Decision Support for Optimising Energy Consumption in European Greenhouses

Abstract

Improving existing greenhouse structures in terms of insulation and other features can save energy with significantly lower investment costs than building new greenhouses. Within the EU Framework VI project GREENERGY a decision support system has been developed that offers the potential to be used by the advisory services for growers all over Europe. It evaluates the impacts of either using different greenhouse materials (e.g. for the cover or screens) or building a complete new structure on the overall energy consumption and crop yield. The system is constructed as an easy to use software tool based upon a set of simulation model modules for greenhouse energy fluxes, crop growth and yield. The user defines the structure of his present greenhouse from the pre-defined menu. This greenhouse is then used as reference greenhouse that can be compared to the various modifications of it that the user selects. The entering of additional variables such as geographic location (country), type of crop, internal greenhouse climate set points etc. allow simulations of energy consumption and crop yield over a period of one year using reference climate data of the respective location as input to be performed. The system is constructed in a way such that the database of greenhouse construction materials can be updated easily to maintain its applicability.

Integrated Cycles for Urban Biomass as a Strategy to Promote a CO2-Neutral Society—A Feasibility Study

“…The final calculation for material flows and potential outcomes for our concept was straightforward. In particular, modeling frameworks such as SIMBA#Biogas for the biogas process and a greenhouse simulator [33,34] for the hydroponic enabled to compare several possibilities. However, selecting the best scenarios was challenging due to the high number of possibilities.…”

“…A numerical simulator for controlled environments and greenhouses was used that is a further development of earlier published greenhouse simulators [33,34]. The simulator was programmed using MATLAB (MathWorks Inc., Natick, MA, USA).…”

“…The simulator calculated macro-and microclimate in a time-step of 5 min, integrated hourly using controlled actuators (e.g., heating, ventilation, cooling, CO 2 , light) that were re-adjusted as described by Körner and Van Straten (2008) [34]. The simulations' output included hourly biological and physical variables related to lettuce production, such as microclimate conditions, photosynthesis, yield, and resource consumption (electrical power, heating energy, water, CO 2 ).…”

Greenhouse industry 4.0 – digital twin technology for commercial greenhouses

“…Furthermore, recent advances in dynamic models for the utilization of supplemental artificial lighting based on weather forecasts and energy prices, which balance the electricity use with the state of the electricity grid, adds to the complexity Kjaer et al 2012;Clausen et al 2015b). Several planning tools have been developed to provide growers with decision support for optimizing greenhouse climate control and managing production (Fisher and Heins 1996;Frantz et al 2010;Körner et al 2008;Vanthoor 2011;Kjaer et al 2011). For instance, the first Danish commercial approach of an online decision support system, InfoGrow, developed by Agrotech (Körner and Hansen 2012) and currently upgraded in the ItGrows 2.0 (Kjaer et al 2018), is a model-based decision support system for greenhouse energy management.…”

Integrated cycles for urban biomass as a strategy to promote a CO2-neutral society – a feasibility study

“…A numerical simulator for controlled environments and greenhouses was used that is a further development of earlier published greenhouse simulators (Körner and Hansen, 2012;Körner et al, 2008). The simulator was programmed using MATLAB (MathWorks Inc., USA).…”