Increasing the comprehensive economic benefits of farmland with Even-lighting Agrivoltaic Systems

PLoS One. 2021 Jul 15;16(7):e0254482. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254482. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Agrivoltaic combines crop planting and electricity generation on the same land, it is considered as an opportunity to resolve the competition for land use between food and energy production. In addition to growing crops, farmers can gain electricity with the installation of agrivoltaic systems on their farmland. They can use this clean energy for agricultural production or sell it for extra income. The Chinese government considers it an important strategy for "Targeted Poverty Alleviation". However, current methods of agrivoltaic provide uneven and low irradiance for crops, which usually results in reduced yield and low quality. In this study, an improved agrivoltaic system with a grooved glass plate has been designed, manufactured, and investigated, called Even-lighting Agrivoltaic System (EAS). Two experiments were conducted to test the effectiveness of the improvement. We measured the crops' light environment, the crop growth process, the crop yield and quality, the electricity generation, and calculated the Land Equivalent Ratio (LER) as well as the comprehensive economic benefits on the farmland per hectare. Under the EAS, crops grew fast and the yield was similar or better than that under the natural state. By adding supplementary LED lamps into the EAS, the soluble sugar content of lettuce increased by 72.14% and the nitrate content of lettuce decreased by 21.51%. The average LER of the EAS for common vegetables was 1.64 as demonstrated in this work. Comprehensive economic benefits outperform the installation and maintenance costs, thus, the EAS can increase farmers' income by an average of 5.14 times. The EAS provides new ideas and directions for the future development of agrivoltaic.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Agriculture
  • Crops, Agricultural
  • Farms*
  • Lighting*
  • Vegetables

Grants and funding

The financial support for the work presented here came from Institute of Microelectronics and Optoelectronics 2014” under grant XT2830000001, Fuyang Municipal Government - Fuyang Normal University Horizontal Project” under grant SXHZ202011, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” under grant WK5290000001. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.