A Sahara full of solar panels turns the weather upside down
Fuss Huge solar farms can influence the climate. Above millions of panels, the air can heat up considerably.
Authors
Laura Wismans
Published on
January 17, 2024
Solar panels on a 77 km site2 in Dubai.
Photo: Joshua A. Bickel/AP
Just fill the Sahara with solar panels, and the climate problem will be solved in no time. This argument works especially well at get-togethers. If you think a little longer, you will soon come up with practical objections, such as the amount of water to keep the panels dust-free, and the question of how to get the energy to the place where you need it. There is a new counter-argument: such gigantic solar parks influence cloud formation with their existence. On the negative. The consequence of a gigasolar park in one place is that much less solar energy can be generated in other places on earth.
This is the conclusion of a computer simulation that Chinese and Swedish scientists wrote about in the scientific journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.
On a cloudy day, a solar cell yields less, because a large part of the sunlight does not reach the cell. The difference can be as much as 75 percent.
What would happen if gigasolar parks really appeared? The size of entire countries, and together perhaps the size of an entire continent?
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/01/17/een-sahara-vol-zonnepanelen-zet-het-weer-op-zijn-kop-a4187232?t=1705555574
