ANNOUNCEMENTS
With the irreversible effects of climate change already being witnessed globally, the world is facing an immediate challenge to swiftly transition from non-renewable energy to cleaner forms of energy in order to mitigate any further CO2 emissions. In this pretext, under the goal of achieving 500 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030, the Indian government is pushing for technological, legal, and economic reforms to replace fossil fuels with clean energy. Considered to be at the apex of promising and scalable renewable technologies, solar energy has the potential to fulfill a major part of India's ambitious 500 GW goal -- but conventional ground-mounted photovoltaic systems require an extensive amount of land resources. A socio-economically as well as culturally vital resource, land must be optimally managed for a densely populated country like India. Hence, new and innovative areas that incorporate photovoltaics on land already being used for other activities, thereby facilitating dual utilisation of land resources, are being looked at as a potential source for achieving the energy transition goal for India. For the same purpose, the country's vast resource of over 159 million hectares of arable land can be used in tandem with photovoltaics for the secondary use of energy generation alongside being primarily used for crop cultivation. This synergy of agriculture and energy generation is termed as agriphotovoltaics or AgriPV. This study explores the energy generation potential of agriphotovoltaics in the Indian context by conducting a land suitability analysis using the tools of remote sensing and GIS on India for an overall theoretical potential. Further, it proposes a field-based approach for estimation by taking the example of the state of Haryana and using crop classification as an additional analysis layer.
