Where Vines Meet the Sun: Armenia’s First Agrivoltaic Vineyard Takes Root

On the slopes of Mount Aragats, a Franco-Armenian project has raised solar panels above rows of Areni and Voskehat. The result is the region’s first agrivoltaic vineyard, a working experiment in whether the same plot of land can produce good wine and clean electricity at once, and whether one can actually help the other.

The village of Aghdzk sits in Aragatsotn, on the southern approaches of Mount Aragats, in a landscape that agriculture has shaped for as long as anyone can document. Since the end of July, something distinctly new rises above the vines there. Rows of solar panels tilt and turn through the day, tracking the sun, generating electricity while casting carefully calculated shade on the grapes below.

This is SUNWINE, Armenia’s first agrivoltaic power plant built on a vineyard and one of the first projects of its kind in the South Caucasus. Inaugurated on July 31 in the presence of French Ambassador Olivier Decottignies, Armenian government representatives and the project’s French and Armenian partners, the installation has a capacity of 121 kilowatts. That figure will not move Armenia’s energy balance, and it is not meant to. What the project is really testing is a question with implications far beyond one vineyard. Can a single piece of land produce both premium grapes and clean energy, and can each improve the other?

“We are opening the region’s first dynamic agrivoltaic power plant together with our French partners at NALDEO, with the support of the French government. Our local partner in Armenia is EcoVille Solar, and this project demonstrates what such a multi-stakeholder partnership can achieve. The technology uses AI and is designed not only to generate clean electricity, but also to improve grape yields and optimize water use,” says Armen Stepanyan, Co-Founder of SUNWINE LLC.

One Land, Two Purposes

Agrivoltaics, sometimes shortened to Agri-PV, rests on a simple premise. The same surface is used simultaneously for farming and for photovoltaic electricity generation. The difference from a conventional solar park lies in the hierarchy of priorities. A standard plant positions its panels to maximize output. An agrivoltaic system must also answer to the crop growing underneath.

At SUNWINE, the panels are mounted high enough for agricultural work to continue below them, and their angle adjusts continuously according to sunlight, weather and the needs of the vines. The task is to divide the available sun between two consumers, the photosynthesis that ripens the grapes and the photovoltaic cells that turn the remainder into power. In practice, this turns the solar installation into a farming tool. During heat waves, added shade reduces heat stress on the vines and slows evaporation from the soil. The same structures can shield the rows from hail, frost and heavy rain. When the plants need more light, the panels move out of the way.

“The installation has been built at sufficient height to allow agricultural activities to continue underneath the solar panels,” says Vardan Hovsepyan, Co-founder and Director of EcoVille Solar, the Armenian company that implemented the project on the ground. “Another key technical feature is its dynamic structure, which tracks the movement of the sun, increasing energy production and enabling a faster return on investment. With a total installed capacity of 121 kWp, the plant incorporates equipment from leading global manufacturers and is designed to operate for more than 30 years, providing the winery with clean electricity throughout its lifetime. We hope this project will serve as a successful example for similar initiatives across Armenia.”

A Vineyard That Thinks

Behind the moving structures sits the less photogenic but arguably more important half of the project, the data. The panels are managed by the Suntropy Energy Management System, software that tracks the sun in real time and adapts the array’s behavior to weather conditions and to the stage of the growing season. Sensors monitor the microclimate around the vines, and the system continuously arbitrates between electricity production and the conditions the plants need.

Pauline Plisson, Group Innovation Director at NALDEO, the French engineering company leading the project, describes the objective as a dual benefit. “The software developed by NALDEO controls the movement of the solar panels, allowing them to protect the crops from excessive sunlight, optimize water use and, at the same time, generate renewable energy,” she says.
This matters because there is no universal formula for agrivoltaics. The amount of shade that suits a vineyard in the south of France may be wrong for one at Aragatsotn’s altitude, with its intense solar radiation, sharp temperature swings and volcanic soils. What SUNWINE creates is something Armenia has never had, a working agrivoltaic vineyard generating local data under local conditions. Over the coming seasons it should begin answering practical questions. How much can dynamic shading reduce water stress? Can the panels reliably protect vines during extreme weather? How do different shading strategies affect grape development and, ultimately, the wine? And how much electricity can be produced without compromising, or while even improving, the harvest?

The French Connection

SUNWINE did not appear in Aghdzk by accident. France has spent the past decade turning itself into the world’s laboratory for dynamic agrivoltaics. Pilot vineyards in the France’s south, operated by companies such as Sun’Agri, have reported that panel shading cut the water demand of sheltered vines by 12 to 34 percent while improving the aromatic profile of the grapes. In 2023, France went further and wrote agrivoltaics into law, requiring that any installation carrying the label must provide a genuine service to the agriculture beneath it rather than simply occupy farmland.
The Armenian project transfers that accumulated experience to new terrain. It is financed through FASEP, a French Treasury instrument that funds demonstration projects allowing innovative French technologies to be tested in real conditions abroad. NALDEO leads the engineering, EcoVille Solar contributed Armenian solar expertise and carried out the construction, and the project was developed in cooperation with the Municipality of Ashtarak, the Vine and Wine Foundation of Armenia and the Ministry of Environment. Speaking at the opening, Ambassador Decottignies framed the vineyard as an example of how Franco-Armenian cooperation in renewable energy and climate resilience can translate into practical, replicable solutions.
The arrangement serves both sides. For France, Armenia becomes a proving ground for a climate technology with export potential across sun-rich, water-stressed geographies. For Armenia, the country gets to test that technology at home, at someone else’s initial risk, and decide whether it deserves wider deployment.

