Page - 4 - in options, Volume summer 2021

News in brief The installation of solar panels to offset energy costs and reduce the environmental impact of homes has been gaining popularity with homeowners in recent years. Despite the promising advantages this mode of electricity generation offers, there is a number of hurdles to overcome. An international team of researchers explored some of these challenges. The study shows that homeowners currently only use 30-40% of the electricity generated by their solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, while the rest of the electricity is exported to the grid with very little to no benefit for the owner. With the addition of a home battery, the self-consumption of solar PV in the building almost doubles, allowing the residents to reduce electricity imports from the grid by up to 84%, which can in turn help the owner to become less dependent on the grid and electricity prices. This would however require the implementation of slightly different policies and regulations to guarantee return on investment in home batteries for homeowners. These include that national renewable energy policies adopt more innovative incentives to enhance the economic profitability of decentralized green energy solutions based on the contribution of these systems to the grid. The findings indicate that this can be easily achieved by, among others, rewarding consumers for using their solar PV generation onsite instead of encouraging them to export the excess solar energy they produce to the grid. Increasing the value of solar panels for homeowners IIASA researchers contributed to a global research effort, which shows that the global land area and population facing extreme droughts could more than double if a medium-to-high level of global warming continues and water management is maintained at its present state. The study presents the first, comprehensive picture of how global warming and socioeconomic changes will affect land water storage and what that will mean for droughts until the end of the century. The research team, including IIASA researcher Peter Burek, and Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program Director Yoshihide Wada, projected a large reduction in natural land water storage in two-thirds of the world due to climate change. The results indicate that areas of the Southern Hemisphere, where water scarcity is already a problem, will be disproportionately affected, which could ultimately affect food security and escalate human migration and conflict. Recent advances in process-based hydrological modeling, combined with future projections from global climate models under wide-ranging scenarios of socioeconomic change, provided a unique foundation for the study’s comprehensive analysis of future water availability and droughts, which comprised a set of 27 global climate- hydrological model simulations spanning 125 years. According to the researchers, their findings highlight why we need climate change mitigation to avoid the adverse impacts on global water supplies and increased droughts. There is a need to commit to improved water resource management and adaptation to avoid the potentially catastrophic socioeconomic consequences of water shortages around the world. Electricity consumption kW h PV self- consumptionImport from grid Import from grid 23 00 4 5 09 5 01800 PV generation SOLAR PV W IT H OUT ELECT RICIT Y ST ORAG E SOLAR PV W IT H ELECT RICIT Y ST ORAG E 14 5 02800 PV self- consumption PV self- consumption Surplus PV / Ex port Surplus PV / Ex port to grid PV self- consumption Extreme droughts threaten increasing number of people Peter Burek: burek@iiasa.ac.at Yoshihide Wada: wada@iiasa.ac.at Further info: pure.iiasa.ac.at/16997 Further info: pure.iiasa.ac.at/17123 Behnam Zakeri: zakeri@iiasa.ac.at 4 Options www.iiasa.ac.atSummer 2021