There is currently a big urge to move to solar energy, and apparently India has decided that solar energy would greatly assist its plans to deal with climate change. However, according to a paper by Ghosh et al.in Environmental Research Letters, there is a minor problem: air pollution. It appears that while India is ranked fifth in the world for solar energy capacity, parts of it, and these tend to be the parts where you need the power, suffer from growing levels of particulate air pollution. There are two problems. First, the particles in the air block sunlight, thus reducing the power that strikes the panels. Second, the particles land on the panels and block the light until someone cleans the detritus off the panels.
I am not sure I understand why, but the impact on horizontal panels ranged from 10% to 16%, but the impact was much greater on panels that track the position of the sun (which is desirable to get the most power) as they suffered a 52% loss of power from pollution. Apparently if it were not for such pollution it was calculated (not sure on what basis – existing panels or proposed panels) to be able to generate somewhere between an additional six to sixteen TWh of solar electricity per year. That is a lot of power.
But if you are reducing the output of your panels by fifty percent, that means also you are doubling the real cost of the electricity from those panels prior to entering the grid because you are getting half the power from the same fixed cost installation. The loss of capacity translates into hundreds of millions of dollars annually. China has the same problem, with some regions twice as badly off as the Indian regions, although care must be taken with that comment because they are not necessarily measured the same way. In all cases, averaging down over area is carried out, but then different people may select different types of area.
So, what can be done about this? The most obvious approach is to alter the sources of the pollution, but this could be a problem. In India, the sources tend to be the use of kerosine to provide lighting and the use of dirty fuel for cooking and heating in rural villages.
The answer is to electrify them, but now the problem is there are 600,000 such villages. Problems in a country like India or China tend to be very large, although the good news is the number of people available to work on them is also very large. Unfortunately, these villages are not very wealthy. If you want to replace home cooking with electricity, and domestic heating with electricity, someone has to pay for electric ranges. One estimate is 80 million of them. Big business for the maker of electric cookers, but who pays for them when the rural people are fairly close to the poverty line. They cook with fuel like biomass that gets smoky because that is cheap or free. Their cookers may even be home-made, but even if not so, they would have to be discarded as they could not be used for electric cooking.
There are claimed to be other benefits for reducing such pollution. Thus reducing air pollution would reduce cloudiness, which means even better solar energy production. It is also claimed that precipitation is inhibited from polluted clouds, so it is concluded that with more precipitation that would wash more pollution from the air. I am not sure I follow that reasoning, because they have already concluded that they will have fewer clouds.
If they removed these sources of air pollution, they calculated that an extra three TWh per year could be generated from flat surface panels, or eight TWh per year could be generated from tracking panels. The immediate goal is apparently to have 100 GW solar installed. It will be interesting to see if this can be achieved. One problem is that while the economics look good in terms of money saved from increased solar energy, the infrastructure costs associated with it were neglected. My guess is the current air pollution will be around for a while. It also shows the weaknesses of many solar energy projects, such as setting up huge farms in the Sahara. How do you stop fine sand coating panels? An army of panel polishers?
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