Colorado State University has completed an intriguing study on the effects of shading from transparent, semi-transparent, and opaque solar panels on crop production. The study suggests that semi-transparent module technology offers a solution to the negative impacts of shading in agrivoltaic systems.
Researchers examined the production of six vegetables (chili peppers, bell peppers, squash, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and lettuce) over two growing seasons.
The vegetables were cultivated under semi-transparent thin-film cadmium telluride (SD-CdTe) modules with 40% transparency, bifacial monocrystalline silicon (BF-Si) modules with 5% transparency, and opaque polycrystalline silicon (O-Si) modules with 0% transparency.
The study, titled “Vegetable Crop Growth Under Photovoltaic (PV) Modules of Varying Transparencies”, found that the yield of most crops increased with the increasing transparency of the solar modules.