Public Radio, and other media. Their powerful example and willingness to serve also earned Arlo a board seat at the American Solar Grazing Association, where he shares leadership responsibilities with other board members and freely shares his knowledge and the field-tested lessons he and his partner Josie have found on their near decade-long journey carrying Cannon Valley Graziers from the cradle into a leading and fully blossomed solar grazing business with a footprint across the country.
In a time of general farm stress, Arlo and Josie's story as young farmers starting out shines a powerful light on an abundant path that’s also led to parallel growth opportunities including sister ventures Tethera (meat) and Bayl (renewable fiber), which are turning the flock’s vegetation-management work into finished products. For Cannon Valley Graziers, therefore, solar grazing is so much more than an agreement to cut the grass. Arlo and Josie’s integrated agribusiness engine is powered by food, renewable fiber and fashion, and four-legged lawn maintenance—and serves as proof that a solar-grazing contract on a dual–use solar farm can be the foundation of a full agricultural business and not just a single-purpose service line.
And being younger farmers with a young family, Josie and Arlo are living proof that solar grazing can provide a gateway for the next generation of agricultural producers to get their hands on working lands and help solve the critical problem of land access that is preventing a generation of would-be farmers and ranchers from getting started in the first place.
Learn more about Cannon Valley Graziers on its website.
2026 Solar Eco-Steward - Mike Kiernan
Founder & Native Beekeeper, Bee the Change | Weybridge, Vermont
Solar Eco-Steward of the Year recognizes the excellence and achievement of someone working to advance conservation, habitat restoration, or other ecosystem services in symbiosis with solar power production on the same site—and this year’s awardee, Dr. Mike Kiernan, founder of Bee the Change, happens to be a medical doctor who has spent the last decade leaving a mark on an altogether different scientific field by doing the work to prove how pollinator habitat can make a perfectly happy home in a solar field.
Bee the Change traces back to two physicians who saw the same problem from opposite ends of a career. After 23 years as an emergency physician at what’s now Porter Medical Center, part of the University of Vermont Health Network, Mike had already spent stretches volunteering in Haiti and nursing a long-running fascination with entomology. His wife, Tawnya, brought a family background in forest biology to the partnership. Together they founded Bee the Change on a simple observation: most solar fields were being covered in stone or mowed turf grass—habitat as empty to a bee as a parking lot—when that same acreage could be resown and managed as some of the richest pollinator land in the region.
What began with a single Middlebury field in May 2015 has grown into a substantial effort. Bee the Change now manages pollinator habitat across 26 fields and roughly 200 acres, with a 27th underway in North Ferrisburgh, working alongside eight different solar developers—chief among them Encore Renewable Energy—and supported by the organization’s first full-time employee alongside hundreds of volunteer backyard gardeners.
All told, the habitat rebuilt under those panels adds up to roughly what every household in Vermont planting a 10-by-10-foot pollinator garden would produce.
And the scientific results speak for themselves. At Bee the Change’s Hinesburg field, pollinator surveys counted 17 species in the planting’s first year—and by a recent season, that had climbed to 305.
“It’s in diversity that we’ll find resilience,” Kiernan says of the approach—an ethic that now shows up on grocery shelves too, in honey harvested from the fields and in a solar-field-inspired beer brewed with The Alchemist. The ripple effects reach past the fence line: healthier pollinator populations support the insects, birds, fish, and other wildlife downstream, and ultimately the farms and communities around each site.
Learn more about Bee the Change, its story and its important work on its website.
Project Awards
2026 Solar Farm Co-Recipient - Colorado State Vitivoltaics Vineyard
Colorado State University, Western Colorado Research Center | 3170 B 1/2 Rd, Grand Junction, Colorado
Solar Farm of the Year honors an outstanding built and operating agrivoltaics project that pairs crops with solar power in the field—and the groundbreaking Colorado State University Vitivoltaics array built by Sandbox Solar stands out as one of two 2026 co-awardees in the Solar Farm category for pairing one of America’s toughest specialty-crop climates with one of its most sensitive cultivars.
Grand Junction sits in one of the most climate-stressed grape-growing regions in the country, and that’s exactly why Colorado State University’s Western Colorado Research Center built the first vitivoltaics research array in the United States there. Led by State Viticulturist Horst Caspari and postdoctoral scientist Analissa Sarno, the installation went live in January 2026, and is diversely built to compare standard fixed-tilt and dynamic tracking panels over instrumented vineyard rows that are also logging soil moisture, temperature, and wind speed above and below the panels as well as alongside an uncovered control plot.
