Austrian researchers conducted a techno-economic analysis of agrivoltaic systems and found that 5% to 16% of the country’s agricultural land would be needed to meet solar energy targets.
A research group led by Austria University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna conducted a techno-economic analysis of the potential of the country’s agrivoltaic installations, combining assessments of profitability for both solar energy generation and agricultural production.
“Our paper presents, to our knowledge, the first integrated framework that combines the simulation of both PV electricity generation and agricultural production for agrivoltaic systems at the level of an entire country, including the impacts of climate change,” said corresponding author Isabelle Grabner. pv magazine. “In our research we examined the reduction in crop production for Austria due to the expansion of solar energy on agricultural land.
“We compared the aggressive deployment of agrivoltaic energy with typical ground-mounted PV installations needed to achieve climate neutrality goals,” Grabner added. “In addition, we have shown limited effects on climate change adaptation under agrivoltaic systems, but these latter results are highly dependent on the crops chosen and country specific.”
To conduct the analysis, the team used a modular simulation framework, using existing software where available and developing new solutions where necessary. The framework is available online under the GPL license. Using EU data from the Policy Integrated Climate Model (EPIC), the researchers first classified areas suitable for agrivoltaic use, applying filters such as a minimum contiguous cropland area of 1 ha, a maximum average slope of 20° and a maximum altitude of 1,950 m above sea level.
Image:
BOKU University, Renewable energy, CC BY 4.0
Electricity generation was simulated with PVlib, using global horizontal irradiance (GHI) data from a climate simulation on a 1 km grid. EPIC was used to model key environmental processes and plant growth at the plot level, with daily time steps and a spatial resolution of 1 km x 1 km. The scenarios include interactions between environmental conditions and management practices, including crop rotation, for crops such as peas, soybeans, potatoes, alfalfa, spring barley and oats.
Climate data were based on observations from 1981–2020 and projections from 2031–2070. Two basic scenarios were tested: agricultural production without PV system and ground-mounted PV without agriculture. Agrivoltaic scenarios include above-ground pole systems, south-facing with an installation height of approximately 10 m, and vertical two-sided systems with a 10 m row spacing and two two-sided panels stacked vertically. Each system was evaluated under low-, medium-, and high-cost scenarios.
The analysis showed that in Austria, ground-mounted PV systems generate 1,173 MWh/ha, pole-mounted agrivoltaic systems 684 MWh/ha and vertical agrivoltaic systems 373 MWh/ha of electricity. Profit ratios to agricultural production alone ranged from 10:1 to 50:1 for vertical systems, to 60:1 for pole systems and to 100:1 for ground-mounted PV.
“To achieve 90 TWh/y of electricity generation from solar energy on cropland, an upper limit in all climate neutrality scenarios, an amount of 5% to 16% of the total agricultural area is needed,” the team concluded. “The areas required and the simulated yield reduction imply that the loss of Austrian crop production would be 2% to 6%. Only agrivoltaic systems can achieve production losses at the lower end of the observed range. The impacts of agrivoltaic systems in terms of climate change adaptation are small.”
The study findings are available in “The techno-economic potential of agrivoltaic installations in Austria”, published in Renewable energy. Researchers from Austria’s BOKU University and the Federal Institute for Agricultural Economics participated in the study.
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