Co-locating agriculture and solar power renewables (agrivoltaics) to create a more sustainable food, energy, and water future
Abstract
Vulnerabilities of our food, energy, and water systems to projected climatic change make building resilience under an increasingly stressful climate a fundamental challenge. We investigate the potential of co-located agriculture and solar photovoltaic (PV) infrastructure to maximize agricultural and energy production, all while reducing demand for irrigative waters. We take an integrative approach - monitoring microclimatic conditions, PV panel temperature, soil moisture and irrigation water use, plant ecophysiological function, and plant biomass production within this novel "agrivoltaics" ecosystem compared to traditional PV installations and agricultural settings (control plots) - to quantify synergies and tradeoffs associated with the systems involved in this arrangement. Because sunlight is overly abundant in drylands, we find that shading by the PV panels actually provides multiple benefits. In terms of water, levels of soil moisture remained higher after each irrigation event within the soils under the agrivoltaics installation than the traditional agricultural setting, indicating that less irrigation is required to maintain adequate moisture conditions. As a result, we find reduced drought stresses on photosynthetic capacity and water use efficiency and greater food production in the agrivoltaic installation relative to the control plants. Combined with localized cooling of the PV panels resulting from the transpiration from the vegetative "understory", which reduces heat stress on the panels and boosts their performance, we are discovering a win-win-win at the food-water-energy nexus.
We provide a foundation and motivation for future explorations towards more sustainable food and energy systems under projected increases in environmental stress involving heat and drought. Wide-spread adoption of an agrivoltaic approach will require both new approaches to designing and assessment of these novel ecosystems, as well as an explicit investigation of the policies, costs and benefits, cultural connections, and community perceptions of these novel systems.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B41B..01B
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0439 Ecosystems;
- structure and dynamics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES