CAREER: A framework for assessing agrivoltaic technical scalability in the US

Agrivoltaic systems use the same parcel of land for agricultural (crop or livestock) production and solar photovoltaic electricity generation. This CAREER project will develop modeling tools needed to evaluate the sustainability and scalability of agrivoltaic systems across major agricultural regions of the United States. The project will combine field data, modeling, and design to identify how configurations of agrivoltaic systems affect crop yield and quality, land use efficiency, and electricity generation costs. The project will provide a large-scale assessment of feasibility for multiple key cropping and livestock systems using compatible agrivoltaics system designs. The project will provide opportunities for undergraduates to participate in the research, and it will integrate training in research tools into undergraduate courses. The project will create publicly accessible online tools to communicate agrivoltaic design trade-offs and synergies. The project will also develop crop-specific outreach materials to support farmer decision-making. This project will integrate solar engineering, vegetation, and techno-economic modeling in a unified open-source modeling and design framework to quantify food-energy trade-offs, co-benefits, and land use efficiencies. The central contribution will be an open-source modeling architecture that links spatial and temporal radiation dynamics, energy system design, and crop responses to shading. This framework will enable systematic assessment of agrivoltaic feasibility across diverse climates, agricultural systems, and solar array designs in the United States. The project will develop and validate a national gridded time-series of global and diffuse photosynthetically active radiation to improve modeling of crops grown under partial shade. The project will create a typology of agrivoltaic system designs based on their compatibility with key cropping and grazing systems. The project will also quantify the techno-economic and sustainability performance of agrivoltaic systems at national-scale by advancing and deploying an open-source modeling framework. These activities will focus on trade-offs and synergies in crop productivity, energy generation, and economic viability. A systematic, integrated framework for evaluating agrivoltaic systems as multi-functional land uses across large geographies and diverse agricultural systems will be created. The framework will enable the identification of solar array design, cropping system, and climate conditions combinations that have the greatest food-electricity synergies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2543822 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Grace Wu | Institution: University of California-Santa Barbara, SANTA BARBARA, CA | Award Amount: $599,892 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2543822 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2543822.html