Canterbury's flat, irrigated plains carry some of New Zealand's most productive farmland; land classified as “highly productive” under national planning policy (link) and contested as solar developers compete with farmers for it. A recent example was the Selwyn solar farm. It was declined consent in 2023 over its impact on highly productive land, then approved in 2024 in scaled-down form. Developers are already building basic forms of agrivoltaic farms on Canterbury dairy land, but nobody has standardised the techno-economic assessment of these projects.
Furthermore, irrigation and process electrification are driving sufficient demand growth that Transpower has draft approval for a $193 million upper-South-Island transmission upgrade. Building on land-suitability mapping already completed through a prior project, this project focuses on the question mapping alone cannot answer: is agrivoltaics worth it for a Canterbury farm? You will build
an indicative techno-economic model with localised capital and operating costs, land-equivalent-ratio(LER)-adjusted revenue, and the self-consumption vs. export trade-off for a representative farm.
You will work under joint electrical and civil engineering supervision, develop applied techno-economic modelling skills grounded in real New Zealand cost data, and produce a regionally credible costing that can inform farmers, the electricity distributor, the grid operator, and future funding applications.
Supervisors
Primary Supervisor: Hamish Avery
Other Supervisor(s): Hadi Vatankhah Ghadim
Application and funding
This is a UC Commitments Summer Scholarship research project. Emailed applications will not be considered. Find out more here: University of Canterbury Scholarship Portal - UC Commitments Summer Scholarship
Final date for receiving applications
25 September 2026
