It is no discovery that agricultural practices can boost electricity and revenue generation while combating hunger. For instance, biofuels are produced from organic materials, including animal waste and plant materials used as substitutes for conventional fuels (learn more).
Recently, innovative applications and combinations of agriculture and electricity have emerged. These ideas show how these sectors complement each other to boost production and increase revenue. Agrivoltaics is an off-grid electrification model where solar panels are deployed on farmlands where either food crops are grown between panel arrays or on buildings where livestock are housed and grazed.
Benefits of Agrivoltaics
There are many advantages of agrivoltaics to humans. The first to come to mind is the possibility of generating multiple streams of revenue from the same location. By fitting farmlands with solar off-grid electricity solutions, producers can reduce their energy costs while reducing their carbon footprint. They also solve land availability challenges associated with solar panel installation.
In rural areas, agrivoltaics can complement off-grid power production. In this case, there is no reliance on the grid power supply for farm machinery to carry out their operation. Furthermore, for crops that require shields from heavy rain, frost and hail, the solar panels act as shields.
As the world steers towards eco-sustainability by adopting methods that would reduce our carbon footprints and climate change impacts, agrivoltaics seems to be the ultimate solution to that problem and combating hunger.