Inculcating herbal plots as effective cooling mechanism in urban planning

Agrivoltaic Systems Design and Assessment: A Critical Review, and a Descriptive Model towards a Sustainable Landscape Vision (Three-Dimensional Agrivoltaic Patterns)

“…Therefore, the area below modules may be exploited with shade-tolerant species, especially in hot arid climates. Some studies in this regard have already been carried out in India [27,28] and Malaysia [29][30][31][32] for testing species such as java tea, aloe vera or spinach (Figure 6), achieving higher crop yields for herbal plants while at the same time reducing the module temperature by 0.85%, which may increase the annual energy production up to 2.8% [33], although with a potential risk of pest due the high moisture [30]. However, concepts that combine farming and energy production on the same site are not limited to stilted solar arrays (stripes) above crops.…”

Solar Photovoltaic Architecture and Agronomic Management in Agrivoltaic System: A Review

“…There are a variety of fascinating details about AVS technology derived from previous studies such as: (1) increase in total revenue [7,15,[19][20][21]45,46]; (2) crops cultivated beneath the solar structure help reduce the ambient air temperature by creating a cooler microclimate [7,11,[47][48][49]; hence, indirectly reducing the solar panel temperature up to 1-2°C and increasing the solar PV efficiency [21,50]; (3) solar PV panels must be washed regularly to maintain their solar radiation efficiency. The water used to clean them can be reused to irrigate the agriculture beneath the solar panel, resulting in increased water efficiency [2,13,21,26,34,51]; (4) emissions due to CO 2 are also uptaken by crops, while low CO 2 is produced by solar energy compared to fossil fuel-based power generation [2,20,43]; (5) solar PV provides a good shading effect on some plants that do not like direct sunlight [30,39,[52][53][54][55]; (6) providing new jobs [12,21,27,51,56]; (7) raising taxes [20] and (8) the expansion of cleaner and renewable energies are necessary to reduce the fossil fuel dependency and global warming [9,…”

“…For the first factor, types of design considered for solar PV structure have been described in Section 3. In case the introduction of agriculture production is on the existing solar farms or an unaltered solar panel structure, the approach used by [50] could be the sustainable solution to combine both productions. They suggested the planting of high-value herbal crops in solar farms with zero or minimal modification of the solar PV structure.…”

“…[25]. Cultivating crops in areas below the photovoltaic panel has the added benefit of reducing the heat load on the bottom surface of the photovoltaic panel by modifying the microclimate and thus assisting in generating the maximum amount of electricity [21,50]. Additionally, [59] also proposed that herbs could be planted in tropic areas using AVS applications with minor modification of the solar panel structures.…”

“…Additionally, [59] also proposed that herbs could be planted in tropic areas using AVS applications with minor modification of the solar panel structures. Herbal plants such as Orthosiphon stamnieus is suitable in the tropical region [50], while Cassia angustifolia (senna), Aloe vera ('gwarpatha'), and others may also be considered as potential crops if the PV structure is in rocky scrubs or degraded lands, depending on the region [25]. Next, some studies performed in various regions of the world indicate different kinds of crops, such as semi-arid pasture (Oregon, USA; [132]), Maize (Po Valley, Northern Italy; [53]), lettuce (short cycle crop), cucumbers (short cycle crop), durum wheat (long cycle crop) cultivated at Montpellier Experimental Agrivoltaic Station, France [6,31], and potato and wheat (Demeter-certified farm community Heggelbach, Germany; [41]).…”