Agrivoltaic shade reduction using diverging lens attachments in row crops

The co-habitation of agriculture and photovoltaics, known as agrivoltaics, is a way to make land be used more efficiently by maintaining land for food supply while also harvesting solar irradiation. Crops that are shade-intolerant, however, may have their yields negatively impacted due to the shadows cast by the photovoltaic modules. Row crops, such as maize, soybean and wheat, are most often found to be shade intolerant. The common workarounds to make agrivoltaic systems functional for row crops often incur large production costs, making them less financially attractive. This study focuses on a solution to be used with shade-intolerant crops which reduces shading levels while lowering capital expenses. The study outlines both a modeling effort and an experimental setup of a simple diverging lens attachment to place on solar panels meant to redirect light in areas that were previously shaded. As a result, the region experiencing partial shade increases in area (by upwards of 25%) but provides 1.95 times the amount of irradiance than originally received. The proposed novel hardware implementation can reduce the requirement for solar developers to significantly alter system architectures.