We've been so reliant on coal for so long that it's really hard for us to kick the habit now.
Despite advances in renewable energy, and the awareness of carbon emissions generated, our shift to cleaner sources of energy that isn't self-damaging remains agonizingly slow.
Images courtesy: Reuters
Now, China is seeing the worst possible effects from its coal-burning. According to a new study, the country is putting out so much smoke, it's effectively dimming the sun and rendering solar farms useless.
The thing is China is doing the most to switch over to solar energy at the moment, commissioning a lot of new infrastructure like solar panels and storage batteries. They accounted for over half of the solar panel installs across the world in 2017, going from 1 gigawatt of solar capacity in 2010 to 130 gigawatts in 2017. And they're on track for about 400 gigawatts by 2030.
The problem is, they haven't yet managed to fully deal with the problems caused by their decades of coal-burning. New research, conducted by an international team, looks at solar radiation measurements in China going all the way back to 1958. The data shows that solar radiation over China steadily declined until about 2005, when the country began implementing more effective anti-pollution measures. After that it levelled off, and began to climb again, slowly.
That dip though is because of all the particulate matter put into the air by emissions. Not only is that obviously bad for the health of people living in the country, it was also pretty much blocking a large portion of solar energy.?
It wasn't uniform though, given that pollution and weather conditions vary across regions. The five worst-affected provinces in China saw drops of between 20 to 28 percent, including major industrial centres. The researchers say that, if China had the air quality today that it did in the 1950s, its 2016 solar infrastructure would have generated another 14 terawatt-hours of electricity, or $1.9 billion worth of more energy.?
To put that into perspective solar energy harvesting has improved thanks to advances in the technology over. This progress has also made them cheaper and therefore easier to mass-produce. Between 2005 and 2017, that itself improved electricity generation by 10 percent. And yet, simply having clean air would have provided more energy than that.
And that's just China, infamous for being just one of the most polluted countries in the world. By many accounts, India might have even overtaken them by this year. After all, 22 of the top 30 most polluted cities in the world are in our country.
And we're well behind China when it comes to solar power infrastructure. By May this year, we'd only managed to reach a solar capacity of 30 GW, though that's a record for us. And that's out of a total installed power capacity of 358 GW.?
If we'd managed to keep our atmosphere clear, we'd also be outputting much more solar energy than just 8 percent of our total power. But despite measures being implemented, we're having trouble even enforcing them.
We haven't yet been able to completely stop people bursting crackers on festive occasions. We've not yet provided our farmers with cheap and convenient alternatives to stubble burning after a harvest. We haven't yet made any sort of significant push towards electric vehicles, whether for consumers or public transport.
So not only are we killing ourselves with this pollution, we're also affecting our ability to generate enough renewable energy to switch over from harmfully polluting fossil fuels. It's a vicious cycle, but something needs to be done.
Maybe advances in science like the 'Black Gold' from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) could help, but we need to implement them fast and without wasting any time.