Impact of Climate Change on Future Solar Power Production

Traditionally, for the planning and assessment of solar energy systems, the amount of solar radiation incident on the Earth’s surface is assumed to be constant over the years. However, with changing climate and air pollution levels, solar resources may no longer be stable over time and undergo substantial decadal changes. Observational records covering the past decades indeed confirm long-term changes in this quantity ("dimming and brightening"). In this activity we examine, how solar dimming and brightening as well as future changes in surface solar radiation projected by climate models may affect solar power production (PV and CSP).

Enlarged view: Global Disruption of Median Trends
Global distribution of median trends of the fractional change of PV power output between 2006 and 2049. White areas imply non-significant trends, based on a t-test with a significance level of 0.05. Units are in percent per year. From Wild et al. 2015, Solar Energy.

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Wild, M., Folini, D., Henschel, F., Fischer, N., and Mueller, B., 2015: Projections of long-term changes in solar radiation based on CMIP5 climate models and their influence on energy yields of photovoltaic systems, Solar Energy, 116, 12-24, DOI: 10.1016/j.solener.2015.03.039.

Jerez, S. R., Tobin, I., Vautard, R., Montavez, J. P., Lopez-Romero, J. M., Thais, F., Bartok, B., Christensen, O.B., Collette, A., Deque, M., Nikulin, G., Kotlarski, S., van Meijgaard, E., Teichmann, C., and Wild, M., 2015: The impact of climate change on photovoltaic power generation in Europe. Nature Commun. 6:10014 doi: 10.1038/ncomms10014

Müller, J., Folini, D., Wild, M., and Pfenninger, S., 2018: CMIP-5 models project photovoltaics are a no-regrets investment in Europe irrespective of climate change, Energy, under review.

Sweerts, B., Pfenninger, S., Yang, S., Folini, D., van der Zwaan, B., and Wild, M., 2018: Returning to pollution-free 1960s surface radiation in China could increase solar electricity generation by up to 13%, Nature Energy, under review.


 

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