Modelling and Assessment of Biomass-PV Tradeoff within the Framework of the Food-Energy-Water Nexus

Food, water and energy are three essential resources for human well-being, poverty reduction and sustainable development. These resources are very much linked to one another, meaning that the actions in any one particular area often can have effects in one or both of the other areas. At the same time, an economy's shift towards climate neutrality requires a massive expansion of energy production from renewable sources. Among these ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) and biomass will be expanded massively to meet the clean energy generation goal, simultaneously influence regional water and food availability and supply security. It is crucial to understand Food-Water-Energy Nexus (FWE) nexus during the energy transition. However, current studies have limitation both methodically (qualitative assessments) and spatially (aggregated data on a national level is more available). Firstly, a consistent share input data set in geographical format was created with the resolution of building/field. An energy simulation platform (SimStadt) was then extended with new workflows on biomass potential, ground-mounted PV potential, food demand/potential, and urban water demand. Combining with existing workflows on urban building heating/electricity demand and roof PV potential, the dissertation created a complete simulation environmental covering most-relating FWE topics in energy transition with consistent input and output structures at a fine resolution. Secondly, the most representative inter-linkage between ground-mounted PV and biomass on hinterland is investigated in details with the new tools. The output data of each field from ground-mounted PV and biomass workflows are linked and ranked according to the scenarios emphasizing PV yield, feasibility, profit, or biomass. The assessment and scenarios are applied at three representative German counties with distinguished land-use structures and geometries as case studies. Results show that current policies does not guarantee the technically efficient allocation of fields. The optimal technical strategy is to follow the individual market profit drive, which is very likely, at the same time for the social good, to achieve high PV yields with limited biomass losses and more significant crop water-saving effects. The local food, water, and energy demands are also included as a metric for resource allocation on the potential side. Besides focusing on the biomass-PV tradeoff simulation and analysis, pioneer works have also been done to test the transferability of the method in cases outside Germany, and the complement of urban solid waste to agricultural biomass is explored to achieve energy autarky