The research question goes beyond the energy and land efficiency math that usually makes the case for building an agrivoltaics-enabled solar farm. In Colorado’s Grand Valley, specialty crops face frost, heat swings, and drought in the same season—so-called ‘weather whiplash’—a devastating pattern that has hit specialty-crop regions particularly hard around the world during the volatile 2026 growing season.
The Colorado State Team will test whether a solar array can double as a resiliency tool, protecting vines against the same extreme-weather swings that smudge pots and wind machines are built to fight, but at a fraction of the capital cost and physical mobilization (often in poor weather conditions). If the solar panels in Grand Junction can protect a vineyard’s crop the way they protect the university's energy budget—as solar glass has already achieved in the face of a frost event at a vineyard in Tresserre, France,for example—then the more-resilient and productive vitivoltaics model proven by CSU's team in Colorado could be ready to travel to any specialty-crop region facing climate volatility, anywhere in the world.
Learn more via Colorado State’s Western Colorado Research Center and via PV Magazine USA.
2026 Solar Farm Co-Recipient - Roundabout Meadows Solar Garden
Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) Solar Garden at Roundabout Meadows | Aldie, Virginia
Solar Farm of the Year’s second 2026 co-honoree, Piedmont Environmental Council’s (PEC) Solar Garden at Roundabout Meadows, is the state of Virginia's very first crop-farming agrivoltaics project and shines as an outstanding example of what a catalytic community-oriented solar farm can look like. Roundabout Meadows is a working farm that was already supplying ~50,000 pounds of food a year to local food pantries—and is now harvesting solar power for the farm and for its community while also serving as a demonstration plot with its proverbial doors open for tours and on-farm tutorials to teach others about agrivoltaics.
Already a local agricultural pivot point, the land PEC is farming today at Roundabout Meadows very nearly became a strip mall. Loudoun County residents pooled resources to help PEC buy the 172-acre Gilberts Corner property outright in 2018 and preserve it from development. Therein, a 40-acre working farm grows Certified Naturally Grown vegetables, berries, and orchard fruit—more than 30 varieties in all—and sends the harvest straight to Loudoun Hunger Relief and Christ Cares.
For several years now, PEC has been working diligently to build its own agrivoltaics garden to harvest it's own electricity and demonstrate that solar need not be a binary choice between either food or energy. Completed by Tiger Solar in 2025, with technical assistance from the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) through its Clean Energy to Communities program, PEC participated in a national cohort of agrivoltaics developers and linked into an ongoing university research network that includes Cornell University, University of Wisconsin, Rutgers University, Virginia State University, Virginia Tech and others.
PEC’s quarter-acre agrivoltaics proving ground consists of 42 panels mounted 6-8 feet high that stand above both in-ground rows and raised planter boxes. It generates ~130% of the farm’s electricity needs and exports the surplus to the grid.
Critically, because the project has a built-in battery backup, the farm can keep running essential operations—including its well pumps, greenhouse, and produce coolers—even when the electrical grid goes down.
Led by PEC Senior Energy and Climate Advisor Ashish Kapoor and farmed by Community Farm Coordinator Teddy Pitsiokos, PEC’s Solar Garden at Roundabout Meadows now serves as a resilient, grid-independent community hub and a bountiful living lab at the intersection of solar power and agricultural production. With ongoing outreach, on-farm tours, and in-field production experimenting with a variety of shade-tolerant and high-demand regional crops like lettuces, tomatoes, and potatoes, PEC's Solar Garden at Roundabout Meadows will shine as a working example of what's possible in a brighter, stronger future for humanity's farms and farming communities.
Inspirational by design, PEC intends and hopes its solar garden provides others with a replicable design and model they themselves can apply across many types of sites—from traditional farms to wineries and even urban agrivoltaic rooftops.
Learn more about PEC's agrivoltaics solar garden on its website.
2026 Solar Ranch - Cal Flats
Arevon Energy, in partnership with Hearst Ranch (Jack Ranch) | Cholame, California
Solar Ranch of the Year recognizes an excellent agrivoltaics project that integrates livestock grazing with solar power generation and creates co-benefits for the animals, the environment, the energy production, and local agribusiness—and few solar grazing projects so far in North America have achieved as mutually beneficial a balance of these interests as this year’s awardee, Arevon’s California Flats Solar-plus-Storage (Cal Flats) project, which is seamlessly integrated into a legacy cattle ranch in California as well as the surrounding wildlife.
