The air in Beijing is often very bad. The city sinks under a brown cover made of exhaust gases from industry, cars and coal fires, which blow a lot of harmful particulate matter, soot, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the air.
The air in Beijing is often very bad. The city sinks under a brown cover made of exhaust gases from industry, cars and coal fires, which blow a lot of harmful particulate matter, soot, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the air.
The dirty air causes massive damage to human health. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), air pollution contributes to around 1.6 million premature deaths per year in China alone, and over 7 million worldwide. Victims suffer strokes, heart attacks or lung diseases.
China has therefore begun to introduce tough measures to combat air pollution, also as a way to curb CO2 emissions. Among other things, the government has invested heavily in the deployment of emission-free solar power and plans to expand photovoltaic systems even more in the future. But at the moment, air pollution in China is still high, and smog not only damages health but also reduces the solar radiation that reaches the ground. This in turn significantly reduces the power output of existing photovoltaic systems.
Electricity industry benefits from clean air
The solar energy industry would therefore benefit greatly from clean air, as researcher Mercè Labordena and her colleagues from the Climate Policy group at ETH Zurich have shown in a study just published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Read more at ETH Zurich
Image: Milky, gray smog shrouds many of the valleys and lowlands of eastern China in January 2017. The orange star marks the location of Beijing. (Credit: NASA Earth Observatory)
