Application of renewable energy sources in greenhouses

Abstract

Greenhouses have significant importance in the field of agriculture and horticulture. A special type of greenhouse is solar greenhouse, which is designed to collect solar energy during sunny days and to store heat for use at night or during periods without the Sun. In this paper it is investigated a solar greenhouse with photovoltaic panels. For greenhouse heating in the winter period and cooling in the summer period, a ground source heat pump was used. Solar greenhouse is simulated in EnergyPlus environment, while Open Studio plug-in in Google SketchUp was used for greenhouse design. Energy analysis was performed with the major aim to minimize greenhouse energy consumption, and to achieve solar greenhouse with net-zero energy consumption. Cases of different solar greenhouse orientations, different photovoltaic slope and different photovoltaic cell efficiency were considered. The simulation results showed that total energy consumption for heating and cooling of the greenhouse can be significantly reduced by using the optimal parameters (orientation and photovoltaic slope angle). Also, by changing the photovoltaics area and by using photovoltaics with higher cell efficiency, a concept of net-zero energy solar greenhouses can be achieved.