Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sponagel, Christian
• Weik, Jan
• Feuerbacher, Arndt
• Bahrs, Enno

Titel

Exploring the climate change mitigation potential and regional distribution of agrivoltaics with geodata-based farm economic modelling and life cycle assessment

Ist Teil von

• Journal of environmental management, 2024-05, Vol.359, p.121021-121021, Article 121021

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Tackling climate change remains a critical challenge for society. Achieving climate neutrality requires a massive expansion of renewable energies such as wind and photovoltaics (PV). Agriculture plays a key role in this context, especially as the expansion of ground-mounted PV systems often leads to land-use conflicts. Agrivoltaics (AV), which combines agricultural and electricity production, can be a solution, but the synergies are particularly dependent on local agronomic conditions. There is also a knowledge gap in how AV expansion impacts greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the landscape level and how it contributes to regional emission reduction targets. In this study, we analysed the economic and climate change mitigation impacts of AV expansion pathways in the German state Baden-Württemberg using an integrated land use model and life cycle assessment under the assumption of general rentability of electricity production by AV. We found that implementing AV on 1%–5% of the regions's arable and grassland area reduced the total agricultural gross margin by a maximum of approximately 0.5%. Concurrently, AV implementation reduced GHG emissions by about 1.2 million to 5.9 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (Mt CO2-eq). Even if this reduction is almost exclusively accounted for in the energy sector, in absolute terms it amounts to more than the current GHG emissions from Baden-Württemberg's agricultural sector (about 4.4 Mt CO2-eq in 2021). In the 5% expansion scenario, almost 90% of the installations were installed on grassland, but this share dropped to 72% when considering landscape quality constraints. Although we found considerable regional disparity, our findings still suggest that AV is an essential component for regional emission reduction targets. These results are particularly relevant for policymakers in spatial planning, agricultural and energy policy. •We analysed impacts of Agrivoltaics (AV) on regional greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.•Spatial placement was optimised from agricultural and landscape quality perspective.•AV on 5% of Baden-Württemberg's agricultural land reduced up to 5.5 Mt CO2-eq.•AV systems were mostly implemented on grassland.•From an agricultural perspective, AV can be a cost-effective GHG mitigation measure.