Report: Adapting Agrivoltaics for Solar Mini-Grids in Haiti
Abstract
With less than 2% of the rural population with access to electricity and almost half the population facing acute hunger, Haiti faces interconnected challenges of energy poverty and food insecurity. One solution to help address energy poverty in Haiti has been the development of distributed solar, particularly solar mini-grids. However, often the land best suited for deploying solar generation is also best suited for agriculture by smallholder farmers, thereby creating a potentially complicated tension between energy access and food security. To address this tension, solar developers, agricultural specialists, and researchers are jointly examining a novel solution called "agrivoltaics." Agrivoltaics is a shared land-use solution that is rapidly expanding in established solar markets like the United States, Europe, and Asia that pairs solar with agriculture, producing electricity and providing space for crops and animal grazing under and between panels. As part of the Energy Access Partnership for Haiti with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) performed an initial feasibility analysis and stakeholder engagement project to evaluate the potential for agrivoltaics in mini-grid contexts in Haiti. The analysis considered typical 100-kW and larger 1-MW mini-grids in towns across Haiti and developed two example agrivoltaic archetypes based on key local inputs, including solar irradiance, production data from the agricultural census, market prices, stakeholder interviews, and existing agrivoltaic research. See NREL/TP-7A40-89399 for the Haitian Creole translation of this document.
Contains a model
Contains novel data
Topics
- Plant Science
- Microclimatology
- Social Perspectives
- Farmer/landowner perspectives
- Community perspectives
- Solar Industry perspective
- Implementation barriers
- Broader social impacts
- Policy and Regulatory Issues
- Ag policies and regs
- Energy policies and regs
- Insurance/liability/risks
- Market Assessments
- Technical potential
- Market potential
- Agricultural supply chains
- Value propositions
- Economics
- Rural development impacts
- Techno-economic analyses
- PV Technologies
- Standardization and Best Practices
- Impact Assessments
- Reviews/Informational
Citation
Andy Bilich, Brittany Staie, James McCall, Alexis Pascaris, Brian Mirletz, Thomas Hickey, Sudha Kannan, Sally Williams, Kai Lepley, Jordan Macknick (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). 2024. Adapting Agrivoltaics for Solar Mini-Grids in Haiti.
(!) : National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
