Climate change and other factors require transformations of the agricultural sector towards sustainable land use practice. The integration of renewable energy systems, particularly photovoltaics, into agricultural and rural land-use systems receives increased attention to decarbonise resource use and consumption and to stabilise incomes and livelihoods in rural regions. This study analyses the quantitative potential of a new concept, Field Margin Photovoltaics, in north-western Lower Saxony, Germany. This concept combines crop cultivation, photovoltaics and biodiversity promotion with wildflower strips and/or hedges. We use a GIS workflow to quantify marginal structures from landscape models, relying on available geospatial data from regional authorities. The marginal structures are categorised based on suitability criteria and solar exposure to estimate the potential energy yield in the region. The results of a regional analysis show that field margins allow a significant contribution to renewable energy production without significantly compromising other land uses. For a region of almost 15,000 square kilometres, more than 1.3 million field margin sections with solar potential were considered. The total length of potentially suitable margins was calculated to be 97,870 km. About 27,300 km were predicted to be partly shaded. Estimating the integration of photovoltaic modules with a surface area of one to four square metres per metre of field margin would result in a theoretical maximum energy potential of around 119 TWh. The modelling work is part of a transdisciplinary project to address various aspects of transformation research ( www.vier-n.de ). The GIS analyses presented here serve for regional planning and stakeholder discourses together with a living lab approach.
Foth et al. (2026) studied this question.