The role of solar on emissions

The news of climate change is so unnerving, there are obvious motivations for the massive movement toward solar energy. In the near future, we are all going to have to make the transition to renewable energy – if not out of concern about climate change then simply because fossil fuels will very soon be completely exhausted. But even sustainable energy technologies may have an effect on global climate, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. In the study, researchers used computerized climate models to investigate what would happen if the world’s entire energy supply were converted to solar. They assumed that solar panels would be installed in the massive desert regions of the world, where the supply of sunlight is greatest, and in urban areas, where the demand for power is highest.

Solar absorption

In areas covered by solar panels, less solar radiation gets absorbed by the Earth, because it gets received by the solar panels (and converted to electricity) instead. Widespread installation of solar panels would decrease absorption of solar radiation by up to 18% in desert areas, the researchers found. In turn, this has cascading effects on the climate. On a world scale, the changes from solar panel installation are small compared to those forecasted to occur due to greenhouse gases. But at a regional level, some of these climatic changes could be significant, the researchers say. The average temperature in desert regions would decrease by about two degrees. Desert rain could also decrease by over 20%, largely because the presence of solar panels also reduces cloud cover.

Desert cooling leads to wind pattern changes

According to the study, this desert cooling would lead to changes in wind patterns, a variation in the location of the jet stream, and altered precipitation levels for many regions. Much of Asia, parts of the Middle East, Australia, and the tropical Pacific would lose up to 25 centimeters of average annual rainfall. Instead, that precipitation would shift to Europe, the North Pacific, western North America, tropical Africa, and the southeast Indian Ocean. (These patterns are opposite to those expected to arise from greenhouse gas-induced warming.)

Regions to the East, or downwind, of desert areas covered by solar panels would also cool off by about one degree. (Exceptions are India and the West Coast of North America, which, due to lower precipitation and altered wind patterns respectively, warm by about one degree instead.)The study presents a fairly extreme scenario: the researchers assumed that 100 percent of the land area in cities and deserts would be covered with solar panels, which isn’t particularly realistic. Those solar panels would generate almost 800 terawatts of power, much more than the world requires for power. But the researchers say this sort of experiment can reveal mechanisms underlying the climate system and help interpret the results of more realistic modeling exercises. So they also imagined a version of their model that more accurately reflects likely future demands for power. In this scenario, solar panels would be installed across urban areas worldwide and in a portion of the Egyptian desert, covering about ten percent of the total land area devoted to solar panels in the first version of the model.

Surface temperatures

The patterns of surface temperature change are similar in broad strokes to those seen in the extreme version of the model, but much more moderate. For example, global temperature would likely decline by about 0.04 degrees Celsius, the researchers found. This smaller global solar grid would produce about 59 terawatts of power per year annually, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated to be, at most, 45 terawatts per year by 2100.

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