Does photovoltaic shading affect plant growth?

... Shading from photovoltaic arrays on the roof of greenhouses can have a positive or negative effect on the growth of the cultivated plants, depending on the period during which the cultivation is carried out [11, 33,34].

Can we grow crops under solar panels instead of trees?

Traditionally, agricultural and agroforestry systems used multilayered plantings by, for example, cultivating shade-tolerant crops such as coffee under bananas. Now, with growing demand for clean energy but a paucity of empty land, researchers are exploring how to grow crops under raised solar panels (photovoltaics) instead of trees.

Which crops can be grown under PV panels?

Tomato, lettuce, pepper, cucumbers and strawberries are the most studied crops under PV panels (Fig. 5). The recent literatures for applications of selective shading systems on the aforementioned crops and others plants are reviewed in the following sections.

What plants grow under photovoltaic panels?

Kavga A, Trypanagnostopoulos G, Zervoudakis G, Tripanagnostopoulos Y (2018) Growth and physiological characteristics of lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) and rocket (Eruca sativa Mill.) plants cultivated under photovoltaic panels.

Should PV panel shading be lower than 25%?

Given the findings, the research seems promising enough to support APV practices that limit PV panel shading to be lower than 25% to avoid affecting crop growth, assumed to be the priority of an agricultural operation.

Can agrivoltaic systems be combined with solar PV?

Associating food crops and solar PVon the same land area which is referred as agrivoltaic systems (also denoted as Agrophotovoltaics, APV) (Dinesh and Pearce 2016; Santra et al. 2017) is among the most developing techniques in agriculture that attract significant researches attention in the past ten years (Fig. 1 a).