Solar Energy Advancements in Agriculture and Food Production Systems

Solar Energy Advancements in Agriculture and Food Production Systems aims to assist society and agricultural communities in different regions and scales to improve their productivity and sustainability. Solar energy, with its rapidly growing technologies and nascent market, has shown promise for integration into a variety of agricultural activities, providing an alternative, sustainable solution to current practices. To meet the future demands of modern sustainable agriculture, this book addresses the major existing problems by providing innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions using environment-friendly, advanced, energy-efficient, and cost-optimized solar energy technologies. This comprehensive book is intended to serve as a practical guide for scientists, engineers, policymakers, and stakeholders involved in agriculture and related primary industries, as well as sustainable energy development, and climate change mitigation projects. By including globally implemented solar-based agriculture projects in each chapter and highlighting the key associated challenges and benefits, it aims to bridge the knowledge gap between the market/real-world applications and research in the field.

• Provides up-to-date knowledge and recent advances in applications of solar energy technology in agriculture and food production
• Introduces two advanced concepts of agrivoltaics and aquavoltaics and addresses their potentials, challenges, and barriers
• Explains the application of solar energy technologies in agricultural systems, including greenhouse cultivation, water pumping and irrigation, desalination, heating and cooling, and drying
• Explains the use of solar energy in agricultural automation and robotics, considering precision agriculture and smart farming application
• Describes new applications of solar energy in agriculture and aquaculture, and technoeconomic and environmental impacts of solar energy technologies in agriculture and food production

About the Author

Dr. Shiva Gorjian is an associate professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, and the Department of Renewable Energy, Faculty of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, at Tarbiat Modares University (TMU), Tehran, Iran. She received her PhD in mechanics of biosystems engineering from TMU in 2014. She is the editor of the book Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conversion: Technologies, Applications, and Environmental Impacts (Elsevier, 2020). Her main research area is renewable energy applications in agriculture (AgroRenewables). She has been the lead guest editor of a special issue on the same theme in the Journal of Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments (Elsevier) in 2021. Dr. Gorjian's research interests include solar photovoltaics, solar desalination technologies, hybrid PVT systems, energy and exergy analysis, and modeling and simulation of renewable energy systems.

Dr. Pietro Elia Campana is a senior lecturer and an associate professor (docent) in energy and environmental engineering at Mälardalen University. He is the subject editor for Applied Energy (Elsevier) and editor for the journal Energy Nexus (Elsevier) and Heliyon (Cell Press). He received his PhD in energy and environmental engineering from Mälardalen University in Sweden in 2015. From 2015 to 2021, he was a research assistant professor at Mälardalen University. Dr. Campana´s research interests include simulation and optimization of renewable energies and integrated energy systems, water-food-energy nexus, agrivoltaic systems, artificial intelligence, and Internet-of-Things techniques for renewable energy applications.