Environmental life cycle assessment of a stilted and vertical bifacial crop-based agrivoltaic multi land-use system and comparison with a mono land-use of agricultural land

Agrivoltaic, the use of agricultural land for food/feed and electricity production via photovoltaic-modules, has been promoted as a possible solution to alleviate the land use conflict of arable land. This study aims to compare two agrivoltaic systems (stilted and vertical bifacial) from cradle-to-gate with the life cycle assessment method using a system expansion approach. Further, an unmodified agricultural production and total substitution of the latter by photovoltaic-modules (photovoltaic-scenario) are assessed. For an objective comparison the same outputs must be produced in every scenario. Hence, in the unmodified agricultural scenario an additional production chain for electricity (Austrian average or green electricity production) was added; while agricultural production was added in the photovoltaic-and stilted agrivoltaic scenario. Results show, that the photovoltaic system has higher (up to 99.32 %) environmental impacts than the agricultural system in all studied impact categories in all scenarios. Compared to the unmodified agricultural scenario with Austrian average electricity both agrivoltaic systems can reduce environmental impacts in 3 of 9 assessed impact categories, but in none compared to the unmodified agricultural scenario with green electricity. A hotspot in both agrivoltaic and photovoltaic-scenario is the photovoltaic-module production in China, due to the high demand and impact of electricity, in the stilted agrivoltaic scenario further the resource intensive steel mounting structure. Reduction potential of environmental impacts with a production in Europe is possible. Overall, it is demonstrated that agrivoltaic systems can reduce environmental impacts in some categories compared to the unmodified agricultural scenario with Austrian average electricity.