Solar parks: A review on impacts, mitigation mechanism through agrivoltaics and techno-economic analysis

Abstract

Solar parks are mega solar projects to fast track renewable energy integration, while avoiding redundancy in electro-mechnical infrastruturing and land acquiring procedures. However these ground-mounted grid-integrated solar photovoltaic projects require vast land banks, which remain covered for the lifetime of the project.. The socio-economic and environmental externalities on at micro level affecting livelihoods often go unaccounted. Earlier works on impact assessment of large solar parks have considered environment, ecology, micro-climate at large while impact on livelihoods and long term externalities on socitial issues were not addressed. The effectivnes of agrivolticas as a mitigation mechanism was primarlity focused on type of crops vis-à-vis height of structures, water management and economic outputs. The current work has a reviewed agrivoltaic projects in India and identified the managaement practices, constraints, cost econmoics and policy framework. A review of works done on solar park impact assessment and mitigation mechanism by agrivoltaics are done in detail. The work has considered agrivoltaics from a social aspect and focused on impacts due to loss of livelihoods and associated externalities under social impact classification. A methodology in which agrivoltaics is taken as a self healing mechanism to environment and society is adopted. A conventional solar plant and an agrivoltaic plant are considered for study and three livelihood mechanisms namely medicinal plants, poultry and bee keeping are considered for techno-commecrcial analysis. It is found that while the medicinal plants in PV plants can improve the income by 8%, while poultry in solar parks bring additional income of 83%, considering one lifecycle, while bee keeping bring additional income of 4%. The economic analysis shows that agrivoltaic without workable business models for a captive power plant with 0.14$/kWh FiT breakeven at 3 years and 9 months while a captive plant with the same FiT without agrivoltaics breaks even in 2 years and 4 months. A captive plant with 0.14 $/kWh FiT with a workable business model will breakeven in 3 years and 3 months. A grid tied solar PV plants with a FiT of 0.03 $/kWh which has a breakeven of 13 years without agrivoltaics, may not breakeven within 25 years (plant life) without a workable business model. However, with a workable business model for agrivoltaics the grid tied solar PV plant with a FiT of 0.03 $/kWh will have a breakeven in 17 years and 8 months.The social impact assessment conclude that, livelihood impacts can lead to extinction of cultures, urban migrations, growth of uncontrolled peri‑urban regions, the long term impacts are beyond economics. Thus social impact mitigation cost (SIMC) along with environemental impact mitigation cost (EIMC) are considered as incentives or subsidied and the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) is calculated. It is found that levelised cost of energy for the conventional ground mounted solar PV plant is 0.03 $/kWh while for agrivoltaic plant without subsidies and incentives the LCOE is 0.052 $/kWh. For the agrivoltaic plant with a subsidy of 30% the LCOE is 0.046 $/kWh and with a further green incentive billing the LCOE can be brought down to 0.041 $/ kWh.