The world has returned to coal. NoWe are not in the 18th century. in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, but in the era of artificial intelligence and wild computing in huge data centers. Although it seems that a large part of the GPUs mounted in data centers are stops most of the timewhen they start working they need a huge amount of immediate energy.
There renewable energies cannot respond (due to intermittency and storage), and that is why Big Tech is resorting to opening nuclear power plantsof gas and, of course, coal. And the big problem with coal is not only the issue of emissions, but something almost as serious: its pollution. is interfering with solar energy production.
It neither eats nor lets eat, as they say, and the researchers who have measured it point out that reality can be much more negative than what they reflect in their study.
Double contamination
Researchers from the University of Oxford and University College London have just published in Nature a study in which they detail how they have mapped and analyzed more than 140,000 photovoltaic installations around the world using satellite images.
After comparing it with atmospheric data on air pollution and calculating how much sunlight stops reaching the photovoltaic cells due to that pollution, they concluded that these solar ‘farms’ produced 5.8% less than they could have produced.
Although the study has been published now, the data corresponds to 2023 and, to lower that figure of 5.8% a little, they point out that it is equivalent to 111 TWh of lost energy. How much is that? The amount generated by 18 medium-sized coal-fired power plants.
That the figures are from 2023 is interesting. Electricity from solar energy was already well established and, furthermore, we were talking about the end of coal. The huge data centers they needed all that immediate energy They were not yet as developed as they are now and both the energy companies and the countries themselves were leaving this type of energy generation aside.
However, there was something that the researchers say had not been measured: the brake on that transition to clean energy. Between 2017 and 2023 there was an explosion in the installation of solar panels with an average of 246 TWh new each year, but this study points out that the losses caused by aerosols were about 74 TWh. That is, almost a third of what was earned by installing plates was lost due to particles emitted by coal plants.
China or India stop generating a lot, but there are countries that are directly negative, such as the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Greece or Pakistan.
These particles are extremely fine, but they are still capable of absorbing light before it reaches the solar panels. It’s like an invisible umbrella that prevents photovoltaic installations from deploying their full potential and the curious thing is that the countries that have accelerated the most with photovoltaics are those that burned the most coal, so they were tripping themselves up.
Focused on China, the great solar power in the worldit is estimated that in 2023 it will generate 793.5 TWh of electricity thanks to photovoltaics. This was 41.5% of the world total, but at the same time had the largest loss due to these particles, with production that could have been 7.7% higher. And the researchers point out that 29% of those solar losses were directly related to emissions from coal plants.
However, they have also found that China is the only powerful region in electricity production through photovoltaics that has been improving over time due to some strict emission standards. In the United States, although photovoltaics have also been on the rise, solar production fell by 3.1% during the same period due to the same thing: large photovoltaic ‘farms’ are too close to coal plants.
The team points out that it is no longer just that pollution blocks sunlight, but “it also changes clouds, which can further reduce solar energy production. This implies that the real impact is likely to be greater than what we have measured, so we may be overestimating how much solar energy can contribute to emissions reductions if we do not control pollution from coal energy.”
That is to say, although more renewable sources are being installed, with solar being the star in much of the world (in Nordic countries it is wind), it is likely that this overestimation of renewable production serves to make governments and companies take advantage, but it should be taken into account. the hidden carbon brake to banish fossil fuels from energy generation once and for all.
The problem is what is surely on your mind. These figures correspond to the period measured in 2023, but since then we have experienced a significant increase in data centers. As we say, they need a huge amount of electricity available immediately to supply the consumption of the facilities in computing peaks, and this is something that they are not covering with renewables.
To do this, data centers they would need huge batteriesbut they would exhaust the energy quickly and would go back to ‘pulling’ from conventional sources. Since the explosion of data centers, some have relaxed anti-pollution measures and even the oil companieswho were making the transition to renewables, they swerved to redirect their gaze to a much more profitable business in the short term.
And the most important thing is what we also mentioned: it doesn’t matter if you install many solar panels if you increase the rate of coal production to satisfy the gluttonous data centers because it is no longer just that there is direct pollution, but that those particles resulting from the burning of coal are interfering with the production of solar energy.
Images | Nature, David Dalton
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