How the changing environment affects solar-panel efficiency: the Indian perspective

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast looks at how climate and environmental change affect the efficiency of solar panels. Our guest is the climate scientist Sushovan Ghosh, who is lead author of paper that explores how aerosols, rising temperatures and other environmental factors will affect solar-energy output in India in the coming decades.

Today, India ranks fifth amongst nations in terms of installed solar-energy capacity and boosting this capacity will be crucial for the country’s drive to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 – when compared to 2005.

While much of India is blessed with abundant sunshine, it is experiencing a persistent decline in incoming solar radiation that is associated with aerosol pollution. What is more, higher temperatures associated with climate change reduce the efficiency of solar cells  – and their performance is also impacted in India by other climate-related phenomena.

In this podcast, Ghosh explains how changes in the climate and environment affect the generation of solar energy and what can be done to mitigate these effects.

Ghosh co-wrote the paper when at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and he is now at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain. His co-authors in Delhi were Dilip Ganguly, Sagnik Dey and Subhojit Ghoshal Chowdhury; and the paper is called, “Future photovoltaic potential in India: navigating the interplay between air pollution control and climate change mitigation”. It appears in Environmental Research Letters, which is published by IOP Publishing – which also brings you Physics World.