How To Use the Spade Beta App

Spade Agrivoltaics is a cloud-based software platform to help you model and analyze your agrivoltaic projects and ideas. From site location to solar panel arrangement and crop planning, Spade optimizes your project for both energy and agricultural outputs with precision!

Project Location

Start by determining the geographical location of your project. Through the app, you can select the closest location for your site. The geographical analysis is completed through the use of a Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) file that uses ray tracing algorithms to visualize weather and irradiance data; these steps ensure accurate modeling.

Weather data is generated as diurnal averages showing daily weather variation, including temperature (℃) and solar radiation (Wh/m2). Because climate varies by location, selecting the right site is critical to understanding your energy and crop potentials. Use our tool to evaluate changes in location that impact your project's outcomes.

Panel Configuration

After a site is selected and geographical analysis is completed, you can easily compare and contrast panel configurations.

Choose from 5 different configurations:

• Fixed east-west peak canopy
• Fixed south-facing
• Fixed south-facing canopy
• North-south tracking
• Bifacial solar fence

Additionally, panel transparency can be adjusted. Comparing panel configurations often has a tremendous impact on the light environment, impacting light distribution, shade patterns, and ultimately affecting crop performance. Visualize how changes in configurations affect your agricultural activities!

Crop Potential

After modifying the site location and panel configurations, the app will automatically begin to calculate crop potentials. Now you can adjust the start and end of your desired growing season, this will impact the results of the simulation accordingly.

First, you will see a chart displaying average Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density (PPFD); these values indicate the number of photosynthetically active photons (wavelengths of 400-700 nm) that reach a given surface per second. The chart will categorize PPFD values by light levels: high, medium, and low; each category will have recommended crop families.

Furthermore, the software will provide you with Daily Light Integrals (DLI). DLI is a daily measure of all photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) that reach a plant’s surface per day; this accounts for PPFD as well as the number of daylight hours for the selected growing period. Once your report is generated, you can toggle between DLI, PPFD, and Irradiance values over your given plot of land.

Visualize your results!

With your report generated, you can now visualize areas with high and low light exposure. Whether you are interested in the impact on solar or agricultural production, you can toggle between PPFD, DLI, and Irradiance. Use these results to determine what to plant and where. From a solar perspective, evaluate how the array reduces irradiance.

Need More?

We are glad to have you interacting with our cloud-based software! Understanding this is a preliminary report and may not answer all questions we offer consulting services. Do you desire to model a utility-scale project? Want to factor for grading on-site? Need an in-depth analysis of your unique array design? These are just some of the questions we are addressing through consultations. We can provide highly customized results considering panel choice, unique array configurations and more! Reach out to us with any questions. We are experts in this field - use our experience to guide you to the results you need!