Potential of floating, parking, and agri photovoltaics in Germany

Abstract

Newswise — The innovative use of photovoltaics (PV) on parking lots, water bodies, or agricultural areas reduces land use conflicts by co-using land with renewable PV production. In contrast to conventional open-field PV, their potential role in future energy systems has not been comprehensively defined yet. This study provides a global overview of existing potential analyses on innovative PV technologies and provides a transparent, reproducible, and transferable methodology using land eligibility analyses with a high spatial resolution of 10 m x 10 m, applied for different scenarios in Germany. For current legislation, the potential of floating PV in Germany is 4.7 GW(p) but shows a high sensitivity towards the considered water bodies and allowed area coverage of the water bodies. Parking PV has a potential of up to 24.6 GW(p), depending on the minimum number of required parking spaces. The potential of agricultural (agri) PV lies between 3215 GW(p) and 5437 GW(p), depending on the crop types considered and the corresponding system designs. While agri PV could significantly contribute to the national PV targets of 400 GW(p) by 2040, floating PV and parking PV can only support a maximum of 1.2 % and 6.2 %, respectively. The spatially explicit potentials are openly available and create the basis for further research about the future role of innovative PV technologies, e.g. by energy system modelers.