Economic feasibility of using agrivoltaics for tomato farming

Rabasoma, Kago, Jenkins, Nicholas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3082-6260 and Ekanayake, Janaka ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0362-3767 2024. Economic feasibility of using agrivoltaics for tomato farming. Food and Energy Security 13 (3) , e548. 10.1002/fes3.548

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Abstract

Agrivoltaics or agrophotovoltaics (APV), which simply describes farming under a canopy of PV panels, has been recently gaining a wider implementation to improve farming yields as well as generate electricity on the same piece of land. The presented study undertakes an economic analysis to justify the implementation of agrivoltaics in a tomato farm. Three research cases are investigated; Case 1 is the control scenario which is just ordinary tomato farming that is used as a baseline. And then there are Cases 2 and 3, which are low‐density and high‐density agrivoltaics, respectively. The farm is irrigated from a borehole using a diesel generator in Case 1 and solar pumps in the Agrivoltaics Cases 2 and 3. The study found that tomato harvest is reduced by a minimum of 16% in agrivoltaics setup. However, this reduced harvest is compensated by the PV output. The payback period has been calculated considering the capital costs of the PV system and other operational costs within the farm, and it is found that Case 2 and Case 3 have 3 years and 3.6 years payback periods, respectively. While on the other hand, ordinary tomato farming is unattractive with a lengthy payback period of 17.5 years. Net present value analysis is also used to determine the profitability of the three scenarios over a 10‐year period, and the agrivoltaics scenarios are calculated to be profitable while ordinary tomato farming is not profitable. Therefore, this study justifies economic investment in agrivoltaics for tomato farming in Botswana.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Engineering
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	2048-3694
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	20 May 2024
Date of Acceptance:	7 May 2024
Last Modified:	20 May 2024 09:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/169026

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