A new study has found that forest fires which plague different parts of India, especially during the summer season play a major role in reducing solar power production in India.
Factors responsible for limiting solar irradiance
- Recently, solar energy generation has been widely used in developing countries such as India which has sufficient solar resources.
- However, several factors like clouds, aerosols, and pollution generated from various sources limit the solar irradiance causing performance issues in the photovoltaic and concentrated solar power plant installations.
- Large-scale development of a solar energy system requires proper planning, and there is a need to estimate the solar potential.
What the new study says?
- A group of researchers at the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital and the National Observatory of Athens (NOA), Greece tried to trace the factors that reduce solar energy production.
- They found that apart from clouds and aerosols, forest fires play a very crucial role in reducing solar energy production.
- The study shows that the aerosol optical depth values were up to 1.8 during the study period (January to April 2021).
- During this period, massive forest fire events led to attenuation of total solar radiation incident on a horizontal surface (global horizontal irradiance- GHI ) and solar radiation received from the sun without having been scattered (beam horizontal irradiance –BHI) by 0 to 45%.
- During this period the air masses were renewed quickly mitigating the smoke contribution to the total aerosol loads and were dominated by continental pollution.
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