Luminescent Enhancement for Combined Solar and Commercial Agriculture. Final Report
This proposal will develop a new racking / mounting system combined with a new agriculture-tuned luminescent solar panel for low cost high tunnel implementation to produce both crops and electricity for small local farms. Crop trials performed under this specialized panel/racking system can be extended to open field agriculture with standard utility scale racking system in phase II. The US agricultural industry uses about 300 billion KW-hr of energy / year. Of this energy consumption, roughly 20% goes towards food production and 20% goes towards food processing. This proposal will allow farm land to simultaneously generate electricity, food AND provide jobs. Employment is one of the largest hurdles for the introduction of solar into rural areas. The ability to provide agricultural jobs in addition to solar energy from a plot of land will pave the way for greater adoption of photovoltaics in rural areas. A cost effective and highly durable hybrid power generating high tunnel greenhouse will be developed that generates electricity at less than $2.50/watt INSTALLED cost and can be used for crop production of high values crops. The high tunnel will use a new design of Soliculture greenhouse integrated luminescent solar panels to selectively absorb the green portion of the solar spectrum that is not used by plants and convert the light to red light with higher photosynthetic efficiency and to enhance power output of solar cells. Green light is selectively downshifted to red light using luminescent materials that match the photosythetically active region for plants and the efficiency maximum of Si photovoltaic cells. The color tuning associated with converting green light to red light has been shown to facilitate fruit production in commercial greenhouses growing cucumbers, lettuce and herbs.