Household preferences for agrivoltaic solar deployment under land constraints in South Korea

Agrivoltaics (AV) offers a promising pathway to reconcile South Korea’s solar deployment targets with severe land constraints and social resistance to conventional ground-mounted photovoltaics. This study employs a nationwide choice experiment with 1,000 households using stratified random sampling and face-to-face interviews. It elicits public preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for AV deployment under realistic income tax increases. The experiment includes policy attributes such as changes in crop yield and solar power generation, reductions in farmer conflicts, domestic equipment share, and farm income increases. A mixed logit model captures unobserved preference heterogeneity while relaxing the independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption, yielding richer preference distributions. Respondents prioritize agricultural productivity and farmers’ income most highly, followed by domestic equipment use and conflict mitigation, with low value placed on extra power generation. Annual household WTP reaches KRW 3,546 (USD 2.54) per 1% crop yield increase but only KRW 389 (USD 0.28) per 1% solar output gain. This disparity positions AV primarily as an agri-rural development tool rather than pure energy technology, offering substantial national welfare benefits.