Increase of landscape ecosystem services generated by agrivoltaics systems

Abstract

UN estimated that the world population will probably grow by 75% in 2050. This will press food and energy production to satisfy human needs. In recent years, the agricultural and energy sectors have been in competition for land use, as many arable lands have been changed in photovoltaic (PV) farms with a loss of food production and ecosystem services. Indeed, in many PV farms the flora is ruderal, with the prevalence of nitrophilous-type plants, and requires frequent mowing with a cost for the companies to prevent panel shading and reduce fire risk. The agrivoltaics system represents a new frontier for renewable energy policy, by associating energy production with food security. The agrivoltaics system combines the PV panels installation with the possibility to develop crop production under them. This provides a new perspective of vegetation management in the agrivoltaics field, mainly allowing to replace invasive plants (passive vegetation management) into crop production (active vegetation management). This allows the implementation of food production and raw material, besides the improvement of ecosystem services provisioning. In this study, we estimated the ecosystem services increase by three agricultural scenarios of agrivoltaics systems, such as vegetables vegetation and woods vegetation. The results show that these potential solutions can give the possibility to generate new economic activities in agrivoltaics farms with potential benefits from a local scale (e.g., cultural services) to a global one (e.g., regulation services). In the agrivoltaics system, the provisioning of ecosystem services is deviated by the feedback of agricultural knowledge, PV technologies and vegetation development. They represent Innovativebased Solutions creating more landscape and environmental externality for human needs through multifunctional land use.