Solar's constraint stopped being the panel a while ago. It is the ground underneath it, which is also wanted for housing, roads, ecosystems and food. DW Planet A works through three ways around that: putting panels over farmland, floating them on water, and putting them in orbit. The first two are being built now, at growing scale, with measurable results on crop yield and water loss. The third is a serious engineering programme with a serious cost problem attached. The video is an explainer rather than a news report, and its figures are presented as of the time it was made, but the framing holds up well: the question is no longer whether to build more solar, it is where you are allowed to put it.
One number in the video shows how fast this field moves. It puts solar at 3.7 percent of worldwide energy production. On the narrower measure of electricity, Ember's Global Electricity Review 2026 reported solar reaching 8.7 percent of global generation in 2025, with a record 647 GW of capacity added that year. Different metrics, but the direction is unmistakable, and it makes the siting question more urgent rather than less. That is the buyer and policy angle the video does not spend long on. Agrivoltaics and floating solar are not competing with rooftop panels on cost, they are competing with a queue. In markets where grid connections have become the scarce resource, as they increasingly are across Europe, a reservoir next to an existing substation or a hydro dam with transmission already in place is worth more than a cheaper site in a field with a long wait to plug in.
On agrivoltaics, the video reports that tomatoes and chili peppers doubled their yield under partial shade, since too much sun stresses the plants, and that irrigated soil under panels stayed wet for two days instead of two hours in researcher Greg Barron-Gafford's trials. It cites a US Department of Energy study in which 95 percent of tested modules survived hail undamaged. The formats it shows range from solar fences with crops or livestock between them, to rotating arrays, to structures tall enough to drive and work underneath. The drawbacks it lists are real: wheat and millet want full sun, investment costs run more than double ground mounted PV, and the mounts themselves eat between 1 and 12 percent of the field. On water, Thomas Reindl tells DW that covering a tenth of the world's reservoirs would give roughly 23 terawatts peak, which he compares to global annual electricity demand. The video cites a Jordanian study finding floating panels cut evaporation by 42 percent, and says ocean sited panels can generate up to 13 percent more because water cools them, at a present cost premium of 2 to 20 percent. It points to a Singapore reservoir array supplying around 16,000 four room flats, a Chinese project five times that size, fish farming under the rafts, and pairing floating solar with hydropower dams that already have transmission. Reindl also cautions that water chemistry effects need assessing project by project. Space solar gets the longest odds: geostationary satellites around 1.7 km across, at roughly 3,000 dollars per kilogram to launch.
Bottom line: Two of these three are investable today and one is a physics demonstration with an economics problem. If you farm, run a reservoir or manage a hydro dam, the interesting question is not whether the panels work, it is whether you already hold something scarcer than land, which is a grid connection. Space solar deserves the research money and none of the hype. A satellite that cannot be repaired 35,000 km up, paid for at current launch prices, is not going to be the thing that decarbonises anything this decade. The dull answers win here.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.