fitting solar panels to cropland to optimize the overall outcome of energy and food production.” explained Kaiyu Guan, a professor of ecohydrology at UIUC and one of the investigators on the project. “In this project, our team will develop models for the agrivoltaics systems, i.e. NCSA, meanwhile, will support the agrivoltaics research through model development and through contributions to the Community Earth System Model (CESM).
Our goal is to maintain or even increase crop yield, increase the combined (food and electricity) productivity of land and diversify and increase farmers’ profits with row crops, forage and specialty crops across a range of environments.” “Our proposed project … will provide a comprehensive analysis of the transformative potential of agrivoltaics. “Agrivoltaics – co-locating energy and food production – has the potential to reduce this competition for land,” Khanna said. “To produce solar energy at the utility scale is land intensive, and cropland is often the most suitable for this purpose,” Khanna said. (In some countries, large photovoltaic arrays have even been prohibited from overtaking crop fields.) Part of the reason for the study, Khanna explained, is the tension between crop yields and energy production that can develop as the two compete for the same land resources. The researchers will develop and study agrivoltaic fields in Arizona, Colorado and Illinois (selected in order to include a range of climates and land types) with the aim of optimizing for factors like land productivity, profitability and water-use efficiency. It will be led by Madhu Khanna, interim director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment (iSEE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), with UIUC as the lead institution as well.
The project was funded to the tune of $10 million over four years by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Department of Agriculture (USDA) is poised to leverage both current- and next-gen systems at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to optimize the designs of these hybrid fields. It’s an efficient proposition – both crops and solar power benefit from ample sunlight – but requires a delicate balancing act to ensure a bountiful harvest of both resources. “Agrivoltaic,” a portmanteau of agriculture and photovoltaic, describes crop fields that include photovoltaic solar panels. Since 1987 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them
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