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A Spanish olive oil bottler is using 5,150 solar panels as a canopy over a working olive grove, lifting the array 13 feet above the trees so that straddle harvesters can still drive beneath it. The build, underway in the Jaén town of Vilches, is being treated as both a corporate decarbonisation project and a field experiment run by the University of Jaén.
The geometry is dictated by a single machine. Traditional Andalusian olive trees top out around 6.5 feet (two meters), but the straddle harvester that drives over each row, clamps the trunk and shakes the fruit loose stands 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) at full stretch. To clear that machine, the steel structures holding the photovoltaic modules had to be raised to more than four meters. Granada-based engineering firm Greening filed the count on 3 August: more than 5,150 modules, 3.65 MWp of installed capacity, and a 3 MWh battery alongside.
The layout is rooted in work the University of Jaén published in Applied Energy in 2023 on Mediterranean olive agrivoltaics: a four-metre canopy over two-metre trees, modules tilted 30 degrees to the south, and 1.7 metres between module rows to prevent self-shading. Pedro Pérez, professor of electronic technology at Jaén, has been named an adviser on the Vilches build. Similar clearance logic drives other agrivoltaic sites — a German array at Tützpatz was lifted high enough for a combine harvester to work underneath on flat arable land.
The electricity is not going to a mill. Acesur runs a packing plant at Vilches, one of its main production sites, filling bottles under the Coosur and La Española labels. The array sits on olive parcels next to that industrial site, and the company has said the plant will cover about 95% of its own electricity demand from it.
Acesur launched a decarbonisation plan in 2021 with a total budget of €9 million (about $10.4 million) running to 2028. The first phase replaced more than 30,000 MWh of fuel oil with biomass made from olive-grove residue, and added solar capacity to four of its production centres in 2023 — 30,000 square metres split roughly 75% ground-mount and the rest on roofs, across Vilches and Jabalquinto in Jaén, plus Dos Hermanas and La Roda de Andalucía in Seville. Those four sites now generate 3,654.70 MWh a year by the company's own count. Site emissions at Vilches fell from 25,400 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2021 to 8,700 metric tons in 2024. Spain's energy diversification institute IDAE has committed €5.2 million (about $6 million) to the agrivoltaic array and a molten-salt steam system called ThermalBox, of which €2.8 million (about $3.2 million) is earmarked for the array itself.
Construction started in April, with both projects scheduled for completion in 2028.
The array covers a 5-hectare (12.4-acre) parcel of traditional grove, and pv magazine España reported in April that more than 20% of the plot is being left uncovered as a control zone. That bare fifth turns the self-consumption plant into a controlled experiment: the University of Jaén will run the site as a living laboratory, measuring agricultural productivity, water stress, soil temperature and how the two activities interfere with each other, comparing shaded and unshaded trees in the same soil, year and rainfall. The design targets a second-phase output of more than 5,000 MWh a year for self-consumption.
Vilches sits in the northeast of Jaén. Across the province, around Lopera, Arjona and Marmolejo, growers have spent two years fighting a set of photovoltaic projects promoted by the Galician company Greenalia that would require clearing olive trees outright. The numbers are contested. Campaign groups circulated a figure of 100,000 trees; the Spanish fact-checking outlet Maldita.es traced that back to a platform estimate built from installed capacity and local planting density, and found that official documentation puts the seven Greenalia plants at 554 hectares. Greenalia has called the 100,000 figure 'radically false', put the real affectation at 36,022 trees across its six parks, and says 87% of the land is under voluntary agreement. The La Loperana cooperative counted 42,600 trees over 426 hectares in Lopera alone.
A judge at the Andújar court issued a ruling on 26 January provisionally dismissing the criminal case over how the permits were handled, citing insufficient criminal intent for a prevarication charge. The same ruling flagged indications of 'artificial fragmentation' — projects each kept under 50 MW so approval stays regional rather than national — the same defect that led Andalusia's high court to annul a comparable plant at Bujalance and Montoro in Córdoba in July 2025. Greenalia has argued that its authorisations were public, went through the statutory consultation windows, and were not challenged at the time.
This is the context in which the elevated Vilches array lands. Acesur and Greening are not making an argument about anybody else's project, and no party has alleged that any of the Jaén plants is operating unlawfully. But a bottler that buys olives for a living has a clear commercial reason not to be seen paving over the crop it depends on — and it has built the more expensive version of the structure to avoid doing so.
Mounting glass over a crop has a known failure mode, and a Bavarian hop grower has the receipts. Josef Wimmer fixed panels to the poles already holding up his hops, 23 feet over the field. The first build generated power well but cut his cone yield: the bines climbed the full 23 feet, hit the panels, went bushy at the top and set fewer cones. Weihenstephan-Triesdorf measured the hit at 10% to 20%. Wimmer rebuilt the array at a 45-degree angle to get the crop back. Olive trees do not climb: a tree that stops at 6.5 feet will never reach a canopy at 13, which removes the specific mechanism that cost Wimmer his cones, and leaves the ordinary one — shade.
Shade under panels cuts both ways depending on the crop and the year. French vine growers near Cognac have put panels over vines partly for hail and heat protection rather than the electricity, and German trials over apple orchards have been tracking what partial shade does to ripening. The Jaén team's own modelling found that the panels need to be partly transparent, in the range of 57% to 71% depending on location, to keep olive yield intact. No Vilches olive yield figure has yet been published; the trees have not been under the array through a full harvest.
Greening chief executive Pablo Otín framed the project on 3 August around energy management rather than generation, arguing the value sits in combining renewable output, storage and flexibility for industrial customers. Acesur environment director Nicolás Tejada put it in terms of the crop, saying the design lets the company cut its carbon footprint while protecting the grove its oils come from. Both companies have set completion of the agrivoltaic array and the ThermalBox steam system for 2028, at which point Acesur expects the Vilches site to emit around 3,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent a year, against 25,400 in 2021.
Source: pv magazine