Assessing Malaysian agrivoltaics from energy-land-food perspective: site-crop selection, scenario development and sensitivity analysis

According to the National Energy Transition Roadmap (NETR), the government has set a target to increase its renewable energy share in the installed capacity mix to a total of 70% by 2050, thus propelling the development of large-scale solar farms. However, the large-scale solar farms require a vast amount of land, leading to conflict with different sectors, mainly agriculture. This leads to concerns regarding the reduction of area for agricultural exports and food security in the region. Agrivoltaics system (AVS) which integrates PV power production on agricultural land offers a potential solution towards these issues by enhancing the efficiency of a piece of land through both crop and energy production. The purpose of this research is to develop and evaluate energy systems of different crops which will be compared to determine the most suitable crops to be integrated with AVS technology. A criterion was created to identify suitable crops in the context in Malaysia and divided into four scenarios which is then compared through various parameters such as Land Equivalent Ratio (LER). The results obtained in the forms of LER, energy yield, system loss, land use and capital costs are placed in a scoring matrix which shows that scenarios with tea and cabbage as crops are the most viable with a scoring of 25 and 23 respectively compared to 11 and 21 for palm and paddy. The LER shows that cabbage has the highest value of 1.74 followed by tea at 1.53. Each of these scenarios may use similar or different types of AVS design to ensure that the crop yield is not significantly impacted. A PESTLE analysis was conducted on the key drivers and barriers for AVS adoption in Malaysia. In addition, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to understand the importance of choosing suitable crops in relation to shading percentage and crop yield. This initiative supports the country’s ambition of increasing sustainable development through the dual-use land method of combining the energy production sector with the agricultural sector.