Review on agrophotovoltaic systems with a premise on thermal management of photovoltaic modules therein

Abstract

Agrophotovoltaics (APV) is the coexistence of solar photovoltaics (PV) and agriculture on the same piece of land. Although the concept of APV is known for the last two decades, its actual penetration in society is inconsiderable. The objective of the current article is to discuss the various APV systems explored in the past and to highlight the futuristic APVs. Furthermore, this study presents the review of the available experimental work on the performance and environmental and techno-economic aspects of the APV systems. The key features, crop selection criteria, feasible crops for Indian climatic conditions, and the future research directions of APV systems have been summarized. Furthermore, apart from the known techno-economic benefits of APV, a premise on its another utility for the thermal management of the solar PV modules by crops' natural transpiration cooling has been presented in this study. A theoretical study demonstrates the gain in the electrical output of the solar PV plant as compared with the conventional PV installation. The theoretical study has been carried out considering the meteorological data of Nagpur (21.1458° N, 79.0882° E). The estimation has been carried out using Nominal Operating Cell Temperature (NOCT) model, NREL irradiance database-NSRDB, and System Advisor Model (SAM). An experimental study has been conducted on APV systems with a 2-kW solar PV plant and tomato crops to investigate its actual performance. The study shows an increment of 17.96% in the daily energy generation as compared with the conventional solar PV power plant.

Keywords: APV; Agrivoltaics; Agrophotovoltaics; Greenhouse APV; Thermal management of PV; Transpiration cooling.