Techno-economic and life cycle assessment of agrivoltaic system (AVS) designs

Achyuth Ravilla; Gabriela Shirkey; Jiquan Chen; Meghann Jarchow; Olyssa Stary; Ilke Celik

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169274

Techno-economic and life cycle assessment of agrivoltaic system (AVS) designs

Sci Total Environ. 2024 Feb 20:912:169274. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169274. Epub 2023 Dec 12.

Authors

Achyuth Ravilla¹, Gabriela Shirkey², Jiquan Chen², Meghann Jarchow³, Olyssa Stary⁴, Ilke Celik⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Portland State University, Portland 97201, OR, USA.
² Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI 48823, USA.
³ Department of Sustainability and Environment, University of South Dakota, 414 E Clark St, Vermillion, SD 57069, USA.
⁴ University Honors College, Portland State University, Portland 97201, OR, USA.
⁵ Department of Mechanical and Material Engineering, Portland State University, Portland 97201, OR, USA. Electronic address: ilke@pdx.edu.

PMID: 38092209
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169274

Abstract

Land use competition between agricultural activities and ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment has increased worldwide attention to hybrid agriculture, and PV systems known as agrivoltaic systems (AVS) in efforts to increase the efficiency of energy and food production and minimize the land use competition. However, little is known about AVS's economic feasibility and environmental tradeoffs. Here we aim to evaluate the techno-economic and environmental impacts of four AVS configurations (full density, half density, mono-axial tracking, and bi-axial tracking) and compare their performance against PV-only systems. We used the life cycle revenue generated from a hectare of land area ($/ha) as a functional unit of our analysis. We found that all AVS configurations outperformed PV-only systems in the economic feasibility assessment, where bi-axial tracking was the best-performing AVS. Further, we developed a case scenario for agricultural farmers to determine the minimum selling price of electricity required for AVS to compete with the economic performance of crop-only farms. We found that the AVS designs require additional incentives (2¢ - 6¢ per kWh of electricity generation) to be as competitive as the crop-only farms. The life cycle environmental assessment demonstrated that the AVS has better environmental performance than PV-only systems, with ∼15-55 % less environmental impacts per functional unit. On average, electricity generation accounts for ∼80 % of AVS environmental impacts, while food production and water demand account for ∼20 %. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis conducted on various uncertain parameters, such as crop yield, water demand, electricity selling price, crop selling prices, discount, and inflation rates, while varying these parameters across broader ranges, indicates that AVS designs become a more economically and environmentally sustainable alternative over PV-only systems in the majority (>66 %) of the data analyzed.

Keywords: Agricultural LCA; Agrivoltaics; Food-energy-water nexus; PV LCA; Techno-economic.