CAREER: CAS-Climate: Understanding Thermal Transport Processes in Atmospheric Boundary Layer with Utility-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Plants

To achieve complete renewable-based electrification from the current level of less than 20% globally presents great challenges for the energy science community. This requires hundreds of trillions of kilowatt-hours of renewable energy, mainly generated through wind and solar power. One neglected but crucial question is whether extracting such huge amount of energy from the atmosphere's surface layer would alter the atmosphere's physics, leading to new climate change challenges. This CAREER project will focus on addressing whether large-scale solar photovoltaic plants alter the local climate. The research will parameterize the atmospheric response carried out by transport processes to facilitate the inclusion of solar plants in climate models. This project will pave the way for undergraduate and graduate students in middle Tennessee to become engaged in climate change education and discussion. The results of this research will enable a new "Atmospheric Transport" course at Tennessee Technological University, a textbook titled Atmospheric Transport to increase scientific literacy, and an educational mobile app ATMOSPort. This project seeks to study the interactions between the near-ground atmosphere and an artificial canopy of millions of solar photovoltaic panels. A two-stage field campaign and computational fluid dynamics simulations are proposed to provide an understanding of thermal transport dynamics within the atmospheric boundary layer above thousands of acres of dark, hot, tall, and rough Photovoltaic panels of utility-scale solar plants. The knowledge gained will clarify whether such giant canopies alter the local climate and will lead to the creation of equations that accurately describe the affected atmospheric characteristics. The proposed research quantifies the significance of these impacts for various background surface conditions and parameterizes the thermal and mechanical effects of the plant to allow meteorologists and environmental engineers to incorporate them into their models efficiently. This achievement would increase the accuracy of atmospheric simulations within regions where utility-scale photovoltaic plants exist. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.