Global lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have had an unexpected impact on air quality, leading to increased power from solar panels.
There has been a noticeable reduction in air pollution throughout the pandemic, as people around the world were asked to stay at home in a bid to stop the spread of the virus.
The improved air quality has allowed more sunlight to reach solar panels, according to new research conducted in Delhi, India, leading to an increased production of clean energy.
"Delhi is one of the most polluted cities on the planet," one of the paper's authors, Ian Marius Peters of Helmholtz-Institut Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energies in Germany, said in a statement.
"Moreover, India enacted a drastic and sudden lockdown at the start of the pandemic. That means that reductions in air pollution happened very suddenly, making them easier to detect."
Peters and his colleagues had previously conducted research in different cities, including Delhi, analysing how haze and air pollution impact the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground - and the effect of air pollution on the output of solar panels.
Using data from existing studies, researchers calculated changes in insolation - the amount of solar radiation reaching a given area - and found that by late March, the amount of sunlight reaching solar panels in Delhi had increased by about 8 percent. This was compared to data from the same dates from 2017 to 2019. Information on air quality and particulate matter suggested that reduced pollution levels were a significant cause for the rise.
"I expected to see some difference, but I was surprised by how clearly the effect was visible," Peter says.
The researchers now expect to find increased output of power from solar panels in other areas where air was cleaner due to lockdown measures.
"The pandemic has been a dramatic event in so many ways, and the world will emerge different than how it was before," Peters says.
"We've gotten a glimpse of what a world with better air looks like and see that there may be an opportunity to 'flatten the climate curve'. I believe solar panels can play an important role, and that going forward having more PV installations could help drive a positive feedback loop that will result in clearer and cleaner skies."
The work was published on June 19 in the journal Joule.
