Event date:
May 26 2021 4:00 pm

Spatial-Temporal Analysis of Light Distribution on Agrivoltaic Bifacial Farm

Supervisor
Dr. Nauman Zafar Butt
Student
Zamen Tahir
Venue
Zoom Meetings (Online)
Event
MS Thesis defense
Abstract
Food, energy, and water (FEW) are three essential resources for humans. As the population is increasing, FEW demand is looming up against limited supply. It becomes challenging to fulfil these demands with limited environmental impact to keep climate change in check. Renewable energy resources provide clean energy with less environmental footprint. International Energy Agency reported a 22% increase in the solar energy production in 2019 and predicted that renewable energy capacity with a prominent generation share of solar is on the course to surpass coal in 2025. However, solar requires large land and becomes a probable threat to agriculture due to land competition. Global trend is shifting from sectoral towards integrated systems to achieve higher efficiency. Agrivoltaic (AV) systems offer solution by collocating solar panels and crops on the same land. This arrangement can increase land productivity and locally fulfill food-energy demand of the rural areas. The most promising potential of AV systems is anticipated in the areas having hot and arid climate. Crops cultivated in these areas experience linked water losses. Panel coverage on the cultivated land reduces thermal stress and water evaporation. Additionally, AV systems can reduce the water budget significantly by integrating the cleaning of panels with irrigation. Hence, AV systems provide a synergistic merge of water-saving and protection from severe weather. These encouraging aspects have motivated researchers to analyze AV systems. AV systems have been implemented by various commercial facilities in Italy, Germany, Japan, USA, and China. These facilities have used fixed-tilt and tracking schemes with various crops and investigated the change in crop yield, morphology, land productivity, and energy production. Pakistan is expanding renewable energy share in its electricity mix. By alternative and renewable energy policy 2019, Pakistan intends to increase the share of renewable energy in total power generation to 30% by 2030. Photovoltaic (PV) system has a considerable share in the renewable energy. Pakistan has vast fertile land, food-energy nexus of AV system can be instrumental in achieving the renewable energy goal. For hot and arid climate of Pakistan, panel coverage over the crops can decrease thermal stress during severe weather conditions and simultaneously increase the land productivity. Research on AV systems is desired to investigate its potential in Pakistan. Although there is plenty of research being conducted on assessing the performance of the AV systems, the analysis on the spatial and temporal distribution of sunlight available for the crops under the solar PV arrays is lacking. The proposed research in this thesis explores the effect of various dynamic and fixed-tilt PV systems on the spatial homogeneity of daily sunlight distribution on the crops for Lahore, Pakistan. Simulations based on the trajectory of sunlight and analytical models for spatial-temporal interception of sunlight on the solar panels and ground are carried out to analyze the energy generation and the spatial heterogeneity of the available photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) required by the crop. The deficit of PAR available to the crop and its trade-off with the power production is investigated as a function of PV system configuration. The spatial temporal light distribution analysis can be very helpful in the crop selection and plantation techniques to avoid spatial gradients in biomass production. Plantation techniques like intercropping or monocropping are suggested for chosen PV system according to light distribution on the ground.

Zoom Link:   https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/91820703624?pwd=RGNmaXFQWSt6emFYUDU1OVB5NWJCQT09

 Meeting ID: 918 2070 3624

Passcode: 275357