D3:4 Business Model Catalogue

To meet Europe’s climate goals, the farming sector must profoundly change how it creates value in rural areas. While renewable energy technologies for agriculture are technically ready, they won't be widely adopted without the right economic and social support systems. The HarvRESt project addresses this challenge by studying decentralized energy setups within farming communities. Its main goal is to build a solid data foundation for two tools: an Agricultural Virtual Power Plant, which links multiple small energy sources to act as one large power grid, and a Decision Support System. These tools are designed to help balance energy generation with food and feed production, navigating the complex relationship between water, energy, and food.

To organize the current market landscape, this study created the HarvRESt business models catalogue, aiming to explore innovative ways to integrate renewable energy into agriculture. The document lists and defines 33 real-world European business models, covering different farm sizes, farming activities, technologies, and evaluation criteria. It also includes a comparative analysis of business models developed by startups and small-to-medium enterprises in the renewable energy sector. The study analyzes these 33 configurations across four structural areas, which encompass technological types, management and ownership structures, land-use strategies, and sector-specific integration. An expert panel then scored each model across seven performance areas—including long-term resilience, how easily they can be copied elsewhere, and how attractive they are to stakeholders—to see which ones have the best potential to scale up.

The analysis highlights a promising opportunity, revealing that while a gap remains between farm-level setups and the broader energy market, farmers are highly willing to diversify into energy production, providing a strong foundation for growth. Right now, attraction from large energy companies and integration into the main power grid are still in the early stages, leaving room for further development. However, current farm energy initiatives have successfully established themselves as viable, local, self-consumption loops. Looking forward, the study shows an excellent opportunity to upgrade these isolated setups into official, organized agri-energy units.

Furthermore, clear operational trade-offs exist within the sector. Complex configurations like agrivoltaics, which combines solar panels with crops or livestock, and biogas systems offer excellent recycling of resources and long-term resilience, despite requiring higher up-front costs. On the other hand, standalone solar installations and third-party leasing frameworks provide lower entry barriers and are easier to scale up quickly in the short term.

An assessment of how easily these models can move across different countries indicates that the primary barriers to expanding agricultural energy are institutional and bureaucratic rather than technological. Deep information gaps persist, with nearly half of the surveyed market players reporting systemic uncertainty regarding available subsidies and rural governance rules. Crucially, two major friction points stall cross-sector collaboration. First, a severe time clash exists between the rapid decision-making cycles required by private investors and the slow, step-by-step bureaucratic processes typical of public administrations, which effectively paralyzes public-private partnerships. Second, centralized power grid regulations in multiple European regions actively penalize local setups by legally restricting or banning peer-to-peer energy trading among neighbors, which hurts economic profits and confines farmers to isolated operations.

The ability to move these agri-energy business models across Europe is highly unequal and depends heavily on regional differences in government efficiency. Consequently, regions with slower bureaucracy or follower markets should initially prioritize simple, commercially proven models, specifically standalone solar assets that are either farmer-owned or managed by energy service companies, as these bypass bureaucratic hurdles. Moving toward highly integrated, multi-source hybrid models and collective cooperatives remains strictly dependent on future policy changes, such as opening up the power grid and simplifying cross-sector permitting procedures. Ultimately, this catalog gives the HarvRESt Decision Support System and Agricultural Virtual Power Plant the real-world data calibration they need, ensuring a complete overview of the toolkit for decision-making and planning.