Covering greenhouses and agricultural fields with photovoltaics has the potential to create multi... more Covering greenhouses and agricultural fields with photovoltaics has the potential to create multipurpose agricultural systems that generate revenue through conventional crop production as well as sustainable electrical energy. In this work, we evaluate the effects of wavelength-selective cutoffs of visible and near-infrared (biologically active) radiation using transparent photovoltaic (TPV) absorbers on the growth of three diverse, representative, and economically important crops: petunia, basil, and tomato. Despite the differences in TPV harvester absorption spectra, photon transmission of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR; 400–700 nm) is the most dominant predictor of crop yield and quality. This indicates that different wavebands of blue, red, and green are essentially equally important to these plants. When the average photosynthetic daily light integral is > 12 mol m–2 d–1, basil and petunia yield and quality is acceptable for commercial production. However, even mod...
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Papers by isaac king