Renewable Energy

The role of SOLAR POWER in SMART FARMING

Renewables provide the chance to leapfrog to a sustainable, prosperous future for all. Increasing access to reliable, affordable and clean energy resources is a key priority, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Around 600 million people in Africa still have no access to electricity, representing 48% of the continent’s population of around 1.2 billion. Africa could meet nearly a quarter of its energy needs from indigenous and clean renewable energy by 2030. Modern renewables amounting to 310 gigawatts (GW) could provide half the continent’s total electricity generation capacity. This corresponds to a sevenfold increase from the capacity available in 2017, which amounted to 42 GW. A transformation of this scale in Africa’s energy sector would require average annual investment of 70 billion US dollars (USD) to 2030, resulting in carbon dioxide emissions reductions of up to 310 megatons.

Solar Technologies in Agriculture
Technology at agricultural farms is changing and improving rapidly. These developments are improving the farm machinery and equipment, farms facilities and buildings, both for crops and animals at farms. As we all know solar energy is the largest and cheapest energy resource on earth. Solar energy can easily fulfill energy provision and supply at agriculture farms.
Various solar energy absorbing devices and systems have been developed and are in work for agricultural applications. This includes solar thermal and electric devices such as solar spraying machine, solar greenhouse heating, solar crop dryers, solar water pumps, ventilation for livestock, solar aeration pumps, solar electricity etc.
It’s no secret that the agriculture industry is vital to human life in any given country. Agriculture isn’t just the world’s leading source of food—it also provides us with raw materials such as textiles, wood, and oils, which are necessary for innumerable applications. Due to its significance, finding ways to make the agriculture industry more efficient and sustainable is essential to ensuring its longevity. Currently, the best way to accomplish this goal is to implement smart agriculture.
Smart agriculture refers to advanced farming management that utilizes innovative information and communication technologies—such as the Internet of things (IoT), big data, and the cloud—to automate processes, analyze operations, and monitor conditions. Smart agriculture helps farmers enhance the quality and quantity of their goods for optimal efficiency.
Smart agriculture offers many advantages, but we won’t be able to appreciate its benefits for long if its processes aren’t sustainable. Unfortunately, the sustainability of the agriculture industry is at risk due to a reliance on finite resources such as oil and gas to power key processes. The renewable resource of solar power is playing an increasingly prevalent role in the industry in order to address the issues threatening its longevity. In addition to sustainability, solar power also offers numerous additional benefits that have revolutionized the smart agriculture industry.

Applications of Solar Energy in Smart Agriculture
One of the biggest advantages solar power provides to the smart agriculture industry is the ability to monitor remote farms and fields. Collecting data regarding a wide variety of conditions such as temperature or moisture can help farmers properly care for their crops. However, as their farms and fields are often located in remote areas, supplying energy to monitoring devices can prove exceedingly difficult—running the cables necessary to provide power is often extremely costly or otherwise impossible.
Solar power provides an advantageous solution to this prevalent issue due to its ability to provide power to sensors and other monitoring devices without the need for cables or electrical sources. Thus, even in geographically challenging environments such as remote farms, farmers can still achieve the benefits of real-time monitoring.
In addition to the benefit of remote monitoring, solar-powered monitoring equipment is also exceptionally easy to install, which is highly advantageous when crop rotation or other locational changes are necessary. Because solar-powered monitoring equipment doesn’t require cabling, it can be installed quickly and easily at any location. In addition, it can easily be transported and moved in accordance with shifting needs. Thus, when farmers have to rotate their crops, they won’t have to completely rewire the network, allowing monitoring equipment to be moved with minimal difficulty.
The role of solar power in smart agriculture is especially impactful when it comes to the essential process of irrigating fields. Irrigation plays a key role in agriculture by improving yields, improving water conditions in soil, and preventing famine as a result of variable rainfall patterns, which disrupt crop growth. Essentially, irrigation is essential to food security. To facilitate proper irrigation in an agricultural application, energy is a vital input. However, access to such energy can prove challenging in rural areas where there is no reliable access to an electricity grid or where diesel fuel is costly.
To supply large- and small-scale farmers with the energy they need to power their irrigation systems, solar-powered irrigation systems are becoming an increasingly viable and advantageous option. Such systems provide reliable, affordable, flexible, and clean energy, which can potentially reduce irrigation energy costs. In areas where access to energy is limited or nonexistent, solar-powered irrigation systems contribute to rural electrification to improve farmers’ access to water and ensure the vital irrigation process has the energy it needs to commence.

Third Generation Mini-Grid
A typical third-generation mini-grid consists of a solar-hybrid generation system that includes solar panels, batteries, charge controllers, inverters, and optional diesel backup generators. The distribution network consists of poles and low-voltage wires; larger mini-grids sometimes also have medium-voltage systems. Third-generation mini-grids often use smart meters that provide both prepaid payment options for consumers and real-time, granular information about energy consumption patterns and system performance.
The ‘third generation’ of mini-grids can provide 24x7 reliable, locally managed power with local ubiquitously available resources such as solar (combined with storage, diesel backup or both), as well as with biomass, hydro and wind. They also use remote monitoring systems, which allows operators to identify technical issues before they affect energy services and rectify problems quickly and inexpensively, thus improving the quality of customer service.