The potential for agrivoltaics to enhance solar farm cooling

Human society is at a critical point where rapid adoption of renewable energy alternatives is necessary to mitigate climate change effects while meeting global energy demands. At the same time, agricultural production must increase significantly by midcentury to feed an anticipated 10 billion people worldwide. These impending food-energy needs create land-use competition between crops and energy production, particularly with solar photovoltaics (PV). Co-locating agriculture and solar PV (agrivoltaics) is one attractive solution, but its widespread adoption is hindered by the perception that co-located sites will see major tradeoffs between food and energy production. Here we investigate the potential for agrivoltaic design features to influence the solar farm microclimate and surface temperature of solar PV modules. We develop a CFD-based microclimate model, evaluated against extensive experimental data, to investigate the effects of panel height, ground albedo, and evapotranspiration in a solar PV site. We show that an agrivoltaic solar farm mounted at 4 m with soybeans underneath exhibits solar module temperature reductions of up to 10 °C compared to a solar farm mounted at 0.5 m over bare soil. These results indicate that ground conditions and panel height play important roles in solar farm cooling, and that agrivoltaic systems can potentially help to resolve the global food-energy crisis by improving solar PV conversion efficiency while enabling agricultural production on the same land.