Economic and Environmental Outlook on Agrivoltaics: Review and Perspectives

The growing world population has continued to drive up the demand for food and energy resources, putting substantial strain on the finite land, water, and fossil resources of the earth. Given the current climate crisis, the necessity of implementing renewable energy-generation strategies has become clear. Although solar energy is one of the most abundant and consistent forms of renewable energy available, conventional ground-mounted solar arrays require large amounts of land area, and solar energy generation may come into competition with agriculture with increasing installation capacity. Agrivoltaics has been presented as a solution to integrate agricultural activities with solar energy generation to enhance the land efficiency of both activities. Through this method, agriculture and solar energy become synergistic, generating multiple profit streams from the same land with additional potential environmental benefits. The review presented herein studies the literature pertaining to the triple bottom line for agrivoltaics systems: people, planet, and profit. Despite the early-stage nature of many available studies, researchers have reported that certain agrivoltaics systems could be up to 270% more profitable than standalone cropping systems and reduce the greenhouse gas potential of traditional agriculture and energy generation by up to 99%. By synthesizing the information from multiple techno-economic analyses, life-cycle assessments, and policy recommendations, we hope to provide some insight into the key parameters driving the long-term sustainability of agrivoltaics systems.