ld of food and electricity was 60 percent higher per square meter than it would have been if food and electricity had been harvested on two separate fields.
The clover did the best, losing about 5 percent in productivity compared to clover grown under full sun. The potato, wheat, and celery yields were lower by about 19 percent compared to test plots without solar panels. “Overall electricity generation far outweighed agricultural losses,” explained Benedikt Klotz, a student assistant at the Fraunhofer Institute.
The panels supplied enough energy to power 62 homes for one year; the goal, Klotz said, is to increase that in the future. The pilot study is scheduled to last three years. “Eventually, we want to lead APV (agrophotovoltaics) to an industry-ready stage for large-scale construction.”
Hypothetically, if all the lettuce grown in the U.S. were converted to agrovoltaic systems, it could double the nation’s entire installed photovoltaic capacity.
So how big can this go? That’s the question a number of recent modeling studies have tackled. Michigan Technical University engineer Joshua Pearce, for example, wondered what would happen if solar panels were installed on grape farms in India. Considering the shade tolerance of grapes, he and colleagues created a techno-economic computer model, plugged in the numbers, and found the economic value of Indian grape farms could increase more than 15 times, compared to traditional farming— with no decline in grape yields. If this dual use of land happened across India,
energy generation would potentially be more than enough to supply 15 million people with electricity.
Pearce and colleagues also looked at lettuce farming in the US. Hypothetically, if all the lettuce production in the US were converted to agrovoltaic systems, photovoltaic power generation could increase by 40 to 70 gigawatts. To put that into perspective, this amount would nearly double the entire installed photovoltaic capacity in the US at the end of 2017.
And that’s just lettuce. On to broccoli.
Sadie Babits is a Ted Scripps Journalism Fellow at University of Colorado, Boulder, where she’s focusing on stories about America’s public lands. Most recently, she was News Director at Colorado Public Radio.
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