Competition for land use between solar energy and agriculture in India: modelling agrivoltaic solutions

Abstract India has shaped its future energy mix towards solar energy due to ambitious renewable energy targets and strong volatility in fossil fuel prices. However, a major challenge for solar energy production is that the large areas of land required for ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) arrays conflict with land heavily pressured by agricultural uses as the majority of India’s population earns their livelihood from agriculture. The efficiency of photosynthesis for crop production (approximately 3%) is much less than the average efficiency of commercially available monocrystalline silicon solar panels (15%), making solar energy a more land-efficient option. This article explores ways to use solar radiation on the same parcel of land to produce both energy and food through an agrivoltaic system. Utilising food crops alongside solar panels on the same site will maximise land-use efficiency and offer a potential alternative to the extreme land shortages faced in the Indian context. Using Land Equivalent Ratios (LER), we evaluate the conventional approach of allocating separate land for food production and energy generation against two potential agrivoltaic configurations with different solar array densities. Our simulation runs model the amount of light transmitted through the PV array to the crop level and use crop models to estimate the expected productive capacity of the agrivoltaic crops resulting from such a configuration. The results demonstrate LER values of from 1.35 to 1.73 for half-density and from 1.43 to 1.97 for full-density configurations, indicating 35–97% land productivity enhancement compared to segregated systems.