Dual Energy: making European agrivoltaics quantitative
Three converging regulatory shifts have changed the rules of the asset class in the past eighteen months. Italy’s Law 4/2026, France’s CRE PPE2 and Germany’s Solarpaket I now require developers to demonstrate, with site-specific modelling, that their installations preserve agricultural yield, soil quality and water balance over the lifetime of the asset. Most developers cannot produce that evidence today. A growing share of permits are being delayed or denied as a result.
Dual Energy’s platform integrates three proprietary modelling engines. A physical engine maintains a real-time digital twin of the installation — panel geometry, irradiance, shading, microclimate — at sub-meter resolution and across all major panel configurations, from vertical bifacial to fixed-tilt elevated to dynamic tracking. A biological engine, a machine-learning model trained on agronomic, phenological and field-telemetry data, predicts crop growth and production under specific panel configurations. A financial engine runs Monte Carlo scenario analysis on combined energy and agricultural revenue, coupled to a project-level optimiser that resolves the design trade-offs between the two yields. The three engines are coupled in real time: the digital twin informs biology, biology informs finance, finance feeds back into the design.
Each pilot site is instrumented with a microclimatic sensor array — soil moisture, temperature, irradiance and humidity at minute-resolution telemetry — and a computer-vision camera that identifies biomass growth and phenological stages. A tracking algorithm adjusts panel orientation dynamically to the current phenological stage rather than to peak irradiance alone. The live data improves the predictive accuracy of the models season after season.
To date, Dual Energy has analysed 126 MWp of agrivoltaic projects for five Italian IPP players, has three fields under real-time monitoring with live telemetry feeding the models, and is in active validation with five Tier-1 European IPPs. The company is hosted at EPFL in Lausanne. Interest from North American developers is now beginning to build.
As Italy, France and Germany move agrivoltaic permitting from qualitative to quantitative compliance, the asset class needs an operational data layer it has never had. Dual Energy is building the European infrastructure that closes that gap.