Simulation Model for Electrical Operation in Agrivoltaic Power Plants: Nine Hourly Panel Orientation Modes

In an agrivoltaic plot, the hourly panel tracking angle governs electricity, on-site economics, avoided carbon dioxide, irrigation demand and crop yield. Operating for photovoltaic output alone discards that space, and does so when a midday kilowatt-hour has lost its value: 715 h of the studied season carried a non-positive export price, 517 of them at midday. This work formalizes the electrical operating layer of a mechanistic hourly simulator as nine panel-orientation modes, each a constrained program solved deterministically by sequential quadratic programming, a dense angular scan, or both. Two modes keep an energy-proportional objective non-degenerate through an adaptive clean-grid switch and an economics–carbon weighting anchored on the crop. The catalog is a framework, demonstrated over a 153-day season on a 66 kWp single-axis sage (Salvia officinalis) plot near Valencia, Spain. Seasonal photovoltaic energy ranged from 57.0 to 31.9 MWh, plot-mean relative yield from 95% to 109%, and worst-plant protection from 61% to 94%. Energy maximization sits at a flat extreme of the frontier: the Pareto mode gained 11.4 yield points and 31 worst-plant points for 1.1% less energy. Avoided carbon dioxide varied by 2.1% across the nine modes, so a carbon objective is degenerate with energy without an interior term.