Using solar energy to let crops and electricity share the same land

Plants are the original solar panels, and they’re very good at converting light into energy – red and blue light, that is.

But what if a solar panel could co-exist with plants, capturing the light that they aren’t using while allowing those red and blue wavelengths through?

That’s what a team led by Silvia Ma Lu of Mälardalen University in Sweden has tested in a new study, using semi-transparent, rose-tinted solar panels that let specific wavelengths of light through to plants growing below, while also capturing solar energy for electricity. They’ve presented their prototype in the scientific journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

“The basic concept is quite straightforward,” Ma Lu says. “The solar panels use part of the incoming sunlight to generate renewable electricity while allowing part of the light to pass through to the crops growing underneath.”

Perhaps we could be harvesting sunlight more efficiently by allocating different portions of the solar spectrum to crop growth and electricity generation, she says.

The magenta panels tested in this study, however, are more like a prototype than the final product. Their magenta color filters light in the green spectrum, but at present, that green light energy is not actually captured by the solar cells. But the experiments suggest this could be a possibility in the future. Ma Lu and team chose broccoli as their crop of choice to test the magenta cells.

Read the study at the link here.