Study of agrivoltaic system to optimize arable land use for energy production in Rwanda

Abstract

Rwanda is a small mountainous country, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, population growth has led to a pressure on food security and land use, over the past 10 years there has been a decline in agricultural land, which has been significantly replaced by housing. High mountains that make up a large part of the country makes electricity expansion very expansive. The most common energy sources in Rwanda are fuel wood biomass, most rural areas in Rwanda do not access electricity from national grid. The purpose of this study is to investigate the feasibility of agrivoltaic system to address the issue of food and energy shortage and optimize land use, a rural area in Nyanza district, Gahondo village located at -2.3690 latitude and 29,7714 longitude was taken as a case study to analyze the feasibility of the system based on the fact that this district was found to have high solar radiation in Rwanda. The performance of the system was analyzed using PVsyst software tools. The solar radiation data used retrieved from meteo data included in the PVsyst software where the horizontal solar radiation of 5.4 kWh / m2 / day was measured at the selected area in western province. With the simulation in the PVsyst of an off-grid solar plant, consisting of 2907 solar panels of 320 Wp per solar panel, and 2 inverters of 420kWac rated power unit, the spacing between the PV rows is 6.4 m were considered where in the simulation this spacing resulted in allow incident radiation of 70% reaching the crop yield, the total power produced by the system was approximately 1419 MWh / year with 85.23% annual performance ratio (PR)