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Different Light Spectra Serve Different Needs for Agrivoltaics:
People are increasingly trying to grow both food and clean energy on the same land to help meet the challenges of climate change, drought and a growing global population that just topped 8 billion. This effort includes agrivoltaics, in which crops are grown under the shade of solar panels, ideally with less water.
Now scientists from the University of California, Davis, are investigating how to better harvest the sun — and its optimal light spectrum — to make agrivoltaic systems more efficient in arid agricultural regions like California.
Their study, published in Earth's Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, found that the red part of the light spectrum is more efficient for growing plants, while the blue part of the spectrum is better used for solar production.
[...] "Today's solar panels take all the light and try to make the best of it. But what if a new generation of photovoltaics could take the blue light for clean energy and pass the red light onto the crops, where it is most efficient for photosynthesis?"
[...] "We cannot feed 2 billion more people in 30 years by being just a little more water-efficient and continuing as we do," Abou Najm said. "We need something transformative, not incremental. If we treat the sun as a resource, we can work with shade and generate electricity while producing crops underneath. Kilowatt hours become a secondary crop you can harvest."
Journal Reference:
Matteo Camporese, Majdi Abou Najm, Not All Light Spectra Were Created Equal: Can We Harvest Light for Optimum Food-Energy Co-Generation? [open], Earth's Future, 10, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF002900
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2023, @01:35PM (1 child)
"we can work with shade and generate electricity while producing crops underneath"
Have any of these people ever seen how a farm works at scale, and the massive capital investment creating this would be?
You aren't going to have people picking crops in the California central valley in a Hellscape like that (I hope...)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday January 24 2023, @02:13PM
Given that it's shading the ground underneath from most of the solar influx (heat and UV) from the Sun, it may be less of a Hellscape than the current non-solar panel field is! And let's consider the revenue: revenue from solar power (possibly reduced by a need to redirect or generate blue light for crops shaded by the panels) and revenue from the field's crops. It doesn't sound that impressive to me either, but presently revenue from solar power in sunny regions probably would pay for the infrastructure. If the hit to the farm's productivity isn't high, this might work economically - that is, be more attractive than either a farm or solar plant alone.
Then there's the cynical politics which these guys are probably milking. In a place like California, you'll get a lot of political revenue, subsidies and direct funding, from combining agriculture with solar power. They probably can get even more if they incorporate organic farming and other green fads. Even if they don't know this stuff now, they can find funding sources so that they learn first hand.