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Abstract. Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) has already shown promising potential for efficient agricultural land-water usage and quality products with high yield. However, energy use for maintaining optimal climatic conditions for plants remains a significant challenge for this industry, often consuming up to 85% of net operational energy. Energy costs can contribute up to 20-40% of the net operating cost depending on CEA facilities and plants grown, which is a significant obstacle to achieving economic and environmental sustainability. It is also worth mentioning that the current technologies for space heating-cooling in CEA facilities are carbon-intensive. Integrating renewable energy will help reduce the environmental impact of this energy-intensive agricultural industry. Applying solar-assisted heating-cooling systems in CEA can offset carbon emissions and truncate the periodic operational cost. Adsorption air conditioning system is a unique technology that goes well with solar because of their comparatively lower operating temperature (as low as 50 °C). It has already shown good prospects in building space conditioning. This study runs a numerical investigation on the feasibility of applying a photovoltaic thermal (PVT) and adsorption chiller combination to satisfy the heating-cooling-power (trigeneration) demand of a commercial-scale greenhouse in California. The system has been designed based on a two-bed silica-gel water adsorption system and a flat plate PVT solar collector. The MATLAB software has been used to simulate the system's overall performance. Results obtained from this investigation can be a step toward materializing the net-zero-energy greenhouse concept.