On Jack Ranch, a working cattle ranch in operation for more than 150 years, Arevon’s California Flats project proves that utility-scale solar and traditional livestock ranching can go together seamlessly. Across 2,900 acres, more than a million solar panels generate 374 megawatts of power alongside a 240-megawatt-hour battery system, offsetting over 351,000 metric tons of CO2 a year for Apple’s California operations and PG&E customers statewide—all while a ~2,500-head cattle herd continues to move and feed freely around the modules and battery containers and sheep graze the shade beneath the panels to keep vegetation in check without herbicides.
Beyond its agricultural benefits and economic benefit to the family farm, what also sets Cal Flats apart is the consideration given to the project’s conservation impacts and potential before a single panel went into the ground. Arevon shaped its conservation planning in collaboration with Audubon California, the California Native Plant Society, the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Sierra Club. The work product of that collaboration is now written into legal protections for the land itself, including: permanent protection for Cottonwood Creek, a breeding habitat for the threatened California red-legged frog; a 1,070-acre conservation easement safeguarding native grassland and critical habitat for California tiger salamanders; as well as a $10.5 million fund managed by the California Rangeland Trust, which has protected 7,300 additional acres for San Joaquin kit foxes, golden eagles, burrowing owls, and native plants—plus curated forage for monarch butterflies passing through.
It’s a rare project that can claim credit for kit fox dens, red-legged frogs, and a cattle operation all in the same breath as its prodigious megawatt-hour production—all proof, as Arevon puts it quite simply, that energy development can work with the land instead of against it.
Learn more about California Flats at Hearst Ranch via the Arevon Energy project website.
2026 Solar Ecosystem - Argonne National Laboratory Multi-Site Research
Solar Soil & SolWEB Field Research — Multiple Sites
Solar Ecosystem of the Year goes to the project accomplishing the most to advance the merger of power generation with ecosystem services—leading to greater understanding, adoption, or improvement of ecosystem-service performance integrated with solar power production, also known as “ecovoltaics.” In 2026 that’s best embodied not by a single site, but by the body of timely field research performed by the team at Argonne National Laboratory, whose powerful scientific approach has helped establish an objective baseline of ecovoltaic observation upon which the solar + conservation field now stands.
For five years, Argonne ecologists tracked flowering vegetation and insect life across two rehabilitated Enel Green Power solar facilities in southern Minnesota—358 separate surveys, four times a summer, from 2018 to 2022. The results, led by landscape ecologist Lee Walston, are the kind of numbers that change how a solar site gets designed: total insect abundance up threefold (3X), native bee numbers up twenty fold (20X), and pollinators from the restored habitat visibly working the neighboring soybean fields. It’s field evidence, not modeling, that habitat-friendly solar can do and is doing double duty as pollinator infrastructure—a finding that matters more every year as pollinators come under increasing pressure.
That same field-first approach now anchors Solar Soil, Argonne’s three-year, DOE-funded push—part of the broader SolWEB (Deploying Solar with Wildlife and Ecosystem Services Benefits) program—to standardize how the industry measures what’s happening underground. Led by Heidi Hartmann, the project has built the National Solar Soil Database from real samples—carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and more—collected at more than 25 solar sites across six U.S. climate regions, with methods developed alongside soil scientists from Columbia, the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and a stakeholder committee that includes USGS and USDA-NRCS. A parallel partnership with the Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association is extending that same rigor to solar development on tribal lands.
Doing the dirty work to take the guesswork out for an industry deciding whether to invest in pro-pollinator development, Argonne’s ecovoltaic science could not have been better timed. Its researchers are among the few to have gone out to the sites, counted the bees and the bugs, sampled the dirt and the mud, and openly published numbers that any developer, regulator, or community leader can act on—gifting the world a caliber of observations gathered by a quality capable and determined scientists in the field it would otherwise be desperate for.
Learn more about Argonne National Laboratory's solar work at the links below.
