Assessing Agrivoltaics: Crops Under Solar Panels, or Solar Panels Over Crops?

Abstract

As we strive to sustain the growing population and economies of the nations, we observe a possible competing land requirement for food and renewable energy productions. A possible path forward is adopting and developing agrivoltaics (AV) technology, a system where solar panels and crops share the same land. At first glance, the relative gain from AV depends on the reference system: (i) do we start from a solar farm and add crop underneath? Or (ii) do we start from a cropland and append an appropriately designed panel array over it? In this paper, we compare these two approaches to evaluate the profit gain from AV. We show that, approach-(i) has low relative economic gain. The performance indicator in this case would need to be set by the stakeholders' requirements. While approach-(ii) seemingly has high economic gain, the crop-loss in a cultivable land should be constrained by national policies. Finally, both the approaches are practically valid, and the design constraints would be set through separate set of economic and policy requirements.