The state of agrivoltaics research: Trends and missing perspectives, a scoping review (Engineering Village).

Le résumé fourni par la source

Abstract Agrivoltaic systems (AVS)—the co-location of photovoltaic energy generation and agricultural production on the same footprint—has emerged as a promising strategy for addressing land-use competition at the food–energy–water nexus. Since the late 2010s, research, design, and deployment of agrivoltaic systems have expanded rapidly across regions and disciplines. Despite this growth, relatively little attention has been paid to critically assessing how knowledge in this field is produced or how research design shapes the resulting evidence base. To address this gap, we have conducted a comprehensive scoping review of peer-reviewed studies on agrivoltaic system design and analyzed the current research landscape for disciplinary composition, geographic and climatic distribution, agricultural product, methodological approaches, and system design priorities. The review highlights several key opportunities to strengthen agrivoltaics research. First, studies are geographically concentrated on temperate climates and relatively affluent regions, suggesting the potential to expand research in regions where agrivoltaic systems could deliver the greatest benefits. Second, most research considers agrivoltaics systems in relation to a single agricultural product, implicitly positioning agrivoltaics systems for conventional monoculture. Furthermore, the majority of literature explores a crop-centered agrivoltaic system, leaving livestock agrivoltaics and ecovoltaics relatively understudied. Third, early literature is dominated by modeling approaches, indicating opportunities for more field-based validation of model predictions. Fourth, in system design and pilot-scale field assessment, the context of future applications, such as grid connection, are rarely taken into consideration. Such an implicit assumption forgoes an opportunity to support the design of agrivoltaic systems for decentralized applications. Fifth, research teams are often insufficiently interdisciplinary and dominated by engineering fields, highlighting a key opportunity to integrate diverse expertise to better capture system synergies and tradeoffs for diverse socio-ecological contexts. Sixth, despite the inherent social nature of agrivoltaic systems, social science perspectives remain underrepresented in system design and evaluation, presenting an opportunity to incorporate insights on human dimensions. Finally, agriculture producer perspectives are rarely explicitly integrated into research design despite the presumed role of farmers as primary users of agrivoltaics systems, revealing an opportunity to align agrivoltaics design with stakeholder priorities and practical implementation and management needs.

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