Plan Awards
2026 Dual-Use Plan Co-Recipient - SUNY Cobleskill HARVEST Project
Harnessing Agrivoltaics for Renewable Vitality and Energizing Sustainability Technology (HARVEST) Project
Developer/Partners: SUNY Cobleskill College of Agriculture and Technology, New York Power Authority, EPRI, NYSERDA
Location: Schoharie County, New York
Dual-Use Plan of the Year is NAAA’s award for a project that has been formally proposed but not yet built—recognizing ambition, design, and likely community or research impact before a single panel goes up. HARVEST, an agrivoltaics array for applied research under development at SUNY Cobleskill, shares the award this year as one of two 2026 Plan honors.
A 1.5 MW solar array on SUNY Cobleskill's 902-acre campus, HARVEST is being designed from the ground up by the college's own agriculture faculty—with livestock grazing and crop rotation decisions made by the people who will teach and study the system for decades to come.
Backed by the New York Power Authority, EPRI, and a $750,000 NYSERDA research grant awarded in December 2025, HARVEST is built to generate more than power: it will produce the performance data on vegetation management, crop yield, and system output to help validate future agrivoltaics projects across New York State.
Groundbreaking is set for early 2027.
Learn more about HARVEST on the SUNY Cobleskill website.
2026 Dual-Use Plan Co-Recipient - Cedar Agrivoltaics
Phased Solar Sheep Ranching and Solar Farming Project
Developer: Compass Greenfield Development, with Capstone Infrastructure
Location: Municipality of West Grey (Hanover), Ontario, Canada
The second 2026 Dual-Use Plan honoree, Cedar Agrivoltaics in Ontario, Canada, stands out for an exceptional community process—a project still in development that already treats community consultation as core design work rather than a box to check before construction.
Cedar Agrivoltaics pairs 17.6 MW of contracted solar generation with sheep grazing across 90 acres of leased farmland, with row crops planned as a second phase. Elevated panels, set seven feet high on 25-foot spacing, are purpose-built to keep the land in active agricultural use rather than taking it out of production.
What sets Cedar apart at the proposal stage is the depth of its public diligence and documentation: a formal Project Description Report and a dedicated Indigenous and Community Engagement Plan, backed by Capstone Infrastructure's 776 MW of operating renewable capacity across North America. And from the outset, this Canadian project was built to focus on sustained engagement with Indigenous and local stakeholders from the earliest community meetings onward—serving as a powerful example of what dual-use solar can look like when community consent is a primary part of the design process and as an ongoing obligation rather than a pre-approval formality.
Cedar’s Indigenous and Community Engagement Plan commits to an open invitation for any interested Indigenous community to engage before construction, a formal Ministry-delegated consultation process and documented consultation record once awarded, and a second full round of consultation with landowners, neighbors, the municipality, and Indigenous communities at decommissioning, two to three decades from now. That commitment is already showing up in the project’s structure: per IESO’s own contract record, the winning bid carries 50% Indigenous participation, in partnership with the Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation and the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation.
The groundwork and commitment to community engagement paid off in April 2026, when Cedar won a 20-year contract in Ontario’s IESO Long-Term 2 procurement—serving as a powerful testament to the value of building community process into a project’s full lifecycle.
Learn more about Cedar Agrivoltaics on the project website.
special recognitions
2026 Champion - Iain Ward
Farmer & Founder and CEO of SolAg | Massachusetts
The NAAA’s annual Champion award recognizes exceptional individual effort, leadership, and advocacy for agrivoltaics—work powerful enough to create positive effects beyond that individual’s own projects, advancing agrivoltaics across the whole field rather than at any single site. In 2026, as in many years, few are more deserving of this recognition than Iain Ward.
Iain’s conviction in agrivoltaics wasn’t born wearing a suit in a conference room or standing at a blackboard—it started with his boots on in the field as a farmer helping enable a Massachusetts cranberry bog for agrivoltaics in one of North America’s very first commercial fruiting solar farms. Now many years later, and working on the front lines with farmers every day, Iain’s firsthand knowledge as an AgPV doer is bridging the understanding between community leaders, farmers and solar developers as the dual-use opportunity begins to truly blossom.
Energetic, prolific and compassionate in the cause of others, Iain’s first-hand experience as a young farmer and an agrivoltaics trailblazer gives him a rare quality capable of translating the promise of agrivoltaics into real on-farm opportunities. Through Solar Agricultural Services (SolAg), the company he founded and leads, he works side by side and site by site with landowners, farmers, developers and EPCs in professional translation every day. Iain built SolAg to fill the gap between two industries that don’t always speak the same language or use the same acronyms—teaching solar developers what farming actually requires on the ground, and helping farmers understand what a lease or power purchase agreement will mean for their operation.
