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Smoke from the wildfires that often sweep across the western United States may be causing only minimal disruption to the output of solar photovoltaic panels, a new study has found.
According to the study, published inCommunications of nature.
Meanwhile, the energy produced by panels across the country has remained relatively stable, even during extreme fire seasons, the study authors noted.
While previous studies have focused on the connection between specific wildfire events and solar panel function, the researchers sought to understand any impact of the smoke blanket spreading across the United States.
“We show that there are significant impacts on solar energy resources near these fires,” first author Kimberley Corwin he said in a statementreferring to the immediate areas of the large fires.
“When smoke is transported farther, as we’ve seen recently in the Midwest and along the East Coast, it presents much less of a concern in terms of prolonged solar loss,” added Corwin, a postdoctoral fellow at Colorado State University.
This knowledge, he explained, could have important implications as the US seeks to increase solar energy contributions to its global energy portfolio and strategies for where to place future installations.
Corwin and his colleagues looked specifically at the impact of wildfire smoke on irradiance, or the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface of a panel. In general, solar power generation can be hindered by many factors, including cloud cover, smoke, and other sources of air pollution.
The scientists focused on a particular type of irradiance, which includes both direct sunlight and sunlight scattered by the atmosphere, and which is most relevant to prevalent flat-plate photovoltaic systems.
During the very active wildfire season of 2020, smoke from burning in California, Colorado and Oregon eventually covered large swaths of the East Coast. However, while the plumes caused some short-term production losses, they caused only modest long-term effects, the study found.
“While you see large reductions near active fires, that declines rapidly with distance,” Corwin said. “Substantial losses are specific to the area directly around the fire where the smoke column is denser and therefore blocks more light.”
According to the study, production levels of California’s photovoltaic (PV) plants adjacent to the fire in 2020 fell 11 to 17 percent compared to averages for low-smoke years, while those are close to fires in Greece in 2021 dropped by 10-20%.
According to Corwin, massive, traveling plumes of smoke linger in the sky for days, but they do so in a diluted form and in a manner comparable to other weather variability.
“Even during extreme smoke-heavy wildfire seasons, as seen in 2020, we project little change in the average availability of PV resources, except in areas with optically thick, cool local smoke plumes,” they say the authors.
Declines from drift smoke typically stayed below 5 percent, and in some areas, less than 2 percent, Corwin noted.
However, to accommodate these short-term impacts, Corwin suggested that battery storage could help minimize short-term energy impacts. By switching to battery backups, operators could avoid relying on fossil fuels to make up shortfalls, he added.
