The cooling effect of PV - SolarStar

With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently suggesting 12% of global CO₂ emissions come from refrigeration air conditioning, a study led by researchers at Finl’s Aalto Universityhas posited a solution: solar power   energy storage  .

Finnish researchers collaborated with colleagues from MIT the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research Technology to produce the Meeting global cooling dem with photovoltaics during the 21st century paper. The academics claimed the residential cooling sector could already have sustained around 540 GW of solar generation capacity last year, if the world’s cooling systems were powered by solar.

“We showed that due to tropical countries gaining more wealth – thus access to cooling; global warming advancing, the cooling devices could sustain another 20–200 GW of PV  every year throughout most of the 21st century – depending on the chosen socioeconomic climate change scenario – despite air-conditioners growing more efficient over time,” wrote the authors of the report.

Start with North America

The study, said to be the first seeking to evaluate synergies between the cooling industry the PV sector, predicted cooling dem could increase from 400 TWh last year to almost 14,000 TWh by the end of the century. Such a 35-fold increase, the researchers said, would require a considerable portion of the solar panels deployed this century.

The high income households that constitute North America ensure that market currently has the best crossover between the cooling solar sectors, according to the paper. “The total PV generation capacity that residential cooling could sustain in North America [was] approximately 155 GW at the end of 2015,” stated the report.

The paper predicts populous South Asia  sub-Saharan Africa are expected to see increasing dem for cooling in the second half of the century, with the former expected to be able to sustain 1 TW of solar capacity by 2065 more than 2 TW by the end of the century. Sub-Saharan Africa could sustain 3 TW of PV capacity by the end of the century, the study predicted.

The cooling sector in the middle East North Africa is forecast to reach the potential to sustain around 532 GW of solar capacity by the end of the century Latin America’s potential was estimated at 482 GW. Europe  former Soviet Union are expected to account for only 104 GW of solar by that point, according to the research.

Seasonal mismatch

The study stressed seasonal differences in cooling dem are larger than those witnessed in PV energy yield. “Because, closer to the equator, the seasonal differences are smaller, generally regions closer to the equator exhibit stronger synergy of cooling PV [-powered energy supply] hence, a larger fraction of the cooling electricity dem can be met on an hourly basis,” the report’s authors added.

As a result, Latin America sub-Saharan Africa were predicted to be the regions with the highest potential to support solar, with PV able to provide up to 59% of cooling dem by the end of the century, a percentage that for the middle East North Africa South Asian regions was estimated at around 56%.

Storage was highlighted as a factor that could increase the proportion of cooling dem met by PV. “We see that the benefit of short-term storage increases greatly over time as cooling dem grows in locations where the mismatch is mostly diurnal rather than seasonal,” the paper noted.

However, even without storage PV could directly power approximately half the world’s cooling dem, the authors of the study claimed.