The transition to renewable energy

All the climate reports say the same thing: we are in a dire situation due to the combustion of fossil fuels and we need to employ alternative energy sources immediately to avert the worst of climate change's ugly surprises. In the near future, we are all going to have to make the switch to renewable energy. There simply is no choice any longer. We are rapidly running out of those dangerous fossil fuels, but they continue to be burned at an alarming rate.

Solar is the answer to the climate change issue

In regions covered by solar panels, less solar radiation gets absorbed by the earth, because it gets consumed by the solar panels (and converted to electricity) instead. Comprehensive installation of solar panels would decrease absorption of solar radiation by up to 19% in desert areas, the researchers found. In turn, this has cascading influences on the climate. At a global scale, the changes from solar panel installation are meager compared to those predicted to occur due to greenhouse gases. But at a regional level, some of these climatic variations could be significant, the researchers say. The average temperature in desert regions would decrease by about two degrees. Desert precipitation could also decrease by over 20%, largely because the presence of solar panels also diminishes cloud cover.

Desert cooling changes wind patterns

According to the researchers’ model, this desert cooling would lead to differences in wind patterns, a shift in the location of the jet stream, and changed precipitation levels for many regions. Much of Asia, parts of the Middle East, Australia, and the tropical Pacific would miss up to 25 centimeters of average annual precipitation. Instead, that precipitation would move to Europe, the North Pacific, western North America, tropical Africa, and the southeast Indian Ocean. (These patterns are opposite to those predicted to occur from greenhouse gas-induced warming.)

Regions to the East, or downwind, of desert areas reached 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 an extreme scenario: the researchers assumed that 100 percent of land area in cities and deserts would be carpeted with solar panels, which isn’t realistic. Those solar panels would produce almost 800 terawatts of power, much more than the world is likely to require. But the researchers say this sort of activity can reveal mechanisms underlying the climate system and help interpret the results of more realistic modeling exercises. So they also constructed a variant of their model that more accurately reflects likely future demands for power. In this scenario, solar panels would be installed across urban regions worldwide and in a portion of the Egyptian desert, covering about 10% of the total land area devoted to solar panels in the first version of the model.

Surface temperatures change

Here the patterns of surface temperature change are comparable in broad strokes to those seen in the extreme version of the model, but much more modest. For example, global temperature would wane by about 0.04 degrees Celsius, the researchers found. This smaller global solar grid would generate about 59 terawatts of power per year. That’s still plenty sufficient to cover global demand for electricity, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated to be, at most, 45 terawatts per year by 2100.

For more information relating to going solar, don't forget to visit our solar blog section for more handy guides and articles.  There has never been a better time to go solar!

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