Environmental life cycle assessment of a stilted and vertical bifacial crop-based agrivoltaic multi land-use system and comparison with a mono land-use of agricultural land

T. Krexner, A. Bauer, A. Gronauer, C. Mikovits, J. Schmidt and I. Kral

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2024, vol. 196, issue C

Abstract: Agrivoltaic, the use of agricultural land for food/feed and electricity production via photovoltaic-modules, has been promoted as a possible solution to alleviate the land use conflict of arable land. This study aims to compare two agrivoltaic systems (stilted and vertical bifacial) from cradle-to-gate with the life cycle assessment method using a system expansion approach. Further, an unmodified agricultural production and total substitution of the latter by photovoltaic-modules (photovoltaic-scenario) are assessed. For an objective comparison the same outputs must be produced in every scenario. Hence, in the unmodified agricultural scenario an additional production chain for electricity (Austrian average or green electricity production) was added; while agricultural production was added in the photovoltaic-and stilted agrivoltaic scenario. Results show, that the photovoltaic system has higher (up to 99.32 %) environmental impacts than the agricultural system in all studied impact categories in all scenarios. Compared to the unmodified agricultural scenario with Austrian average electricity both agrivoltaic systems can reduce environmental impacts in 3 of 9 assessed impact categories, but in none compared to the unmodified agricultural scenario with green electricity. A hotspot in both agrivoltaic and photovoltaic-scenario is the photovoltaic-module production in China, due to the high demand and impact of electricity, in the stilted agrivoltaic scenario further the resource intensive steel mounting structure. Reduction potential of environmental impacts with a production in Europe is possible. Overall, it is demonstrated that agrivoltaic systems can reduce environmental impacts in some categories compared to the unmodified agricultural scenario with Austrian average electricity.

Keywords: Life cycle assessment (LCA); Agri-photovoltaic; Environmental impact assessment; System expansion; Multi-use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032124000443
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:196:y:2024:i:c:s1364032124000443

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2024.114321

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().