Manish Khare

Manish Khare is redefining what farmland can do. As the pioneer behind India’s most advanced agrivoltaic installations, he is making the case that renewable energy and agriculture don’t compete. They multiply.

As Founder and Managing Director of Khare Energy, Khare is one of India’s most pioneering voices in agrivoltaics — the practice of integrating solar power generation with active agriculture on the same land. His work sits at the crossroads of two of India’s most urgent challenges: energy poverty and agricultural fragility. And his answer to both is the same field.

Manish Khare’s journey into agrivoltaics was shaped by a practical problem. While working across technology, governance, and renewable energy in India and abroad, he repeatedly encountered the same bottleneck: land. Large-scale solar expansion requires significant land, yet in a country where farming sustains hundreds of millions of livelihoods, taking agricultural land out of productive use creates deep social and economic conflict. Agrivoltaics offered a way through.

Today, Khare Energy operates some of India’s most advanced AgriPV demonstration sites. Their flagship research laboratory hosts approximately 2 MW of agrivoltaic capacity across 16 acres, with five different elevated solar structure designs running simultaneously. Beneath the panels, farmers grow strawberries, capsicum, broccoli, wheat, and a range of seasonal crops. The site is a living laboratory — generating the agronomic data, design benchmarks, and farmer-learning ecosystems that the industry urgently needs.

Khare’s vision extends far beyond individual projects. He believes India has the potential to deploy at least 10 GW of AgriPV capacity over the next five years — particularly across Central and Eastern India, where vast agricultural regions remain largely untapped by renewable energy. His long-term goal is to create large-scale Agri-Energy assets where solar power feeds rural infrastructure, including irrigation, cold storage, and food processing, turning farms into integrated economic hubs rather than isolated plots.