Development of concentrated solar and agrivoltaic based system to generate water, food and energy with hydrogen for sustainable agriculture

Water, food and energy together form a critical nexus which is at the core of sustainable development. Agricultural activities are the major consumers of water and energy, while on the other hand, energy generation is another major reason for water consumption. With the growing population and economies, there is an increasing pressure on water, food and energy nexus and their management. Therefore, it is a necessity to develop dual, triple, or multiple benefits from single systems or applications in order to maximize the effective and efficient utilization of sources. It is also necessary to multiply the benefits of the land; agrivoltaics maximize the benefit of the land by combining solar photovoltaics and food crops on the same land. Moreover, the process heat is an important useful commodity to multiply the benefits of the integrated energy systems. The concentrated solar power (CSP) systems can generate process heat for many applications, and we propose to use such systems on agricultural lands and to call this as “agri-CSP”. Moreover, different agrivoltaic orientations are comparatively assessed with newly suggested agri-CSP. The agrivoltaic and concentrated solar energy systems generate power and process heat in order to meet electricity, fresh water, space heating, space cooling and hydrogen demands of a farm community. The first and second laws of thermodynamics are considered while designing and analyzing the integrated system. Realistic simulations are carried out with software packages where commercially available products and actual meteorological data are considered. The study results show that a community of 86,000 people with farms in California can be self-sufficient with the proposed system. The agri-CSP is designed to orient accordingly and generates 1716 MWh of electricity per MWp capacity in a typical year, where a MWp of agrivoltaic generates 1338.7 MWh of electricity with vertical-fixed orientation, 2040.5 MWh of electricity with tilted-fixed orientation, 2365.7 MWh of electricity with tracking orientation. Moreover, 959.06 k-tonnes of fresh water and 290.07 t of hydrogen are additionally generated. The overall energy and exergy efficiencies of the proposed integrated system are obtained as 59.95% and 41.01% on average in a typical year.