To combat the problems of climate change, drought, and a rising global population that has just surpassed 8 billion people, people are increasingly attempting to grow both food and clean energy on the same land. Agrivoltaic is a component of this effort, in which crops are ideally produced using less water while protected from the sun by solar panels.
Now, researchers from the University of California, Davis, are looking into how to more effectively harness the sun’s energy and its ideal light spectrum to boost the effectiveness of agrivoltaic systems in arid farming regions like California.
Their research, which was published in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future, discovered that the blue section of the light spectrum is more suited for solar production while the red part of the spectrum is more effective for growing plants.
A door opener
The findings of the study could direct interest in agrivoltaic globally and point out potential uses for those systems.
According to corresponding author Majdi Abou Najm, an associate professor in the department of Land, Air, and Water Resources and a fellow at the UC Davis Institute of the Environment, “This research is a door opener for all sorts of technical developments.” He collaborated on the research alongside Matteo Camporese, the study’s lead author from the University of Padova in Italy, who visited UC Davis as a Fulbright visiting scholar. “Solar panels of today attempt to maximize the available light by capturing all of it.” “But what if a new generation of photovoltaics could use blue light for clean electricity while transmitting red light to crops for photosynthesis, where it is most effective?”
To account for the various light spectrums, the researchers created a photosynthetic and transpiration model. The model accurately reflected how different plants, including lettuce, basil, and strawberries, responded to diverse light spectra under controlled laboratory conditions. According to a sensitivity study, the red spectrum can be adjusted for growing food, while the blue spectrum should be filtered out to produce solar energy.
Together with UC Davis Assistant Professor Andre Daccache from the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, this study was further evaluated this past summer on tomato plants in UC Davis agricultural research areas.
lighting source
According to the study, understanding how plants react to various light spectra is a crucial first step in developing systems that balance sustainable land management with water use and food production in an era of limited usable land.
Being slightly more water-efficient and carrying on as we are now will not allow us to feed 2 billion more people in 30 years, according to Abou Najm. “Not incremental change is what we need, but transformation.” If we view the sun as a resource, we can create shade, produce electricity, and grow food in its shadow. Kilowatt hours turn into a byproduct you may harvest.
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, UC Davis, and a Fulbright Research Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State all contributed to funding the study.