Iain’s leadership carries his talents for translation well beyond his own client list, indeed wherever he goes. Iain makes the grounded case for agrivoltaics around the country, brilliantly, enthusiastically and tirelessly communicating both the opportunities and realities of solar farming—often freely sharing his hard-earned insights with others just to advance the working foundation of AgPV knowledge in the world. He works alongside many other agricultural organizations, nonprofits and institutions to help educate stakeholders. And he advocates to policymakers crafting legislation for better policy to incentivize agrivoltaics and build a foundation for its long-term agricultural integrity, on equal ground with other agricultural practices.
From boots wet from his cranberry bog, to meeting with suits in the halls of the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C., and a growing number of state houses and county seats, Iain’s leadership is carrying the case for agrivoltaics forward to all stakeholders who join the effort to enable farmers with all the tools and technology to seize today’s opportunities, adapt to today’s realities, and thrive far into the future.
Learn more about Iain’s work on the SolAg website.
2026 Pioneer - Stacie Peterson
Executive Director, American Solar Grazing Association, American Grazing and Growing Association | Montana
The NAAA’s Pioneer award recognizes an individual whose agrivoltaics achievements were earned along the road less traveled, through uncertainty and adversity in undiscovered territory, with innovative thinking, collaborative spirit, steely resolve, and sheer force of will—often with a passion that sparks the fires of innovation in others and motivates them to take action—and there are no agrivoltaics professionals more pioneering than Stacie Peterson, Ph.D.
Stacie’s catalytic agrivoltaics work built essential infrastructure and institutions that the burgeoning industry needed before the field even had a name for itself. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s in Environmental Engineering from Montana Tech and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Montana—work that braided environmental science, public health, history, and technical communication into one discipline. That interdisciplinary grounding has defined her career since, including substantial work on polluted lands and remediation, plus extensive experience in environmental engineering, sustainable energy, and community engagement, through which she has developed and led national, regional, and state-level energy programs that have meaningfully engaged communities, supported rural businesses, and provided essential education and technical assistance to stakeholders across the board.
Stacie built the AgriSolar Clearinghouse from the ground up while serving as Director of Energy Programs at the National Center for Appropriate Technology. With grant support from the Department of Energy, she grew the first-of-its-kind Clearinghouse into the field’s premier knowledge hub, now fed research and case studies by more than 40 partner organizations.
Stacie has been a driving force for agrivoltaics education, information development, and outreach all around, and she has personally spearheaded numerous community engagement initiatives, including a sold-out 20-stop tour of agrivoltaic sites across the country.
Watch Stacie in action to advance agrivoltaics in this CBS Saturday Morning segment.
Named Executive Director of the American Solar Grazing Association at its 5th Annual Membership Meeting in March 2025, Stacie has taken the reins at another leading agrivoltaics organization—built by farmers, for farmers—and has made it her mission to see it grow and continue to thrive.
“I look forward to leading the organization with a focus on excellence, science, and trusted partnerships,” she said on taking the role—a fitting throughline for her own career so far: connecting the research she spent a decade compiling, to the interdisciplinary professionals she’s brought together, to the flocks now grazing under panels across the country, and a brighter future for farming and ranching alongside them.
Learn more about the American Solar Grazing Association on its website.
2026 Groundbreaker - Jordan Macknick
Lead Energy-Water-Land Analyst, National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) | Colorado
The NAAA’s Groundbreaker award recognizes an individual whose bold thinking and energetic commitment to exploring agrivoltaics has made mold-breaking contributions to the field—an innovator, originator, or instigator who has led the way in developing new ideas, concepts, or methods that hadn’t been tried before and resulted in significant advancements, whose work and example has also inspired others to follow in their trailblazing footsteps—with few breaking more ground for more professionals for longer in North America, or anywhere, than Jordan Macknick.
One of the agrivoltaics field’s earliest and most influential professionals in the United States, Jordan was among the very first to approach the agrivoltaics opportunity with professional rigor, scientific objectivity and marshal meaningful resources. Having catalyzed many of the first generation of serious, robust AgPV projects in the country, few professionals may ever have as groundbreaking an agrivoltaics impact as Jordan Macknick.
