Increasing the agricultural sustainability of closed agrivoltaic systems with the integration of vertical farming: A case study on baby-leaf lettuce

Cossu, Marco; Tiloca, Maria Teresa; Cossu, Andrea; Deligios, Paola A.; Pala, T.; Ledda, Luigi

doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2023.121278

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…The outcome (shown in Supplementary Figure 2) proves the robustness of GWP deficiency of the two lettuce farming systems of traditional sunlight greenhouse and plant factory under 20-year and 100-year time scales. Additionally, for the TWP metric, the uncertainties were within 5% when considering the 16 CO 2 impulse-response functions reviewed by Joos et al (2013) [26] . Therefore, these narrowing variations of uncertainties demonstrated the TWP metrics' robustness.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…We failed to consider the possibility that plant factories move away from the wide-region power grid to local electric energy sources. For example, Cossu et al (2023) showed that the local photovoltaic electricity generation system of solar panels is very flexible to power the plant factory and reduce the reliance on a wide-region power grid [27] ; the climate performance of typical local electricity supply has also been analyzed [28] . Moreover, the power consumption varies considerably across different LED lighting systems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…where parameters of a 0 = 0.2173, a 1 = 0.2240, a 2 = 0.2824, a 3 = 0.2763, 𝜏 1 = 394.4, 𝜏 2 = 36.54, 𝜏 3 = 4.304 of IPCC AR5 were used, in addition to the parameters of 16 CO 2 impulse-response functions summarized by Joos et al (2013). Supplementary Table 8 gives details [26] .…”

Section: Technology Warming Potentialmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Life cycle climate performance of urban plant factory versus rural greenhouse under China’s power-grid decarbonization: considering short-lived methane and nitrous oxide emissions

Cheng,

Song,

Liu

et al. 2024

Carbon Footprints

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Plant factories can potentially enhance the climate resilience of urban vegetable production by reducing the losses from climate hazards but generate high climate burdens - due to consuming carbon-intensive power generated by coal combustion with upstream methane emissions - unlike rural traditional sunlight greenhouses with nitrous oxide emissions. Here, we compared the life cycle Global Warming Potential (GWP) and Technical Warming Potential (TWP) metrics of lettuce production by plant factory and greenhouse, and explored the effect of power grid decarbonization on the climate performance of the cultivations. Results show that in the baseline scenario using the southern Chinese grid, the 100-year GWP of plant factory cultivation (14.9 kgCO2e kg-1) is over 50 times higher than that of the greenhouse (0.27 kgCO2e kg-1). The nitrous oxide emissions contribute 14% to the GWP of greenhouse, while methane contributes 16% to that of plant factories, which can be reduced to ~4% under a high grid decarbonization scenario in 2050. Electricity consumption (fertilizer and polyethylene film applications) shares 43%-99% (80%-89%) of the GWP of plant factory (greenhouse) cultivations. Grid decarbonization decreases the TWP metrics over time, meaning a rising climate advantage for plant factories. However, plant factories still fail to compete with greenhouses in mitigating climate change (with TWP ranging from 5-66), except if hydropower were fully deployed. Our findings add knowledge about climate-friendly and resilient vegetable supplies under China’s grid decarbonization efforts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Life cycle climate performance of urban plant factory versus rural greenhouse under China’s power-grid decarbonization: considering short-lived methane and nitrous oxide emissions

Cheng,

Song,

Liu

et al. 2024

Carbon Footprints

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“…In recent years, there has been a notable rise in the production of lettuce cultivated within controlled environmental systems. In contrast to traditional field cultivation, controlled environment cultivation has emerged as a prevalent method, enabling year-round lettuce and vegetable production irrespective of geographical and climatic limitations [ 2 , 5 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A hyperspectral deep learning attention model for predicting lettuce chlorophyll content

Ye,

Tan,

Dai

et al. 2024

Plant Methods

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Background The phenotypic traits of leaves are the direct reflection of the agronomic traits in the growth process of leafy vegetables, which plays a vital role in the selection of high-quality leafy vegetable varieties. The current image-based phenotypic traits extraction research mainly focuses on the morphological and structural traits of plants or leaves, and there are few studies on the phenotypes of physiological traits of leaves. The current research has developed a deep learning model aimed at predicting the total chlorophyll of greenhouse lettuce directly from the full spectrum of hyperspectral images. Results A CNN-based one-dimensional deep learning model with spectral attention module was utilized for the estimate of the total chlorophyll of greenhouse lettuce from the full spectrum of hyperspectral images. Experimental results demonstrate that the deep neural network with spectral attention module outperformed the existing standard approaches, including partial least squares regression (PLSR) and random forest (RF), with an average R2 of 0.746 and an average RMSE of 2.018. Conclusions This study unveils the capability of leveraging deep attention networks and hyperspectral imaging for estimating lettuce chlorophyll levels. This approach offers a convenient, non-destructive, and effective estimation method for the automatic monitoring and production management of leafy vegetables.

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“…Since one of the main drawbacks of th VF systems is the higher energy consumption due to the lighting system, different studies addressed the possibility to integrate renewable energy sources such as PV panels in order to reduce their energy consumption. Cossu et al [18] integrated a VF system with a pre-existing photovoltaic greenhouse for the growth of baby-leaf lettuce in order to maximize the system productivity and minimize the CO2 emissions, while taking advantage in the use of PV panels combined with VF system. Yalcin et al [19] studied a novel lighting system to be employed in vertical farms which consists of parabolic collector which collects the sunlight and splitters and optical fibres which transmit it to the internal ambient of crop growth.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of the energy consumption of indoor farming for different climates and lighting system intensity

Arcasi,

Mastrullo,

Mauro

et al. 2023

J. Phys.: Conf. Ser.

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Nowadays, due to the energy, water, and arable land crises, as well as the constant global population growth and urbanization, water, energy, and food sources are strongly linked to each other, and a comprehensive analysis including all the influencing factors has to be carried out. In this context, the need to improve the energy performance of traditional cultivation systems, as well as to develop alternative and innovative ones, is causing a shift in interest from greenhouses to indoor farming methods (such as vertical farms) in the agricultural sector. In fact, they allow for completely controlled crop production without the use of chemical pesticides. Moreover, their productivity is independent of external conditions and improved compared to traditional systems. However, their energy consumption is larger than that of greenhouses. To evaluate the techno-economic feasibility of such systems, a comprehensive model of a vertical farm, including air conditioning, lighting systems, and plant evapotranspiration, has been developed to quantify the energy share for the different elements of the system (air conditioning and lighting) and to relate the energy consumption to the kilogram of produced crop, analysing exclusively the growth phase. The analysis is carried out for different cities and considers different scenarios in terms of lighting and electricity costs.

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Increasing the agricultural sustainability of closed agrivoltaic systems with the integration of vertical farming: A case study on baby-leaf lettuce

Cited by 13 publications

References 59 publications

Life cycle climate performance of urban plant factory versus rural greenhouse under China’s power-grid decarbonization: considering short-lived methane and nitrous oxide emissions

Life cycle climate performance of urban plant factory versus rural greenhouse under China’s power-grid decarbonization: considering short-lived methane and nitrous oxide emissions

A hyperspectral deep learning attention model for predicting lettuce chlorophyll content

Assessment of the energy consumption of indoor farming for different climates and lighting system intensity

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