Simulating Climate Responses to Large-Scale Photovoltaic Deployment with PlaSim

作者：Arya Samanta, Kira Rehfeld · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.5194/egusphere-egu26-20178 · 研究领域：Solar Radiation and Photovoltaics、Photovoltaic Systems and Sustainability、Climate Change and Geoengineering

The rapid integration of renewable energy into national and global electricity systems is a cornerstone of climate mitigation strategies consistent with the Paris Agreement. Photovoltaics (PV) are central to this transition, with global installed capacity exceeding 800 GW by 2021 and projections indicating multi-terawatt deployment by mid-century (IRENA, World energy transitions outlook, 2023). While large-scale PV expansion is essential for decarbonization, it also constitutes a substantial land-surface modification that can influence surface energy fluxes, radiation balance, and atmospheric circulation. Quantifying these interactions is therefore important for understanding the broader environmental implications of renewable energy systems at scale.Here, we investigate the climatic response to spatially extensive PV deployment using the intermediate-complexity climate model PLASIM (Fraedrich et al., 2005). We perform idealized global simulations with varying fractions of land surface covered by PV, across multiple horizontal resolutions (T21, T31, T42) and three model configurations: atmosphere-only, mixed-layer ocean, and a large-scale geostrophic ocean. This framework allows us to contrast short-term atmospheric adjustments with longer-term, ocean-coupled responses, and to assess the sensitivity of results to spatial resolution and coupling timescales.Our results show that the climate response to PV deployment is strongly dependent on the albedo contrast between PV panels...