Researchers at the University of Cordoba in Spain have developed a model to simulate solar radiation in agrivoltaic plants deployed on hedgerow olive orchards.
Compared to traditional olive orchards, hedgerow olive orchards allow a higher degree of mechanization and reduced costs. They are commonly spread in Spain and Portugal, where they occupy 100,000 ha and 120,000 ha, respectively, and they are becoming the most common orchard design in new plantings, especially in production zones away from the Mediterranean Sea. These orchards also offer advantages such as high plant density, easier disease and pest control, and easier irrigation and fertigation.
“Our tool integrates models to simulate irradiance on the whole way from the sun to the crop, even the irradiance absorption through the canopy of the crop,” the research's lead author, Marta Varo Martínez, told pv magazine. “The model allows assessing not only electricity production but also oil production.”
The proposed model considers the interaction between solar irradiance, the solar modules and crop-growing in a south-oriented agrivoltaic facility using horizontal trackers. In the proposed system configuration, both oil and energy production are alternately interspersed, with an olive grove hedgerow in each lane between the solar panels.
The model takes into account global solar irradiance and photosynthetically active irradiance (PAR), as well as their direct and diffuse components. “Once the incident irradiance in the crop is known, it is necessary to estimate the radiative transmission inside the olive canopy,” the research team said. “To determine the spatial distribution of the absorbed radiation within the canopy, it is considered that the crop hedgerow is divided into adjacent parallelepipeds.”
The tool was applied to a south-oriented superintensive olive farm located in Cordoba, southern Spain, with different row spacings. The PV system was assumed to be based on trackers with astronomical tracking and without backtracking. “The height of the axis of rotation ranged from 2.5 m to 3.5 m at 0.5 m steps and the width of the modules from 2 m to 4 m at 1 m steps,” the academics explained, noting that the modeling generated 81 different geometric combinations.
The simulation allowed obtaining the distribution of absorbed PAR within each of the elementary parallelepipeds of the hedgerow and revealed that the highest amount of oil production per unit length of hedgerow can be achieved by the widest spacing between tree rows, which allows in turn a higher interception of solar radiation. “However, using wide spacings implies a reduction in the number of hedgerows per hectare, which leads to oil production per unit area to decrease,” the team emphasized.
The proposed approach reportedly enables an accurate estimate of the effect of shading caused by solar panels, as well as the annual production of oil and electricity. It also allows the generation of mathematical equations estimating the influence of the system design variables. “These equations also show the tendency of the data to find the best uses with the smallest of the interdistances tested,” Varo Martínez said.
Their findings can be found in the study “Simulation model for electrical and agricultural productivity of an olive hedgerow Agrivoltaic system,” published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.
Another group of researchers at the University of Cordoba recently developed a new method to calculate how much land could be used for agricultural purposes under photovoltaic plants based on dual-axis solar trackers.
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