Use of Agrivoltaics to Enhance Cucumber Production in the Hot and Arid Climate of UAE: A Sustainable Approach for Food and Clean Energy Security

The rapid growth of the world population is fueling the transition to sustainable approaches to ensure energy, water, and food security. Agrivoltaics allows the dual use of land by integrating photovoltaic (PV) systems and crops. In hot and arid climates, the solar panels provide shade to the crops, and the water used for cleaning the panels can be used for irrigation. In this work, we investigated an agrivoltaic system with mono-facial PV modules to assess shade-tolerant cucumbers' growth under and outside PV s in October, when it is hard to grow crops under direct sunlight in the hot arid climate of the UAE. The tilt of the module was 25°, and the height of the module was 1.5 m. Our results showed that all growth and fruit production parameters were significantly greater in the shaded area and significantly less mortality than in the site exposed to sunlight. A negative correlation was observed between the growth and production parameters and the distance from the center of the panels. The results show that the development of agrivoltaics is a very promising approach to ensuring the sustainable security of energy and food in the hot arid lands of the UAE.