Agrivoltaics (AV) is an innovative approach in which solar photovoltaic (PV) energy generation is collocated with agricultural production to enable food–energy–water synergies and landscape ecological conservation. This dual-use requirement leads to unique cooptimization challenges ( e.g., shading, soiling, and spacing) that make module technology and farm topology choices distinctly different from the traditional solar farms. Here, we compare the performance of the traditional optimally titled North/South ( N/S )-faced monofacial farms with a potential alternative based on vertical East/West ( E/W )-faced bifacial farms. Remarkably, the vertical farm produces essentially the same energy output and photosynthetically active radiation ( PAR ) compared with the traditional farms as long as the PV array density is reduced to half or lower relative to that for the standard ground-mounted PV farms. Our results explain the relative merits of the traditional monofacial versus vertical bifacial farms as a function of array density, acceptable PAR deficit, and energy production. The combined PAR /Energy yields for the vertical bifacial farm may not always be superior, it could still be an attractive choice for AV due to its distinct advantages such as minimum land coverage, least hindrance to the farm machinery and rainfall, inherent resilience to PV soiling, easier cleaning, and cost advantages due to the potentially reduced elevation.

Agrivoltaics (AV) is an emerging technology having symbiotic benefits for food-energy-water needs of the growing world population and an inherent resilience against climate vulnerabilities. An AV system needs to balance the sunlight sharing between the solar panels and crops to maintain the desired food-energy yields, subject to appropriate constraints. Given the emerging diversity of monofacial and bifacial farms, the lack of a standardized crop-specific metric (to evaluate the efficacy of the irradiance sharing) has made it difficult to optimize/assess the performance of ${\mathrm{AV}}$ systems. Here, we introduce a new metric—light productivity factor (LPF)—that evaluates the effectiveness of irradiance sharing for a given crop type and photovoltaic (PV) array design. The metric allows us to identify optimal design parameters including the spatial PV array density, panel orientation, and single axis tracking schemes specific to the photosynthetically active radiation needs of the crop. By definition, LPF equals 1 for PV-only or crop-only systems. The AV systems enhances LPF between 1 and 2 depending on the shade sensitivity of the crop, PV array configuration, and the season. While traditional fixed-tilt systems increase LPF significantly above 1, we find LPF is maximized at 2 for shade-tolerant crops with a solar farm based on single axis sun tracking scheme. Among the fixed tilt systems, east/west faced bifacial vertical solar farms is particularly promising because it produces smallest variability in the seasonal yield for shade sensitive crops, while providing LPF comparable to the standard N/S faced solar farms. Additional benefits include reduced soiling and ease of movement of large-scale combine-harvester and other farming equipment.

In this study, the energy management and switching control of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) in a hybrid smart micro-grid system was designed. The charging station in this research consists of real market PHEVs of different companies with different sizes. The rate of charging of PHEVs is managed via switching control to receive maximum benefits from renewable energy sources and reduce the consumption of electricity from the grid. To support the optimum utilization of sustainable power, charging time and network stability, seven scenarios were developed for different interaction among the proposed micro-grid system and PHEVs. The proposed hybrid smart micro-grid system consists of three renewable energy sources: photovoltaic (PV) array controlled via an intelligent fuzzy control maximum power point subsystem, a fuel cell stack and a microturbine set controlled by proportional integral differential/proportional integral subsystems. A hybrid energy storage system (super-capacitor, battery storage bank and hydrogen) and residential load are also included in the proposed architecture. The hybrid smart micro-grid system is checked in terms of voltage regulation, frequency deviation and total harmonic distortion (THD). It was found that these are in limits according to the international standards. The simulations verify the feasibility of the proposed system and fulfill the requirement of vehicle-to-grid and grid-to-vehicle operations in a smart grid environment.