PhD seminar – Marin Guinard

Event details :

Marin Guinard will present his paper entitled: “Targeting Agrivoltaics for Food Systems and Rural Equity: An environmental accounting approach for France”.

Abstract: Rapid solar expansion is essential for decarbonisation but increasingly competes with agricultural land and valued rural landscapes, raising siting conflicts and equity concerns. Agrivoltaics (AV)—the co-location of photovoltaic panels and farming—has been proposed as a way to ease these tensions by jointly producing energy and supporting agricultural adaptation. Yet AV benefits are highly context-dependent and current spatial suitability studies often remain techno-centric, providing limited insight into trade-offs between energy performance, climate resilience, agricultural transition and rural socio-economic goals. We propose a transparent, non-monetary, policy-oriented framework to support multi-objective AV targeting in metropolitan France at the commune level. We operationalise four pillars—Energy (E), Climate (C), Agricultural practices (A) and Socio-economic resilience (S)—built from observable indicators identified through stakeholder interviews and a targeted literature review. Indicators are normalised to [0,1] using winsorised empirical CDFs and aggregated into pillar scores, which are then combined into a scenario-based composite value function with explicit weights and optional concave utilities. Applied to ~34,500 communes, the pillars show strong internal heterogeneity, low cross-pillar correlations, and limited overlap of top-decile areas, indicating that multi-criteria “sweet spots” are scarce and that policy narratives imply distinct spatial priorities. The framework provides a reproducible decision aid to reveal synergies and trade-offs, compare alternative deployment strategies and support more equitable and strongly sustainable AV rollout.

His paper will be commented by Lesly Cassin (Senior Lecturer, BETA, UL) and  Anaïs Kanellos (PhD, INRAE, BETA).