Agrivoltaics analysis in a techno-economic framework: Understanding why agrivoltaics on rice will always be profitable

Abstract

Agrivoltaics (AV) promises sustainable food and energy production from shared lands. While various literature studies AVs for leafy crops, there are limited equivalent works on AVs with major crops (e.g., rice, corn, wheat, etc.). Here, we present an end-to-end modeling framework to analyze location-specific AVs over paddy rice. We consider the local ambient conditions to find the spatially distributed rice production under panel arrays, the panel yield, and the economic aspects (costs, revenue, and profit) of the AV system. On a given land, solar energy has a far larger absolute profit than rice cultivation due to the 100s of folds higher investment possible in panels compared to paddy rice. Policy-level constraints are required to set a permissible reduction in rice for more energy. We find that, while maintaining 90% (or 80%) of the conventional rice production, the overall profit can be 22–115 (or 30–132) times higher than rice cultivation.