Solar farms grow beyond a certain size to the point that they affect the air around them, according to a new study. Ultimately, this will affect the climate on the planet as a whole, because its different regions are extremely interconnected; Changes in one part of the world disrupt the balance in the other.

What will be the impact?

Solar energy is greatly affected by weather conditions: Production depends on the day and time of year, as well as clouds, rain, snow and fog that block photons from reaching the solar panels. On a cloudy day, productivity can drop by 75%.

In the long term, climate change may affect the cloudiness of certain regions and the amount of solar energy they can produce. For example, simulations show that Northern Europe will likely experience a decrease in solar activity in the future, while the rest of Europe, the US East Coast and Northern China are expected to see a slight increase in the number of sunny days and clear skies. .

If we build truly giant solar power plants covering large areas of the planet, they could cause a similar effect.

For this study, scientists actually modeled the Earth; climate, weather cycles, relationships between different regions, and more. In this simulation, humanity covered 20% of the Sahara with solar panels. They are darker in color and therefore absorb much more heat than light desert sand, which tends to reflect some of the light back into space. Although some of the energy is converted to electricity, most of it still heats the panel. When millions of panels are packed together, the entire space is heated.

If these solar panels were in the Sahara, our simulations show that this new heat source would alter the global climate pattern, changing rainfall in the tropics and causing the desert to become greener again than it was 5,000 years ago. This will affect the structure of cloud cover and the amount of solar energy that can be produced worldwide.
– the authors write.

• Regions that will become cloudier and have reduced solar energy generating capacity include the Middle East, southern Europe, India, eastern China, Australia, and the southwestern United States.
• Regions that will produce more solar energy include Central and South America, the Caribbean, the central and eastern United States, Scandinavia and Southern Africa.

Something similar happened when scientists modeled the effects of massive solar power plants in various parts of Central Asia, Australia, the southwestern United States, and northwestern China; each of these led to climate change elsewhere. For example, massive solar farms covering much of Australia’s outback will make South Africa sunnier but dreary in the UK, especially in summer.

All of these scenarios are based on hypothetical scenarios. Moreover, scientists say that the situation will not change catastrophically, only by a few percent. While Scandinavia will still be cool and gloomy, Australia will be warm and sunny. The current scenario for the Sahara is based on covering 20% ​​of the entire desert with photovoltaic solar power plants, but such a thing is unlikely to happen in the near future, although such ambitious proposals have already been made. . If the area covered were reduced to a likely (though still unlikely) 5% of the Sahara, global impacts would be almost negligible.