Balancing crop production and energy harvesting in organic solar-powered greenhouses

Greenhouses are a form of highly productive farming that conserves land and water. However, greenhouses use significantly more energy compared with conventional farming. For greenhouse to become an attractive option for environmentally sustainable agriculture there is a need to reduce their energy footprint. Employing semitransparent organic solar cells (ST-OSCs) on greenhouse structures has been proposed as a strategy to significantly reduce the systems energy needs. ST-OSCs are particularly attractive given the opportunity to tune spectral transmittance to generate power and also meet the plants lighting needs. In this talk, we experimentally demonstrate that the ST-OSCs result in negligible crop productivity losses when growing red-leaf lettuce, a popular greenhouse crop. We also show through computational modeling that net-zero energy greenhouses can be achieved using ST-OSCs with 10% efficiency. We expand on this model by coupling the energy model to a detailed plant growth model that accounts for light intensity and spectra on crop yield. We modeled over 60 different ST-OSCs that have unique spectral character and performance. We show that integrating ST-OSCs with greenhouse can increase their net present value by nearly 50% thereby revealing that OSCs can assist in achieving environmentally sustainable greenhouse based agriculture.