Study on the assessment method of photovoltaic potential in agricultural greenhouses

Greenhouses are the most energy intensive systems in the agricultural sector. Renewable resources of energy have emerged as a sustainability form of worldwide consensus form to improve the consumption of traditional fossil energy in agriculture greenhouses. Solar energy has demonstrated great potential for integration with agricultural greenhouses Photovoltaics are divided into distributed and centralized photovoltaic systems. The roofs of rural agricultural greenhouses provide an excellent platform for the installation of distributed photovoltaics, supplying electricity for vegetable cultivation inside the greenhouse. This can achieve “self-production and self-sale” of electricity, thereby achieving dual benefits. Photovoltaics modules mounted on roofs or walls of greenhouses cause shading which can adversely affect the growing trend of cultivated crops inside. Statistics on the area and distribution of agricultural greenhouses and assessment of their PV potential can help provide guidance on the development of agricultural PV. However, how to estimate the distributed PV potential on top of agricultural greenhouses is an urgent issue. In this paper, a photovoltaic potential assessment method that considers the classification of transparent and non-transparent type of agricultural greenhouses is proposed. Shouguang, a county-level city administered in Weifang city in Shandong province of China, is taken as a case study area. Firstly, semantic segmentation is used to extract transparent and non-transparent agricultural greenhouse areas on the remote sensing images. Then, the potential area and installation capacity of photovoltaics on transparent and non-transparent areas are evaluated using different reduction coefficients, combined with solar angles, photovoltaic panel power generation and other parameters, thus addressing the issues in the photovoltaic assessment field from raw data to assessment results. It is found that the total area of agricultural greenhouses in Shouguang County in Shandong Province is 235.252 km² with an installed potential of 5790.36 MW, which can provide data support for the formulation of PV development policies in Shouguang County to a certain extent.