Future gigantic solar farms could impact the amount of solar power that can be produced elsewhere in the world

The sun’s energy is effectively unlimited. Although resources such as coal or gas are limited, if you are able to capture and use solar energy, that doesn’t stop anyone from also using as much sunlight as they need.

Except that’s not quite the full story. Beyond a certain size, solar farms become large enough to affect the weather conditions around them and, ultimately, the climate as a whole. In our new research published in Earth and Environment Communicationswe looked at the effect that such climate-altering solar farms could have on solar power generation elsewhere in the world.

We know that solar energy is affected by weather conditions and its output varies by day and season. Clouds, rain, snow and fog can all block sunlight from reaching the solar panels. On cloudy days, their output can drop by 75%, while their efficiency also decreases at high temperatures.

In the long term, climate change could affect some regions’ cloud cover and the amount of solar energy they can produce. Northern Europe will likely experience a decrease in solar radiation for example, while there should be a slight increase in available solar radiation in the rest of Europe, the east coast of the United States and northern Europe. China.

If we were ever to build truly giant solar farms, spanning entire countries and continents, they could have a similar impact. In our recent study, we used a computer program to model the Earth system and simulate the impact of hypothetical enormous solar farms covering 20% ​​of the Sahara on global solar energy production.

A photovoltaic (PV) solar panel is dark in color and therefore absorbs much more heat than reflective desert sand. Even if a fraction of the energy is converted into electricity, much of it continues to heat the panel. And when millions of these panels are grouped together, the entire area heats up. If these solar panels were in the Sahara, our simulations show that this new heat source would reorganize global climate patterns, directing precipitation away from the tropics and leading the desert to become greener again, as was the case just ago 5,000 years.

This in turn would affect cloud cover patterns and the amount of solar power that could be generated globally. Regions that would become cloudier and less capable of producing solar power include the Middle East, southern Europe, India, eastern China, Australia and the southwestern United States. -United. Areas that would produce more solar power include Central and South America, the Caribbean, the central and eastern United States, Scandinavia and South Africa.

How global solar potential would be affected:

Something similar happened when we simulated the effects of huge solar farms in other hot spots in Central Asia, Australia, the southwest United States, and northwest China – each of which has led to climate change elsewhere. For example, huge solar farms covering much of the Australian outback would make the weather sunnier in South Africa, but cloudier in the UK, particularly in summer.

If huge solar farms were installed in other arid areas:

There are a few caveats. Things would only change by a few percent at most – no matter how much solar power we produce, Scandinavia will still be cool and cloudy, Australia still warm and sunny.

And anyway, these effects are based on hypothetical scenarios. Our scenario for the Sahara was, for example, based on covering 20% ​​of the entire desert with photovoltaic solar farms, and although there have been ambitious proposals, it is unlikely that a project on this scale will come to fruition. produce in the near future. If the area covered is reduced to a more plausible (although still improbable) figure of 5% of the Sahara, the overall effects become mostly negligible.

Why this thought experiment is important

But in a future world in which almost all regions invest in and become more dependent on more solar projects, the interaction of solar energy resources can potentially shape the energy landscape, creating a complex web of dependencies, rivalries and opportunities . Geopolitical maneuvering of solar project construction by certain countries may hold significant new power influencing solar production potential well beyond their national borders.

This is why it is essential to foster collaboration between nations to ensure that the benefits of solar energy are shared equitably around the world. By sharing knowledge and working together on spatial planning for future large-scale solar projects, nations should develop and implement equitable and sustainable energy solutions and avoid any unintended risks to remote solar power generation.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.