Large-Scale Agrivoltaics Visualisations for Assessing Landscape Impacts and Social Acceptance

Abstract

Visual landscape impacts are of great importance when it comes to social acceptance measures of renewable energy. Although agrivoltaics seems to have higher acceptance values than other renewable energy infrastructures due to the dual land use approach, it is expected that they have a bigger visual impact on the landscape scenery than ground-mounted installations due to the increased land requirements and clearance heights. This article presents the development of a game-based visualisation approach using open-source software and open data (open government data) for visualising energy landscapes by creating large-scale interactive and immersive 3D visualisations. The results show that the use of open geodata and available open-source gaming technologies can be used to create comprehensive digital VR landscapes for assessing the visual impacts of agrivoltaics. Furthermore, the data-driven approach can provide additional indicators for evaluating planning scenarios and investigating the social acceptability due to renewable energy expansion.