From Agrivoltaics Design to Energy-System Planning: A Critical Integrative Review

Agrivoltaics (AV) integrates photovoltaic electricity generation with continued agricultural production on the same land. This critical integrative review examines AV as solar-energy infrastructure, focusing on configuration trade-offs, the translation of land and crop outcomes into energy-system variables, techno-economic boundary conditions, and policy and ownership arrangements for scalable deployment. The review covers the literature from the foundational agrivoltaics work published in 1982 onward and combines searches across multiple academic databases with authoritative institutional sources and backward and forward citation chaining. Eligible sources were English-language studies addressing active agricultural production combined with PV, together with relevant authoritative policy, legal, spatial, and energy-planning sources; conventional PV without continued agricultural activity, duplicate reports, non-verifiable commentary, and studies lacking evidence relevant to the review questions were excluded. Selected studies report land equivalent ratios above 1, although differences in crop type, PV configuration, reference systems, land-area accounting, and temporal boundaries preclude interpretation as a pooled effect estimate. The evidence shows that no AV configuration is universally superior: elevated and tracking systems can preserve machinery access and enable dynamic light management but increase structural and operational burden; spaced systems simplify integration but reduce PV capacity density; and vertical-bifacial systems provide distinct generation profiles and potential rear-side gains that depend strongly on site and design conditions. Land-use and economic outcomes are similarly context-dependent, with reported performance sensitive to crop type, climate, reference system, project scale, market conditions, financing, and policy support. The review proposes model-ready AV archetypes that combine geometry, hourly generation, capacity density, crop-retention constraints, costs, policy and ownership conditions. Limitations of this review paper include heterogeneous study designs, uneven geographic coverage, and non-exhaustive database-level tracking.