Photovoltaic agriculture - New opportunity for photovoltaic applications in China

Abstract

Photovoltaic industry has been an important development direction of China's strategic emerging industries since 2012, and more and more attentions have been paid to broaden the domestic demand to solve the problem of overcapacity of China's PV industry. Photovoltaic agriculture, the combination of photovoltaic power generation and agricultural activities, is a natural response to supply the green and sustainable electricity for agriculture. There are several main application modes of photovoltaic agriculture such as photovoltaic agricultural greenhouse, photovoltaic breeding, photovoltaic wastewater purification, photovoltaic water pumping and new type rural solar power station. Photovoltaic agriculture can effectively alleviate the contradiction between more population and less land, powerfully promote the development of controlled environmental agriculture, evidently increase economic benefits of farmers, and significantly improve environment due to emissions reduction in China. In recent years, photovoltaic agriculture has a rapid development in China due to powerful support policies, flourishing controlled environmental agriculture, policy-oriented rural electrification and promising electric machinery for greenhouse. Therefore, photovoltaic agriculture provides new opportunity for China's photovoltaic industry, thus not only to solve the dilemma of overcapacity for China's photovoltaic industry effectively, but also to accelerate the development of modern agriculture in China. However, the more theoretical researches and practical exploration must be conducted to optimize the combination of photovoltaic power generation and agricultural planting. And the unified standards must be established to standardize the design and scale of projects of photovoltaic agriculture. Also, photovoltaic enterprises need to produce widely applicable photovoltaic products for agricultural production and farmers’ life.