Agrivoltaics denotes approaches to use agricultural areas simultaneously to produce food and to generate PV electricity. In this way, Agrivoltaics increases land-use efficiency and enables PV capacity to be expanded while still retaining fertile arable areas for agriculture.
Agrivoltaics technology has developed very dynamically in recent years and can be found in almost all regions of the world. The installed Agrivoltaics power increased exponentially from app. 5 MW in 2012 to app. 2.9 GW in 2018, with national funding programmes in Japan (since 2013), China (ca. 2014), France (since 2017), the USA (since 2018) and most recently Korea.
Regarding renewable energy applications to greenhouse in the SusMedHouse project, in the beginning, the 3D models of the greenhouse were drawn in SketchUp program. A function was developed in Python to translate the 3D greenhouse geometries into a format that can be imported into and used in Radiance objects and/or scenes. The assessments and inferences were done by prioritizing the light requirements of crops in order to avoid agricultural losses, and to use as much natural light as possible. Furthermore, a better trade-off between the PV energy yield and agronomic conditions was investigated based on the design parameters.
The results reached by Fraunhofer ISE indicates that the checkerboard pattern enhances the light homogeneity on the ground level of the greenhouse compared to the of the straight line pattern. Tomato, pepper and lettuce will tested in the agro-PV section comparing hydroponic, aquaponic and conventional methods in the SusMedHouse demonstration greenhouse at AR&TeCS.
