Transparent solar pv windows provide a strong potential for self-sustainable food production

A groundbreaking article titled “Transparent solar photovoltaic windows provide a strong potential for self-sustainable food production in forward-looking greenhouse farming architectures” by Hao Luo, Mikhail Vasiliev, Tianhua He, Penghao Wang, Jamie Lyford, Victor Rosenberg, and Chengdao Li was published on the 18th of January in the high impact journal Cleaner Engineering and Technology by Elsevier.

This study comprehensively reviews the energy efficiency, water savings, and plant productivity trends observed at the Murdoch University Solar Greenhouse during the 2021–2022 growing seasons, concluding that high-transparency photovoltaic solar windows made by ClearVue provide a substantial potential for improving the industry practices in advanced greenhouse farming architectures. 

This comprehensive research underwent rigorous peer review, driving improvements in practices for upcoming growing seasons.

Abstract
Agriculture is a major contributor to global environmental challenges and is highly vulnerable to climate change. High-technology greenhouse farming provides efficient, secure and climate-resilient food production but costs significant energy to operate.

We designed and constructed a greenhouse with high-transparency photovoltaic windows used as roof- and wall-mounted components of building envelope and demonstrated its significant potential to improve the sustainability of greenhouse farming. This innovative structure reduced energy consumption by 57% and water usage by 29% in research-scale greenhouse production.

We showed that several crops commonly produced in greenhouses exhibited no yield loss when grown in solar greenhouses, including tomato, snow pea, spinach mustard, dwarf bean, bell pepper and lettuce. Due to a limitation in the experimental design, solar windows were not fully installed on the greenhouse, which led to an underestimation of the potential energy savings.

A computing model showed that a fully glazed solar greenhouse has the potential to offset up to 100% of the energy consumption in worldwide locations by using adaptable and efficient temperature control techniques, thereby potentially enabling completely self-sustainable greenhouse farming on a global scale. The potential of self-sustainable greenhouse farming could be further enhanced by refining its wavelength-selective transmittance and using genetic manipulation to engineer crops that thrive in the solar greenhouse environment.

The solar greenhouse technology represents significant opportunities to make substantial progress towards achieving net-zero emissions in global food systems by 2050.

Conclusions Agriculture production is energy intensive. Solving the food, energy, and environment trilemma is an energy challenge. Transforming the food production systems will require a transformation of our energy system. In this study, we designed and built a research-scale greenhouse using high-transparency window-integrated PV as the roof and window materials. 1. We demonstrated that the use of window and roof-integrated photovoltaics has significant potential to improve the sustainability of greenhouse farming, with substantial energy and water saving. 2. Crops commonly grown commercially through greenhouse farming demonstrated robust growth without yield loss in the solar greenhouse. 3. Across a range of global locations in the world’s agricultural continents, solar greenhouses have potential to yield sufficient energy to fully offset the energy consumption in a commercial greenhouse setting with adaptable and efficient temperature control methods. Future advancement on light transmittance profile optimisation of the photovoltaic windows and flexible, adaptable, and efficient temperature control techniques could allow the solar greenhouses being able to entirely offset their energy consumption and becoming a zero-emissions food production system on a global scale. Solar greenhouses offer a multifaceted set of real-world benefits that address critical challenges in modern agriculture, including energy consumption, resource management, climate resilience, and food security. READ FULL ARTICLE

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