Agri-PV in Portugal: How to combine agriculture and photovoltaic production

Energy is one of the main topics being discussed by governmental institutions, mainly due to today's society's high dependence on non-renewable energy sources and the clear evidence of global warming by climate change. With this problem and the fact that the world's population is growing, another problem arises which is the lack of food worldwide. One solution for these problems is combining solar PV systems with agriculture in a dual-land usage setup creating the concept of Agri-PV. The present research work aims to study the viability of implementing Agri-PV in Portugal, a country with good climate characteristics of solar production, in financial, production and environmental terms. The case studies consist of two Agri-PV applications, spaced and elevated PV rows with distinct layouts, and a regular PV implementation for comparison reasons. Both applications are considering selling all the energy produced by the panels, to have a clear image for the financial analysis, but since is a bit unrealistic scenario, the self-consumption study with Agri-PV application was made with certain assumptions to cover the agriculture expenditures. Results have shown that combining agriculture with photovoltaic systems can be very beneficial from energy production and a financial point of view, where despite the considerable initial investment cost, the payback time does not surpass more than 5 years and it is concluded that Agri-PV worth more than only PV or only agriculture productions, verified by a LER higher than 1. Moreover, the spaced solution reveals a higher potential, since the LER is at least 0.1 higher in comparison with the elevated one.