Dissertation: Harvesting Sunshine: A Modular Integrated Framework for Modeling the Agrivoltaic SystemThesis/Dissertation
Abstract
Understanding the interplay between energy and water is central to effective natural resource management. With enough energy it is possible to secure sufficient water, with enough water it is possible to produce nearly boundless energy. The sun is the engine which drives the availability of both these resources; nearly every source of energy on earth can ultimately be tracked back to solar energy and solar radiation dictates climatic cycles, distributing water around the globe. Agriculture is the endeavor which most embodies these interactions. Effective natural resource decision making requires multi-scale models which consider the synergies and trade-offs within this Food – Energy – Water (FEW) nexus. These multi-scale models are dependent on research which explores these interactions at scales from the finely detailed field level up to the global level. This dissertation will focus on one technological approach, agrivoltaics, which sits firmly at the nexus of various natural resources, investigating it at multiple scales. First, context is provided about how the agrivoltaic approach fits into the broader FEW nexus, including a systematic review of the FEW nexus, and various perspectives that researchers use to characterize the nexus (Chapter II). This review finds that the volume of research on the FEW nexus has grown exponentially since 2010, that the research is coming from a wide geographic range, and that the majority of the research is related to the Ecosystems and Institutional Change perspectives. Next, an analysis of agrivoltaics at the national level is conducted, producing estimates of the various impacts of wide-scale agrivoltaic adoption in the United States (Chapter III). This analysis estimates that 20% of the US’ total electricity generation can be met with agrivoltaics if less than 1% of the annual US budget is invested into rural infrastructure and if less than 1% of the nation’s farmlands are converted to agrivoltaics. The analysis also finds that widescale installation of agrivoltaic systems can lead to a carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction equivalent to removing 71 million cars from the road annually and the creation of over 100,000 jobs in rural communities. The dissertation concludes with the introduction of an integrated modular framework (AV-EAS) for field level analysis (Chapter IV). The AV-EAS framework incorporates a solar radiation model, a process-based crop growth simulation model, and an economic model in order to simulate an agrivoltaic field and identify optimal panel configurations for a particular location and particular crop based on multiple objectives. An example use of AV-EAS, modeling dry bean growth in western Oregon, finds that increasing the panel row spacing has a greater impact on crop yield than increasing the clearance height of the panels, that the relationship between panel configurations and yield is dependent upon whether the cropping system is energy-limited or water-limited, and that, with current steel-based racking methods, racking costs must be kept below $0.5/Watt for agrivoltaics to remain profitable. The process of characterizing the FEW nexus and developing multi-scale models is an iterative one. This work explores the agrivoltaic approach at multiple scales, introduces an integrated field-scale framework for simulating these systems, and provides a clear pathway for the NewAg lab at Oregon State to deepen the understanding of the potential role of agrivoltaics within the broader FEW nexus.
Contains a model
Contains novel data
Topics
- Plant Science
- Microclimatology
- Market Assessments
- Economics
- Rural development impacts
- Cost benchmarks for O&M/CAPEX
- System Configuration
- Impact Assessments
- GHG Emissions/reductions
- Environmental/climate LCA
- Food-water-energy Nexus
- Reviews/Informational
