Abstract
The growing need in both producing renewable energy and food has led to the development of new systems such as agrivoltaic systems. Similar to agroforestry systems, agrivoltaics systems combine an understory of crop production with an overstory layer, casting spatial-temporal varying shade that can affect the yield of the understory crop, by either improving or reducing crop growth underneath, depending on type of crop, pedoclimatic context, photovoltaic (PV) structure and its implementation design. Current studies on agrivoltaic stations mainly evaluate global yield in areas under panels and in between panel and/or outside agrivoltaic system (ie. in full sun condition), and sometimes for various panels densities, but don’t consider shade gradient. The aim of this study was to assess field crops yields distribution around high biaxial PV installations that are trackers, with the spatial variations of shade, microclimate, soil parameters. This distribution was then used to simulate yields of different power plant designs. For this purpose, 2 types of crops (wheat and maize) were considered in 2022 and 2023, with a total of 21 trackers over 13 sites, located in Western France. Received radiation (RR) appeared as the most impacting variable of yield and biomass. Yields and biomass linearly decreased under decreasing RR, respectively by up to 45% and 40% locally with a 50% RR decrease, except for maize in 2022, probably due to exceptionally hot summer. The simulation designs showed limited global losses for both crops, only one, with the highest panel density, led to losses slightly greater than 10%.