Design and Development of a Symbiotic Agrivoltaic System for the Coexistence of Sustainable Solar Electricity Generation and Agriculture

Abstract

The symbiotic photovoltaic (PV) electrofarming system introduced in this study is developed for the PV setup in an agriculture farming land. The study discusses the effect of different PV system design conditions influenced by annual sunhours on agricultural farm land. The aim is to increase the sunhours on the PV panel for optimized electricity generation. Therefore, this study combines the Taguchi method with Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) to optimize the two quality characteristics of the symbiotic electrofarming PV system with the best design parameter combination. The selected multiple quality characteristics are PV power generation and sunhours on farm land. The control factors include location, upright column height, module tilt angle, and PV panel width. First, the Taguchi method is used to populate a L9(34) orthogonal array with the settings of the experimental plan. After the experimental results are obtained, signal-to-noise ratios are calculated, factor response tables and response graphs are drawn up, and analysis of variance is performed to obtain those significant factors which have great impact on the quality characteristics. The experiments show that the parameters which effects power generation are: location, upright column height, module tilt angle, and PV panel width. The ranking of the degree of influence of the control factors on the quality characteristics is location > PV panel width > module tilt angle > upright column height. By controlling these factors, the quality characteristics of the system can be effectively estimated. The results for PV power generation and sunhours on farm land both fall within the 95% CI (confidence interval), which shows that they are reliable and reproducible. The optimal design parameter realized in this research obtains a power generation of 26,497 kWh and a sunshine time of 1963 h. The finding showed that it can help to build a sustainable PV system combined with agriculture cultivation.