Why Armenia, Why Now

The timing is not incidental. Armenia is in the middle of a solar boom. The country added roughly 615 megawatts of solar capacity in 2025 alone, pushing the cumulative total past 1.1 gigawatts and lifting solar to about 15 percent of electricity generation, a threshold the government’s energy strategy had not expected to reach before 2030. More than 50,000 households and businesses now operate their own solar installations under the net metering scheme.
That success creates its own dilemma. Ground-mounted solar consumes land, and in a small mountainous country, land suitable for both panels and crops is often the same land. As deployment accelerates, the question of whether energy and agriculture must compete for territory becomes less theoretical every year. Agrivoltaics proposes that they need not, and that under the right conditions they can reinforce each other.
Climate change sharpens the argument. Higher temperatures, prolonged droughts, erratic precipitation, hail and late frosts all press on Armenian agriculture, and vineyards are among the most sensitive assets of all. Heat and sunlight shape ripening, acidity and sugar levels, and through them the character of the wine itself. For a wine sector built on distinctiveness, climate adaptation is not an environmental abstraction. It is an economic necessity.

Ancient Grapes, New Technology

There is a layer to this story that makes it particularly Armenian. The vineyard at Aghdzk grows indigenous varieties, including Areni and Voskehat, grapes tied to a winemaking tradition that archaeology traces back more than six millennia, to the world’s oldest known winery in the Areni-1 cave. The country counts around 400 native grape varieties, of which several dozen are in commercial use, and over the past two decades its producers have built a genuine revival around them, rediscovering forgotten terroirs and positioning Armenian wine internationally on the strength of that heritage. The grapes grown at SUNWINE’s vineyard are also at the heart of FLAMA Wine, the company’s wine brand, making the project not only a demonstration of new agricultural technology but a direct investment in the quality and resilience of the wines produced from this land.
The revival remains a work in progress. Armenian wine now reaches more than 30 countries, and exports have more than doubled over the past decade, yet the sector is still heavily dependent on a single market. Russia took around 70 percent of export volumes in the first half of 2025, a period in which overall shipments fell sharply. The strategic answer the industry has chosen is quality, and quality begins in the vineyard. A technology that protects vines from climate shocks while stabilizing growing conditions speaks directly to that strategy. The solar panels above the rows may look futuristic, but their purpose is old. Keep the vineyard alive, and keep the land productive.

More Than Electricity

The economic logic extends beyond power generation. Farming is a business of compounding risks, where a single season of hail or drought can erase a year’s income. A dual-use plot stacks several revenue layers on the same hectare. There is the crop, there is the electricity, there are potential savings on irrigation and avoided weather losses. And in SUNWINE’s case there is a fourth layer, wine tourism, since a vineyard where visitors can taste Areni beneath sun-tracking panels is also, unavoidably, an attraction. For rural communities weighing whether such systems are worth the considerable upfront cost, this diversification may prove the strongest argument of all.

From Aghdzk Outward

The partners are already looking past viticulture. “We are planning to move into the next phase of agrivoltaics by establishing a demonstration site on non-irrigated agricultural land,” says SUNWINE co-founder Nvard Shahmuradyan. “This will allow us to measure and assess how these technologies can introduce new approaches to drought resilience, particularly for forage crops grown without irrigation. By creating additional shade and moisture and improving the microclimate around the crops, we hope to demonstrate how agrivoltaics can help mitigate the effects of climate change and make agriculture more resilient.”
If the model works, the geography of its relevance is wide. Much of the South Caucasus and the neighboring regions faces the same combination of strong solar radiation, rising temperatures, water stress and agricultural economies exposed to climate variability. A successful Armenian demonstrator could become a reference point well beyond the country’s borders.

For now, the most valuable thing growing in Aghdzk may be neither grapes nor kilowatt-hours but knowledge. Agriculture operates in seasons, not press cycles, and the real verdict will come as the vineyard passes through hot summers, dry spells and unpredictable springs, each one adding data on how Armenian vines behave beneath moving panels and whether the economics justify replication. Sensors now measure what generations of Aragatsotn farmers judged by eye and experience, yet the goal behind all the software is one those farmers would recognize instantly. Keep the land working. If the experiment succeeds, Armenia will have shown that it does not have to choose between its agricultural traditions and its energy future. Sometimes the technology of tomorrow turns out to be the best available way of protecting the inheritance of the past.

Join us on Telegram