Widely respected as one of the agrivoltaics field’s founding professionals, his activities and accolades are too many to credit, but chief among them is helping launch America’s founding research program, InSPIRE. As the initiative’s principal champion at the National Laboratory of the Rockies, Jordan has spent close to a decade converting the basic question ‘does agrivoltaics work?’ into a portfolio of answers—and InSPIRE now spans 29 research sites across multiple states, territories, and tribal lands, each testing different crops, climates, configurations, technologies, and methods.
As a force multiplier with impeccable timing and exceptional professional manner, Mr. Macknick’s catalytic impact is impossible to measure. The legacy of the research actionable information he, his teams, his partners, and program participants have developed will continue to ripple far beyond InSPIRE’s 29 research sites—which is the hope. Careful to measure and manage their way forward, Jordan and his teams documented every step and are all too happy to share their notes with others. Their research distilled what makes agrivoltaics projects succeed or fail into a “five C’s” framework built on partnership between solar developers and agricultural stakeholders, turning years of scattered field trials into a replicable playbook that other researchers and developers now build from.
“Now, our challenge is to figure out how to scale up and replicate these successes,” Macknick has said of the work — a challenge he’s meeting in part at home, where NLR recently planted an agrivoltaics site on its own campus.
“I’m excited to have an agrivoltaics site right here on our home campus,” he said. “Everyone can actually taste the fruits of our science.”
Learn more about NLR’s agrivoltaics work.
Learn more about the InSPIRE project on its website.
2026 Leadership - Senator Bob Smith, NJ
Chairman, New Jersey Senate Environment and Energy Committee | New Jersey
Leadership is NAAA’s honor for the policy work that builds the legal and regulatory foundation agrivoltaics needs to scale—recognizing not a single project or a single session, but a career spent turning good ideas into durable law. In 2026, the example of few other agrivoltaics leaders shined so brightly as New Jersey State Senator Bob Smith.
Long before he was a legislator, Bob was a science teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s in chemistry from the University of Scranton, added a master’s in environmental science from Rutgers University, and spent 15 years teaching chemistry and environmental science at Middlesex County College—a scientist’s grounding that has shaped nearly every environmental bill he’s written since. He went on to earn his law degree from Seton Hall University in 1981, around the same years he was elected to the Piscataway Township Council and then became the town’s mayor.
That local career launched one of the longest-running environmental legislative records in New Jersey history. Bob won a seat in the General Assembly in 1986, rising to Deputy Minority Leader, before moving to the State Senate in 2002 to represent the 17th Legislative District, covering Middlesex and Somerset Counties. Four decades after he first took local office, he’s still going strong—serving a term that runs through January 2028 and still chairing the Senate Environment and Energy Committee, a post he has held for more than a decade along with a seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Long before agrivoltaics had a name, Senator Smith was already New Jersey’s go-to author on environmental law. His name is attached, as sponsor or chief architect, to the Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act, the site-remediation reform that created the state’s Licensed Site Remediation Professional program, the Barnegat Bay restoration initiatives, one of the strictest fertilizer laws in the country, the Electronic Waste Management Act, and a $400 million Green Acres funding initiative. It’s the kind of four-decade record that made him the natural author when New Jersey needed a legal framework for putting solar panels and farming on the same acre.
That framework became New Jersey’s Dual-Use Solar Energy Act, which Senator Smith co-sponsored to let farmers generate solar power on active agricultural land without taking that land out of production—capping individual projects at 10 megawatts and the statewide pilot at 200 megawatts, while requiring the ground underneath to stay in real agricultural or horticultural use. He then championed the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities’ rollout of the resulting Dual-Use Agrivoltaics Pilot Program, which culminated in August 2026 when the NJBPU awarded the program’s first 16 projects, totaling more than 52 megawatts of dual-use solar capacity on working farms across the state.
“When we passed the Dual-Use Solar Energy Act, this is exactly the progress we hoped to see: New Jersey farmers producing food and clean power on the same acre of land,” Senator Smith said of the milestone. “These 16 projects prove we don’t have to choose between keeping farmland in active production and building the generation capacity our state needs — we can have both.”
There are few legislators anywhere who can point to agrivoltaics policy momentum so clearly as Senator Smith can. And with New Jersey’s AgPV pilot program just getting started, the framework Bob spent a career building the legal groundwork for is only beginning to sow what it will ultimately reap for the Garden State far in the future.
